Hey folks, Harry here with Capone and his ever-loving look at LIFE IS A HOUSE... which attempts to attach strings to the evil mobster's no good black heart... See if it succeeded...
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here. We're about one week away from the Chicago International Film Festival, which kicks off next Thursday with David Mamet's HEIST (replacing the shelved COLLATERAL DAMAGE). Other films on tap from Oct. 4-18 include Guillermo Del Toro's THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE; David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE; Catherine Breillat's FAT GIRL; William H. Macy and Laura Dern in FOCUS; Jean-Pierre Jeunet's AMELIE; Todd Field's IN THE BEDROOM; Patrice Chereau's INTIMACY; Cambell Scott's FINAL with Hope Davis; Benjamin Bratt in PINERO; Abel Ferarra's 'R XMAS; and Richard Linklater's WAKING LIFE, just to name a few. I'll be faithfully filing reports as the festival is in progress. But today, I'm here to talk about another movie, one that will be released in late October and one that I'm guessing a lot of you will find very moving.
Here it is folks, the best all-out weeper of the year so far. If you aren’t sitting in a puddle of tears by the end of this movie, you do not possess a heart, a soul, or a pulse (or maybe you just don’t have tear ducts). In one of the few instances I can think of, Kevin Kline plays his loveable attributes to the hilt in the totally manipulative but no less effective heart-strings tugger LIFE AS A HOUSE.
Kline plays George, a renowned architect who still pitches his design ideas with hand-made models instead of the much quicker computer imaging.We also learn that he has a remarried ex-wife, Robin (Kristen Scott Thomas), and a rebellious goth-boy son, Sam (the soon to be Anakin Skywalker, Hayden Christensen), who can’t stand George. As the film opens, George doesn’t look so good. His co-workers tell him that he looks thin, he hasn’t shaved in a while, and he’s generally just dragging his ass. His boss fires him, and George responds by taking a metal pole to every model in the office that he created. After this wonderful act of venting, he exits the front doors of his office building and collapses.
When he wakes up, he’s in the hospital and judging from the lack of any offer of real treatment, George correctly deduces that he has only a few months to live. (By the way, this is not a spoiler; we learn this in the first few minutes of the movie and every write up on this film mentions the fact that George is dying.) There’s a wonderful little scene between George and his nurse that clued me in early on that this was going to be a special movie. Without telling anyone about his condition, George leaves the hospital and heads directly to his ex-wife’s house. After a gigantic battle with her and Sam, it is decided that Sam will spend the summer with George tearing town his run-down seaside home and building his dream house. Sam hates the idea. I should say at this point that Hayden Christensen gives a really strong performance in this movie. He has dyed black hair, black eye makeup, piercings galore, and he seems to dabble in male prostitution for drug money. Christensen also does a great job going toe-to-toe with Kline in the film’s most dramatic moments. George wants more than anything in the world before he dies to regain the bond they had when both were younger, and although it seems like a foregone conclusion that they will, the movie doesn’t make it that simple.
Sam’s protests about being forced to work for the summer simmer down some when he meets Alyssa (Jena Malone), the daughter of Colleen (Mary Steenburgen), who dated George briefly after his marriage ended. Eventually Sam warms to the idea of working with his dad. Since George is tearing down his house and living out of what is basically a garage, Sam is forced to shower at Alyssa’s house; you can probably guess what that leads to. That’s one of the things I liked about LIFE AS A HOUSE: it starts out in the microuniverse of George and Sam, but as the tension between them eases, the story lets the world around them breathe. We meet neighbors, we spend more time with Robin and her new family, including husband Jamey Sheridan and two children.
George’s illness begins to take its toll on his body, and soon every character is helping him make this beautiful house. Despite the title of the film, there are no simple (or simplistic) life lessons passed between father and son. George hated his father as much as Sam hates George, and he is determined to mend what is broken between him and his son.
I’m not a huge fan of producer Irwin Winkler’s ventures into directing. In fact, his last two efforts (THE NET and AT FIRST SIGHT) were plain awful. But his clout as a producer of such films as ROCKY, RAGING BULL, THE RIGHT STUFF, and GOODFELLAS have left him in a position to recruit some solid acting talent. Here, Kline and Kristen Scott Thomas have some of the best chemistry as a divorced couple that I’ve ever seen on the screen. Their bitterness is believable, but as Robin spends more time helping with George’s house, their grizzled love sparks anew in a very natural and understandable way.
Winkler manages to avoid most of the trapping of a film that features a dying lead character. We are even spared the obligatory scene of him getting the news about his condition from a doctor and we are blessedly spared his actual death scene and weepy funeral. The final moments of the film are the closest LIFE AS A HOUSE came to be out and out hokey, but the are 100 percent appropriate. LIFE AS A HOUSE is a tear jerker for people who don’t like tear jerkers. With its decidedly R-rated language and content, it should keep the romance novel readers out of the theatres and hopefully appeal to those looking for a life-affirming film that doesn’t feature a Celine Dion or Faith Hill song over the credits. This is one of Kline’s absolute best dramatic roles, and it provides a nice preview of Christensen’s Dark Side.
Capone (Bend to my power and E-mail me NoW!)
Or read my collected review at (just click on Steve@theMovies).
