Cinema
Passion Fish (`15', Mayfair) Sliver ('18', Empire)
Charmingly boring
Mark Amory
The first shot of Passion Fish is of the hand of a woman who is lying in a hospital bed as it scrabbles for a button to press. A crisis right away, you assume, but no, she is just desperate to catch a certain television programme and when she does her worst fears are confirmed: 'He gave her my f- ing close-up.' But no, you were right the first time, there is a crisis and within min- utes she has been told she will never walk again.
Putting the word 'passion' in the title (it is not much to do with fish either), a few repetitions of the same swear-word, the drama of paralysis — that is as near sensa- tionalism as John Sayles, writer, director and editor, is interested in going. No dinosaurs, no shooting; the only car that goes off the road does so very slowly because it has broken down. But was I grateful? Not at all. I was deeply depressed by the idea of watching a heart-warming story of the human spirit overcoming adversity through courage and endurance and that is, I suppose, what this film is, but so much better than usual that you do not notice. As a friend said of The Pumpkin Eater years ago, 'It was so well done, I didn't mind it being boring'.
May-Alice (Mary McDonnell) goes back to sit in the house in which she was brought up, outside a small town and near a lake in Louisiana. 'Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in', but there is no one left to take her in.
So she has to have a companion, which she can afford. Several come and go in a series of enjoyable vignettes: the tough, the talkers, the inadequate. May-Alice watches television and has another drink — she seems keen on both. But she is an impossi- ble patient. The daytime soap opera she was so eager to watch in hospital repre- sents the summit of her career and she is deep enough into middle age for it to be clear that she was unlikely to go much higher. She retains her New York actressy style, as in the query, 'Weren't you Elsa in She-Beast of the Gulag?', even when there is no one to notice.
A slightly slower introduction alerts us that Chantelle (Alfre Woodard) is going to stay. She is intelligent, black, unforthcom- ing. 'I need this job,' is all she will volun- teer and we gather that her claims to have been a nurse are exaggerated.
So the odd couple are in place and we have race and feminism on the agenda as well as overcoming adversity, and again it is true these things are part of the story, but not so that you object, feel got at. Passion Fish feels like a play in the obvious sense that most of the time we are stuck in or near the house but also in that the main interest is in the gradual revelation of information and character. And it is gradu- al: when Chantelle sat down on her bed and wept, I thought she was making rather a fuss about the admittedly depressing decor; there was more to it than that but it took another hour to come out.
Visitors come and go. May-Alice has some silly school-friends, who let you understand what she had been so desperate to escape from. An attractive handyman/ fisherman she had known (and fancied) by sight now has a wife who got religion between the second and third babies. An uncle of whom Chantelle tactfully observes, `He's, well . . . literary,' has, she is tartly informed, been 'literary' (i.e. gay) since he was a boy.
Her producer offers to write her back into the script; Chantelle's father, lover and little daughter look in. Some recur, most do not; it is episodic. It is also leisurely, underpopulated and perhaps if it were European would seem more ordinary. Many of its virtues are negative: it is not glib, it is not sentimental, it is not manipu- lative, as we have come to expect American films to be. The result is that the characters gain a dignity that gives them charm as well. It was so well done, I wasn't bored at all: 7.
But I was by Sliver, which is expensive but cheap. Sharon Stone became a star by being insolent, smoking a cigarette and wearing no pants; that she can do, vulnera- bility she can't. When women ask the men who have insisted on seeing this film, 'How was it for you, darling?', the men will have to admit, '3'.
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