Film

Rip It Up, Issue 119, 1 June 1987, Page 8

Film

HEARTBURN Director: Mike Nichols It doesn’t seem like three years since Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep made Silkwood. After a long period working in theatre, Nichols has returned with Heartburn, a movie based on Nora Ephron’s best-selling novel about her marriage to and eventual divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. For a novel supposedly rooted in ‘‘real life,” all the characters are very exteriorised — types rather than flesh-and-blood people. I’m not able to accept Streep as a swanky food columnist any more than I could Bette Davis as a fashion designer in June Bride, but with the feminist politics implicit in Ephron’s script, it’s important now that the heroine is credible. Jack Nicholson’s reprobate husband is sketched rather than drawn and the most effective scene between the couple is an impromptu drunken singalong, which I would imagine was very much the result of Nichols’ work with his actors. Heartburn is a bitter film, cynical even. Most of the male characters, from Milos Forman’s ageing Lothario to Arthur Hill’s unconcerned father, are unflatteringly presented, and the women don’t fare much better — Stockard Channing’s complacency towards her husband’s attitude is straight out of Stepford. Some scenes, such as that in which a young thug robs Streep’s encounter group, are presented without showing any realisation of the darker implications of what has happened. Nichols hasn’t managed to penetrate beneath the New York gloss to find any core of reality — and it’s significant that one of the most genuinely funny scenes is that in which a couple of waiters at a wedding reception breathlessly chatter about the niceties of haute cuisine. Heartburn is, in the final count, a Big Apple bonbon, all wrapped up with a smooth Carly Simon score. William Dart THE NAME OF THE ROSE Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud There’s a clever crossing of genres at the heart of this film. Based on Umberto Eco’s novel of a few years back, it's a medieval mystery story, with Sean Connery’s Brother William of Baskerville playing Sherlock Holmes to Christian Slater’s young Watson, and unravelling a series of puz-

zling murders at a Benedictine abbey in 1327. Broodingly set among mistshrouded courtyards and vaulted chapels and libraries, The Name of the Rose has been ’ beautifully shot by Tonino delli Colli, while James Horner’s soundtrack makes appropriately ominous rumblings from time to time. Although the film doesn’t really do justice to the finer points of Eco’s book — those elaborate and fascinating discussions of the ins and outs of 14th Century ecclesiastical turmoil — it does delve into a deeper level than a medieval Conan Doyle. In his one-minded search for the closeted library of the abbey, William of Baskerville unfolds an allegory on the evils of repression and the importance of freedoms, both individual and collective.

There are some extraordinarily vivid performances here, from William Hickey’s sly old monk to Feodor Chaliapin Jr’s epicene assistant librarian, although F Murray Abraham’s visiting inquisitor counts for very little. Sean Connery brings the same laconic wit that launched the 007 adventures 25 years ago, making the most of lines such as, “If I always had the answers for everything, I’d be teaching theology in Paris.” William Dart

SALVADOR Director: Oliver Stone Oliver Stone made Salvador several years before Platoon, but the shadow of Vietnam hangs over the earlier film. It’s most noticeable in the running conflict between journalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) and the hawkish Colonel Hyde (Will McMillan) as they rekindle the animosity they had in South East Asia. But, in wider terms, the political struggles of San Salvador and American’s military handshake are a replay of the early 60s in Vietnam. There have been other films on this subject before, from Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire to Costa-Gavras’s Missing, but their impact pales beside Stone’s searing indictment. From the flickering images of Robert Dawson’s main title sequence, Salvador has a leanness that suits its subject. The director does not try for rhetoric and high-toned eloquence as in Platoon; rather it is time for seedy revelations.

Salvador is, in many respects, a road movie gone awry as the two scuzzbags (Woods and Jim Belushi) take off from LA and find themselves caught up in the political nightmares of Central America. It’s a study of compulsion, and compulsion is what has kept Oliver Stone in the movie business for the last decade or so.

William Dart