Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 2

And then the major virtue of the movie works against it. The fact that they don't abandon the concept pushes the story into a more emotional and even speculative realm when, despite the heroine's disability, the romantic comedy concludes happily. Barrymore is appealing because she comes across as an amateur and yet despite that lack of expertise reveals herself emotionally. She does wobbly things that more technically refined actresses and more thoroughly synthetic stars wouldn't dare to. But she would need to be a much more spookily poetic performer than she is to suggest the mysteries of living every dawn as if it were a rebirth. But see it anyway.

Owen Wilson is an even better reason than Drew Barrymore to see almost any movie and I had a reasonably good time at both The Big Bounce and Starsky & Hutch. The Hawaiian setting of The Big Bounce was especially gratifying during my first New York winter. But here the problem is that the movie is too likeable for its nasty-ironic plot. It's as if Wilson's amiability broke the story's yolk--what seems in plot-terms to be a nightmarish escapade about a small-time thief sexually suckered into taking the fall for a more malevolent gang, turns into a runny romance of temptation with the feckless, affable protagonist treated as a hero because he gets away with the money.

Wilson is all about the comedy of amorality. He plays out our fantasy of being so attractive we can get away with anything, provided it's on a limited scale. He's a crime-plotter with no grandiosity and in The Big Bounce in particular it's as if he understood that an overambitious criminal scheme would be too much like work. Wilson is able to keep this act in the realm of comedy because his persona doesn't have a hint of sadism and his movies aren't realistic enough for suffering to have any presence. He's the new generation's Peter Pan, without the icky sexual ambiguity of the original character (what makes Peter Pan appealing to Michael Jackson). Owen Wilson is a Peter Pan who fucks: as any working adult knows, the guys who refuse to grow up get laid more. What makes Wilson a star is that he doesn't coast on his blondness (the nose wouldn't allow him to get by on looks alone). He has a personally erratic style of delivery as original as Judy Holliday's. He noodges out stray thoughts in a way that puts the rhythm of scenes off-kilter, and then follows out the doodly trajectory made up of those stray thoughts and eccentric rhythms.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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