Cinema
Talking dirty
Mark Steyn
Grumpy Old Men has a great title much better, in my opinion, than Kieslowski's Three Colours White. Unfortu- nately, the director Donald Petrie never proves it. As far as titles are concerned, Comden and Green summed it up best: `When we wrote "Singin' In The Rain," ' said Betty Comden, `all we knew was that we'd have to have a scene where it was raining and a guy was singin'."In it', added Adolph Green. In Grumpy Old Men, you wait for the old men to get grumpy, but the portents are not good. Scene One: `Momin', dickhead,' says Walter Matthau. `Hello, moron' says Jack Lemmon. `Moron'? 'Dickhead'? From Matthau, the guru of grouch? The jowls quiver and jud- der and bring forth a mere `dickhead'? To quote the telephone-sex girl in Short Cuts: 'I never say "dick." It's such a dumb word.'
Well, it's winter in a small town in Min- nesota, which would make most of us grumpy. Lemmon and Matthau live in adjoining houses and have hated each other for half-a-century. But it's that yucky feelgood movie kind of hatred which you know is going to wind up with one bailing the other out of a tight spot or saving his life or giving up the woman he loves — or, if you're really unlucky, all three. Lemmon and Matthau were grumpier in The Odd Couple, where they needed each other cru- elly, pathetically, pointlessly. They talked dirtier in Billy Wilder's remake of The Front Page — a crude travesty of the Hecht and MacArthur play, but a little Billy Wilder cynicism and his fuller-blooded ver- nacular would do wonders here. Instead we get lots of ice fishing. Ice fishing is when you drag a hut, a stove and a crate of Bud into the middle of a frozen lake, go inside, drill a hole, open your first beer and wait for the fish to bite: it's the icecapades of ennui, involves no skill whatsoever and gets you away from the wife for eight hours a day during long winters. But you cannot make a grumpy movie about ice fishermen. Ice fishermen, by definition, are not grumpy: they are complacent, undemand- ing types, at one with the world. A movie called Grumpy Old Men largely set on an ice fishing lake is liable to wind up hard and cold on the surface, but full of holes and sopping wet underneath.
Fortunately, Burgess Meredith is on hand as Lemmon's 94-year old dad, single- minded but multiply-metaphored: as Matthau gets lucky one night, Meredith leers, 'looks like Chuckie's takin' 01' One- Eye to the optometrist.' Meredith and Matthau would have made for better cast- ing, as Lemmon's too hung up on his like- able twitchy schnook act. Meanwhile, the one that 01' One-Eye's got his eye on is, in fact Ann-Margret, the double-barrelled sex kitten. Ann-Margret can't be much younger than Burgess Meredith these days, but 'sex kitten' still seems the appropriate designation: she pouts and jiggles and wob- bles her breasts even under the snow suit (technically very difficult), and the more she talks thoughtfully about art and litera- ture, the more she reduces Matthau and Lemmon to a couple of old mutts lost in a fog of sexual allure. She'd have been a hoot in the Andie MacDowell role in Four Wed- dings and a Funeral, but you do wonder what she sees in a couple of ice fishers whose pectorals hang lower than their testi- cles. Conversely, no self-respecting ice fish- er would see the need for Ann-Margret when he's got a perfectly good dog and a second-hand pick-up. In The Odd Couple, Lemmon and Matthau's double date with the cuckoo Pigeon sisters from England is funny and affecting because the mismatch is so plausible. Grumpy Old Men has neither the ring of truth nor the seductive- ness of fable. For geriatric triumphalism, I'll take that moment in Cocoon when Don Ameche and Gwen Verdon break-dance every teenager off the floor.
Despite the title, Look Who's Talking Too is a sequel to a sequel. The premise is that a grown-up actor supplies an internal voiceover for someone who can't speak: so, in the first film, Bruce Willis was the voice of John Travolta and Kirstie Alley's baby; in the second, he acquired a kid sister; now, the family's taken in two talking dogs. This movie is big on 'planes. I've seen it involun- tarily a half-dozen times and, talking dogs
aside, it's quite a charmer. There's a cute fantasy sequence with Travolta and a predatory blonde, in which, as in all fan- tasies, the predatory blonde fades away to nothing, leaving only her two silicon breast Implants on the floor. I expect that's the next in the series: talking breast implants.
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