Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Helena is sans corset, again, in Till Human Voices Wake Us

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Sometime during the '90s Helena Bonham Carter struggled out of her Merchant Ivory corsets, threw away her parasols and immersed herself in a series of scraggly, freaky-haired oddballs with neither foundation garments nor a steady job (Fight Club, Novocaine, Women Talking Dirty). In the Australian film Till Human Voices Wake Us she plays yet another scary-vulnerable punkette; but as good as her performance is, it's not enough to dispel the feeling that we've seen it all before.

Voices is an ephemeral, fey little film wavering on the border between memory and metaphysics. Sam Franks (Memento's Guy Pearce) is a morose psychology professor heading home to bury his father. Chiseled looks blunted by an unflattering goatee and a cap of hedgehog-colored hair, the usually arresting Pearce plays Sam as an emotionally impacted mess with less personality than a head of cabbage. When the dangerously unkempt Ruby (Bonham Carter) gives him the eye on the train, Sam responds by dropping his book. Shortly afterward he's fishing her bedraggled, amnesiac self from the river. What else can he do but take her home?

Little more than a slight and silvery ghost story, Voices nevertheless has some lovely flashbacks to young Sam's riverside dalliances with his first love, Silvy (the teens are beautifully played by Lindley Joyner and Brooke Harman). But writer/director Michael Petroni is much too fond of Significant Moments (as his leaden scripts for the TV series "Miracles" attest), and Voices creaks with pretentious images of birthed calves and dead birds, flapping moths and firefly-laden trees. As the film's preposterousness increases, so does its energy; but as you watch Bonham Carter slurp at a jar of preserved cherries, hair spiking in fashionably gummed-up clusters, be prepared to wince. Some women just look better in a corset.

Anger Management 's a

mammoth mess

In the hands of a mediocre director, frat-boy darling Adam Sandler is merely a recognizable comic prop, a passive-aggressive man-child around whom more accomplished actors are free to make fools of themselves. But, as we saw in last year's Punch-Drunk Love, in the hands of a director like Paul Thomas Anderson, Sandler's natural inner rage can become an incandescent commentary on the proximity of chaos.

To call Anger Management director Peter (Tommy Boy) Segal mediocre would be something of a kindness. A mess of this magnitude requires a level of incompetence not seen since a terminally ill Winona Rider smooched a wooden Richard Gere in Autumn in New York. And it's not just the endless stunt cameos--Bobby Knight, John McEnroe, Derek Jeter--or the hoary, corn-encrusted ending. It's the shameless waste of a great premise and a writer (David Dorfman) whose talent for surreal humor is painfully under-used.

Sandler plays Dave Buznik, a repressed designer of hideous outfits for overweight felines (seriously). When an altercation with a stewardess lands him in court, Dave is sentenced to anger therapy with Dr. Buddy Rydell (an Einstein-haired, Talmud-quoting, patently certifiable Jack Nicholson). Buddy moves in with Dave (cue two-men-in-a-bed fart jokes), accompanies him to work (mine-is-bigger-than-yours jokes), and encourages him to release his homophobia--a dreadful scene involving Woody Harrelson in a dress (no joke at all).

As Dave's long-suffering girlfriend, the adorable Marisa Tomei tries gamely to hold her ground in the midst of Buddhist wedgies, West Side Story singalongs and Heather Graham's career suicide. The inclusion of a hammy Rudy Giuliani yelling erotic encouragement to Dave in the middle of Yankee Stadium accomplishes nothing except the loss of the mayor's post-9/11 dignity--the nadir of a script that has completely imploded.

The random snorting heard during the screening I attended proves there is, indeed, an audience for this kind of film. You just wouldn't want to encounter it unarmed.