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Kissing a Fool
*1/2
Cinema
Releases - September 18,
1998
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Directed by Doug Ellin. Written by Doug Ellin and James Frey.
Starring David Schwimmer, Jason Lee, Mili Avital, Bonnie Hunt, Vanessa
Angel.
I'm not sure how I felt about "Kissing A
Fool", and that's obviously one of my problems with it. An even bigger
problem is that, for most of it, I wasn't even sure how I was supposed to
feel. It's a very strange sort of bad movie, actually -- it doesn't lose
us completely, even after we're lost on the basics. Those basics include
some sort of character identity, some sort of focus and direction, some idea
what we're supposed to be involved in.
The film opens at a wedding, where Samantha (Mili
Avital) is getting married to someone who we do not see. Linda (Bonnie Hunt)
is a book editor whose house is the venue for this affair, and who boasts
"I introduced the bride and groom!" She tells the story of how the
two ended up together to some stupid guests who she obviously doesn't like
-- the film doesn't make clear why Linda, one of the few nice characters
in the piece, can't find anyone interesting to talk to. I don't know what
this storytelling device was for, but near the end of the film the thought
occurred to me that maybe what the filmmakers were trying to do was keep
the audience trying to work out what is officially kept from them: whether
Samantha has married sportscaster Max (David Schwimmer) or writer Jay (Jason
Lee). Actually, it's obvious, since out of these two people we know that
Max wasn't introduced to Sam by Linda. But even if it wasn't -- isn't it
quite desperate to have a film resting on that one little game? Shouldn't
the film have made us care who Sam ended up with?
It doesn't, as you might have already guessed
from my attitude, and the film can't make us care because it has no grasp
on its characters. Their natures change unintentionally from one minute to
the next, because of an unfortunate accident -- the employing of incompetent
writers. Max starts out as a loud-mouthed dimwit, turns into a nice guy,
then a fool for love, then into a scheming, cold-hearted prick, and then
turns up smiling sweetly at the wedding. The film can't decide whether Jay
is strong or weak, honest or deceitful, dumb or smart. And everybody, at
some point or another, becomes loud and irrational, or pathetically
insecure.
This leads me back to why I didn't feel much one
way or another about the film. Who were my sympathies supposed to lie with?
It's easy to tell once we've stood back and looked at who learns what lessons,
but onscreen, in the movie, nobody is painted in any specific light. At times
it's interesting, even amusing, to watch all these idiots, but it's not
endearing.
The same actors could have been, though, if they'd
been saying something a little smarter. In a lot of scenes Schwimmer and
Lee try very hard to bring their dialogue to life, as Lee did do in Kevin
Smith's wonderful "Chasing Amy". But even these guys can't rise from the
script from the murky depths of hell. They're made to look so clumsy it's
as if the Budweiser frogs all fell off their lily-pads and smacked their
heads together for two hours.
The frightfully choppy editing highlights the
pointlessness of the flashback storytelling device, as well as the buffoonery
of the characters. Now and again, the film seems to be going for the kind
of laughs Cary Grant got in his comedy work -- but he played people who were
charmingly foolish in classy films, not sad, lonely, crass oafs in tacky
sitcom rehash.
Like "Picture Perfect", a flawed but much better
film from earlier this year, "Kissing A Fool" has a lot of good actors giving
their all to a bunch of filmmakers who don't deserve it, and who let the
actors take the blame for their bad work. Depressing.
COPYRIGHT©
1998 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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