Tag: genre

Ghost

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Everyone has seen Ghost before they’ve seen Ghost. We all know the iconic scene where Demi Moore shapes pottery while Patrick Swayze sits behind her as The Everly Brothers “Unchained Melody” plays in the background. It’s been parodied everywhere, from Family Guy to Two and a Half Men to The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (David Zucker, 1991). There’s a good reason it has been parodied. It’s a good scene. Cheesy, but memorable; a portrait of love that has transcended the ages.

But these parodies give a false expectation of what Ghost is actually about, which is less concerned with the transcendent power of love than a mishmash of different genres that cannot master any of them. While a huge success upon its release, winning Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and making a mind-bending $505.7 million worldwide, the rest of the film barely shapes up to that one iconic scene.

The film is split into two key parts: before and after Sam Wheat’s death. This first part is far more engaging, with the young yuppie couple seemingly having it all yet afraid that their love is transient. Sam watches a plane crash on the TV, and states that he shouldn’t fly to LA as these things always come in threes — a false flag intended to tease those well aware of the film’s premise.

The point is that death can take us any time, and that the love we have on earth is special. Their communication at this time is tentative; with Sam — played with typical stunted machoism by Swayze — unable to tell Molly how much he truly loves her. Unpolished and unvarnished, these feel like real people. When the classic scene comes, it’s his way of saying that he cares about her, their joint caresses of the pottery wheel a symbol of the life that they want to share together.

This all changes after Sam is killed by a criminal on the street. Ghost quick jumps us through unnecessary narrative hoops instead of giving us the time to feel the immense loss that Molly must be feeling. Sam is not only literally a ghost but metaphorically too. Likewise Molly is half-formed, still waiting to be shaped at the pottery wheel.

In fact, Ghost doesn’t really get into the nature of grief at all. Instead this shaggy dog story — part comedy, part conspiracy theory, part exploration of purgatory, part action thriller — launches into a convoluted plot-line involving murder and illicit bank transactions. Therefore, Sam is not forced to try and get Molly to notice him for his own sake (which might be more moving) but to stop further crimes from being committed.

Ghost

Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her brilliant supporting role (only the second black woman to do so) as a spiritualist who can talk to Sam, but her character is kind of shortchanged too. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his initial review about the classic kiss scene where Sam kisses Molly through her body: “this should involve us seeing Goldberg kissing Moore, but of course the movie compromises and shows us Swayze holding her — too bad, because the logical version would actually have been more spiritual and moving.” While the former move would’ve been a better representation of the power of love to transcend anything, the second is just another classic example of Ghost changing the rules of the game for the sake of the screenplay.

This is a film completely unconcerned with logic. One moment he can’t touch anything, then he figures out that he actually can; initially she can’t hear him, then right at the end she can. These kind of manipulations take us out of the emotional journey of the characters, which ends with a typically Hollywood action climax which must’ve satisfied denizens of the Box Office back in 1990 but ruins the film’s potential as a genuinely moving work of art.

Jerry Zucker, known previously for his far wackier works as part of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team such as Police Squad (1982) and Airplane! (1979), felt like the wrong director for the work, which might’ve succeeded far better as pure comedy. Anthony Minghella‘s Truly Madly Deeply (1991), released just a year later and containing a very similar premise, is the far more moving and humorous work, able to track the multi-varied emotions associated with grief with actual nuance and depth. I recommend you watch that instead.

The 30th anniversary edition of Ghost is in cinemas on Friday, February 14th.

Out Of Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.

Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.

After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?

Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.

The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.

Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.

The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.

Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.

All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.

As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.

Out Of Blue is out in the UK on Friday, March 29th. Before then, it screens in the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, February 27th and 28th. On VoD (BFI Player and other platforms) on Monday, October 21st.