A Girl and a Gun: Bad News and Other News

July 27, 2005

Bad News and Other News

I didn't catch the original Bad News Bears (1976), so am not qualified to say whether Richard Linklater's new version is superior to the original. I certainly had reason to hope so, based upon my exposure to Linklater last year--Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Waking Life, and Tape were all, to my mind original and engaging. Even School of Rock, not ordinarily my type of movie, held my interest with its clever treatment and solid pacing, although nearly two hours of Jack Black were a severe test.

Alas and alack, I found Linklater's update (or remake, or whatever it is) pretty dreary. It's the basic one-joke movie (cute kids who are also obnoxious) with a dash of redemption tossed in, and though Billy Bob Thornton pretty much carries things for the whole ride, it's a load even for an actor of his talent. Here's the concept: a washed-out drunk, a sort of Bad Santa turned vermin exterminator, who made it to the major leagues for one game, is brought in to coach a little league team. The kids are impossibly inept and gifted only in attitude. They play terribly, then get better, then wind up in the championship game against the team that humiliated them early in the season (a team coached by Greg Kinnear, whose schmuck beneath the good guy pose is getting terribly tedious). It's really a movie for kids whose parents don't mind a little coarse language. I don't know quite how to account for the enthusiasm which the new film has generated among critics and in the blogs, but I suspect that many of reviewers saw the original as early or pre-adolescents, loved it, and because Linklater was reasonably faithful to Ritchie (again, I'm guessing here), found this edition nostalgically satisfying.

I last mentioned the work of French director Lauren Cantet with the estimable Time Out (2001), distinguished by being one of the few contemporary films about the waking activity which consumes more of our lives than any other one: work, or in this case, being out of work. An early film, Human Resources (1999), is an even more subtle and interesting entry. A working-class provincial family sends their son off to business school in Paris so that he can have a management career. He chooses a trainee's position in the company that has employed his father in a shop floor job for decades (an unlikely choice by the son, but you can get past it). The big issue of the 1990s in French industry was the transition to the 35-hour work week, promoted by government and industry as providing more leisure time, resisted by certain unions--and especially the Communist C.G.T.--as cutting out five paying hours a week. It is the job of Franck (the son), to devise a program to sell the idea to the workers of his father's shop and their militant, rigid, and very funny union spokesperson (delightfully played by Danielle Mélador). Franck is successful, only to discover that his father's job is to be eliminated in the consolidation. He turns coat, exposes management's plan to eliminate jobs all along, and sparks a wildcat strike at the plant. His father actually opposes him all the way, first in accepting the shorter work week, then in going up against management. He is the perfect embodiment of the old-line French factory worker for whom any change was bad, worse if it came from management. Cantet handles the tensions within the plant, and within Franck's family, not to mention the hostility felt by provincials for those schooled in Paris, with great delicacy, and we get a clear and sympathetic statement of each faction's point of view. Incidentally, in the May referendum by which France rejected the European constitution this year, one of the central issues often cited was the working classes' fear of losing the 35-hour week.

Human Resources announces its seriousness and complexity from early on, although it manages to keep from become heavy-handed or slow. The Housekeeper (2002) is a pleasant little sex comedy which keeps us smiling until it starts to turn dark--another way of saying "realistic"--in the last twenty minutes or so. Jean-Pierre Bacri, recently seen in the best of Agnès Jaoui's films, is a mid-forties bachelor whose most recent romance has come to an end. He suddenly realizes that he's depressed and living like a slob instead of a comfortable Parisian bourgeois with an apartment in the insanely desireable sixth arrondissement, and so hires a housekeeper--a femme de ménage, which is the film's French title--who turns out to be an extremely attractive young woman of no more than about twenty. He resists the attraction, she promotes it, and ultimately she wins out. They start sleeping together, living together, going on vacation together. It all looks idyllic until, at the seaside, she shows greater appetite for dancing and contemporary music than he does. Pretty soon, she is spending more time with a young fellow (admittedly gorgeous) than with him. Finally, a woman his age who knows nothing about his relationship with the girl mentions what a lovely daughter he has. A look of devastation passes over Bacri's face as he realizes the truth of the maxim that there's no fool like an old fool. Roll credits.

Claude Berri, who is seventy-one now with more than fifty films to his credit, gave this admittedly slight little picture just the right touch to add some heft. He is immeasurably aided by Bacri, on of the most talented actors in French film right now, someone who seems to be able to take on any role and find directions in which can be expanded. The Housekeeper is not great art, but it's thoughtful and nicely executed, demonstrating that the old chestnut about an old fool may apply to men and women, but not necessarily to men and filmmaking.

July 27, 2005 at 09:02 AM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

July 27, 2005

Bad News and Other News

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