If I'm Going to Die, I Might As Well Do It for My Country
Written: Jun 15 '01 (Updated Jun 18 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Strong performances and great dialogue . . .
Cons: . . . from stock characters in a formulaic story.
The Bottom Line: Cary Grant showers with his clothes on, uses his chin to take an orange from a woman, and pretends to require a translation of a Punch and Judy show.
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| Sloucho's Full Review: |
Although its plot could more properly be called 'comatose' than 'tired,' Charade is proof that gifted actors, an inspired director, crackling dialogue, and a captivating score by a composer like Mancini at the top of his game are more important to our enjoyment of a film than a riveting storyline. Charade is, by turns, funny, profound, and romantic. It's an intensely morbid farce throughout which we keep forgetting both the morbidity and the farcicality because of a budding romance between Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) and Regina 'Reggie' Lampert (Audrey Hepburn). Although we're never really told what their romance is predicated on or why we should believe in it, the charisma of the Grant/Hepburn pairing is such that we accept their interest in one another--albeit grudgingly.
Charade exhibits a shockingly casual attitude about death--the kind of attitude that will make most viewers laugh (some of them nervously, no doubt). It begins with the death of Reggie's husband, but his death doesn't really matter to her because she was just about to divorce him anyway. When Inspector Grandpierre (Jacques Marin) informs Reggie of her husband's death, she is barely fazed. The inspector has to show her the dead man's multiple passports (all under different names) in order to pique her interest, but she becomes bored again as he itemizes her husband's personal effects (an inventory that appears to bore the inspector as well, whose only courtesy to the widowed Reggie is to not light a cigar at her request). The funeral service ratchets the indifference towards poor Mr. Lambert all the way up to callousness. One mourner clips his nails through the service; another holds a mirror to the corpse's nose just to make certain that he's dead; another charges in to stick a pin in the corpse. And all the while, the background music becomes ever more plaintively Italian, ever more Felliniesque. It's the music that makes the scene genuinely (and not formulaically) funny.
Charade is also strangely profound. When Reggie asks Peter why people lie, he replies, "Because they want something, and they're afraid the truth won't get it for them." Reggie's question is like the question of a child, precisely the kind of question that we all eventually learn to stop asking because such questions are so difficult to answer. But Peter's response, even if it tells us nothing that we don't already know, answers the question far more effectively than most of us could. When Reggie later asks Peter how you can tell when someone is lying. His answer is equally straightforward and perhaps even more compelling: "You can't."
For reasons that I won't bother explaining (since the movie hardly bothers itself), Reggie is in danger for her life. But apparently her flippant attitude about her husband's death is representative of her attitude about mortality in general. Although she shrieks when she is attacked in her hotel room by Herman Scobie (George Kennedy) and becomes frightened when she is menaced by Tex Panthollow (James Coburn) in a phone booth (he hurls one lit match after another at her), she spends most of her time dining, laughing, and generally living it up with Peter Joshua. We are obliged to wonder how many attempts will have to be made on her life before Peter starts volunteering to inspect her hotel room before leaving her alone in it. However, since director Stanley Donen is more interested in creating laughter than a sense of anxiety, he never allows the characters in the film to take their situation very seriously, not even as they are killed off one by one.
Even at his worst, Donen always attempts to do something interesting with the camera. In the atrocious Arabesque, for example, he shows us the world through all sorts of reflections. His camera stunts in Charade are also worth mentioning. In one very strange scene in which Reggie walks past two men telling a story about an ambassador, the two men get into an elevator as Reggie makes her way to an office. Ordinarily, the camera would stay with the character that the audience is following, in this case Reggie; and the closing of the elevator doors on the two men would remove them, quite effortlessly, from the story. But Donen puts the camera inside the elevator so that we can watch the two nobodies stare at each other in silence as the elevator doors close and our main character disappears behind them.
Equally strange is Donen's attempt to replicate a boat trip down the Seine. Although the background he uses is pretty obviously stock footage of Paris, Donen includes a shot of the underside of a bridge and has his characters' voices echo while they are supposed to be under the bridge. The backdrop is so palpably phoney that the echo, instead of lending the illusion an air of credibility, calls attention to the contrived nature of the scene. I couldn't help suspecting that the echo was the punchline to a joke that I had missed.
Although Reggie and Peter have their share of hilarious lines (including the one I've used as my title), a great deal of the comedy in the film is handled by the minor characters, particularly Inspector Grandpierre, who is bound to remind us of Inspector Clouseau with such lines as, "A man drowned in his bed? Impossible!" and "They all died in their pajamas; I would not stay in my pajamas if I were you." It's also an awful lot of fun to see James Coburn tear into Cary Grant when Tex says to Peter, "You fell for it like an egg from a tall chicken. You are a greenhorn, a jackass, a nincompoop."
The chief triumph of the film has to be the way that Peter convinces us that the bossy-yet-helpless-and-orally-fixated Reggie is a likeable woman. Clearly she isn't likeable. As she swallows one candy after another during her first interview with the inspector and gobbles a chicken sandwich in her interview with a man who calls himself Bartholomew, we are haunted by the words of her friend Sylvie Gaudel: "It is infuriating that your unhappiness does not turn to fat." That is only the first in a long list of infuriating things about the painfully superficial Reggie, who can always be distracted from her concerns about Peter Joshua's true identity by a kind word about her appearance or an expression of love on his part. Although we're bound to concede that she's good enough for us if she's good enough for Cary Grant, I daresay we do so grudgingly.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Sloucho
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Member: Mike Davis
Location: Philadelphia
Reviews written: 199
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About Me:
Read my reviews in order to heal the sick and control the weather. Seriously.
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