Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 5

The Dreamers is not an ordinary breed of dog (but by time I got my head around its unappealing muttliness I had lost the impulse to write). The flaws of the Meg Ryan boxing movie Against the Ropes are so obvious you could point to them with a two-by-four. Ryan plays a working-class woman who grew up in her father's boxing gym and who gets out of her demeaning job as a secretary to the sexist manager of the Cleveland sports arena, where her knowledge and talent are derided, by reshaping a thug she runs across into a successful fighter. The major problem is structural: it's a melodramatic chivalric romance with Ryan as the knight with a quest (to prove that she, as a woman, is the equal of any male manager) but the physical battles are displaced onto her fighter.

The movie goes belly up when the lady knight succumbs to the temptation of grabbing the spotlight from her protege and has to learn the lesson of humility. We're supposed to like her because she has the nerve and guts to break into a man's game, and then we're supposed to dislike her for the same reason, and then finally we're supposed to like her all over again when she apologizes to everybody and stays in the background. But since the fighter was never at the center of the story, the last third of the movie when Ryan has penitentially retreated from his corner has no center at all. While he's in the ring winning a brutal "personal" battle, we're supposed to be cheering for her because she's relegated herself to the dim margins, like the good girl we were earlier asked to like her for not being.

Against the Ropes is inexcusably lousy but I was interested to see Ryan in a role that could have been a reasonable extension of her star personality. Johnny Depp is so badly miscast in Secret Window you can't imagine what the writer-director David Koepp was thinking of besides cost and availability.

Depp, whose face is as open as a flower but not very expressive, here plays an alcoholic writer who holes up in his lakeside cabin, unable to write, because his wife has taken up with a new man and wants a divorce. John Turturro shows up as a creepy stranger from Mississippi who claims that Depp plagiarized a story of his about a man who murders his wife. The stranger wants proof that the writer published his story before the stranger wrote his, but then the stranger destroys the evidence and generally terrorizes the writer (by killing his dog with a screwdriver, for example).

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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