The Bottom Line: There's no character development to speak of, just costuming and bad acting and a script that starts nowhere, leads nowhere, and ends when it assumes everyone has fallen asleep.
In many ways, Jefferson in Paris begs to be compared to an afterschool special. It features clumsy dialogue, reprehensible acting, and a central message that is repeated over and over again without ever becoming interesting. But from a structural standpoint, it isn't quite up to the standards of an afterschool special, as Jefferson in Paris does not bother about having a beginning, a middle or an end.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the movie is just one big middle. It's too diffuse for even that to be true. In fact, the screenplay is so painfully tangled and self-encumbered that it's safe to say Pauly Shore could have written something better in his sleep.
I'm willing to wager that the film's problems really begin with its central thesis, which is that Thomas Jefferson found some women sexually desirable. That's just about the most profoundly uninteresting thesis I've ever encountered in my life--and I grade composition papers for a living.
Perhaps the explanation for this extraordinary lapse in judgment and execution on the part of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant is to be found in the filmmakers' assumptions about the audience they had built for themselves through such extremely successful films as Howard's End and Remains of the Day. There are people--apparently lots of people--who very much like films dedicated to the idea of grown-ups decking themselves out in old-timey costumes and venturing into the public eye for the sole purpose of demonstrating how incredibly sexually repressed they are.
I can't help thinking that Messieurs Ivory and Merchant somehow got it into their heads that their films were successful because of the costuming and the theme of sexual repression, whereas most of us liked the movies for their acting and their refreshingly contemplative pacing.
Jefferson in Paris is, if anything, a vague sort of morality tale about the trouble that Jefferson's sexual impulses get him into. He does sleep with one of his slaves; he wants to sleep with the wife of an English painter; and he flirts momentarily with the idea of kissing his daughter in a way that is perhaps less than appropriate. Or rather, it seems that his daughter invites him to kiss her in such a way. One cannot quite tell about his daughter, since she is played by Gwyneth Paltrow. And one never knows about Paltrow; it's difficult to say whether she is dead or alive, whether she more closely resembles a fish or a duck, and whether the clinging sexual desperation that hangs about her eyes is the product of our imagination or of some gizmo buried in her undergarments.
Jefferson in Paris features more superlatively bad acting than I can remember having seen in one film in some time. Paltrow's performance is so unspeakably inept that in my most recent encounter with the civil authorities, the judge threw out the murder charge that had been brought against me for having shot at Paltrow. We later learned that she wasn't dead at all, merely acting in another film. The point is that even if I had killed her, the murder would have been justifiable--if only as a way of protecting the good name of anorexic ducks everywhere.
James Earl Jones' performance as the son of Jefferson is almost as unforgivable as Paltrow's portrayal of his daughter. Jones has a great voice and magnificent bearing, but is completely miscast as a vaguely clueless informant to the journalist whose questions form the unbearably clumsy frame for our narrative.
Care for a snippet of atrocious writing? One of the journalist's first remarks is this: "A newspaperman is willing to make his way to any destination as long as there's a story at the end of it."
At the end of what? The destination? Umm, I guess I'm just all kinds of bogged down in my rather conventional--perhaps priggish--notion of destinations as being ends, not having ends. The writing gets worse throughout the film. There is a sort of mock debate in which the participants must take turns advocating either the heart or the head. Roughly a dozen attempts are made at wit, but not one person can come up with a single observation that is the least bit clever. Many of Jefferson's lines were presumably lifted from documents he had written. They certainly have the 'ring' of Jeffersonianism about them, but they absolutely never fit in the context in which Jefferson (Nick Nolte) is asked to deliver them.
When we aren't being pelted by bad dialogue, we're subjected to little known historical facts for no good reason whatsoever. The script forces one invention of Jefferson's after another down our throats. It's precisely as if an insipid research paper has been brought to life. Who needs a tableau vivant when we can get all dressed up in 18th century accoutrements and enact a footnote or two from a history book? Remember how dumb Bill and Ted were supposed to be? Well, even they knew better than to come back from their trip into history with anything this contorted and contrived.
There's no story to speak of, no character development to speak of, just endless costuming and bad acting and a script that starts nowhere, leads nowhere, and ends when it assumes that everyone has fallen asleep. I stayed with this film all the way to the end only because I thought that there was no way a Merchant-Ivory production could be so relentlessly terrible throughout.
I was wrong. Jefferson in Paris is every bit as bad as everyone said it was.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.