Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I know I haven’t done my REMAKE THIS! column in a while. It’s mainly because there was no way to keep up with the avalanche of remakes at every studio these days. It used to be a big deal when someone remade a classic. Remember the furor around Gus Van Sant’s attempt to update PSYCHO? At this point, though, no one even seems to notice. Great films are remade just as frequently as crappy ones, if not more so. As a writer, I hear it time and again at pretty much every studio: “Look through our library of titles and see if there’s anything you’d want to remake.” Nothing seems to be off-limits. Take, for example, the case of ALFIE. Bill Naughton’s play and the film that resulted from it were an inspiration for a full generation of swinging bachelors, and it made Michael Caine a star in the ‘60’s. Little wonder. It’s the kind of film that lives or dies based almost wholly on the charisma of the lead, and Michael Caine brought the full force of his Cockney charm to bear in the original.
Part of my skepticism towards the remake came from the announcement of Charles Shyer as the director. Shyer’s not a bad filmmaker, but he’s never seemed like a particularly passionate one to me. He’s had a long and successful career as a writer who crafted a certain type of polished, professional mainstream comedy, and as a director, he’s had hits with films like FATHER OF THE BRIDE and BABY BOOM. Films, in short, that just weren’t my cup of tea. For many years, he was partnered with his wife Nancy Myers, and since their personal and professional split, he’s been working on his own. In a way, it’s looked like he was working to define himself in a different way, as with his last film, THE AFFAIR OF THE NECKLACE. Hardly what you’d expect from the author of SMOKEY & THE BANDIT (which, for the record, I love). For ALFIE, he adapted Naughton’s play and screenplay with Elaine Pope (a former SEINFELD writer and producer) as his co-writer. It would be hard to pinpoint exactly why ALFIE feels so different from his previous work, but there’s no denying that it does. There’s a pulse here, a new sense of vitality, and the result is a sleek, smart slice of adult entertainment that has some real soul amidst the slick.
Part of the credit obviously rests of the perfectly squared shoulders of Jude Law. He’s a fascinating performer, a bit of a chameleon so far in his career. He’s never been afraid to make himself ugly or to vanish into a role. There’s an admirable lack of ego to the work he’s done for directors like Steven Spielberg, Anthony Minghella, Andrew Niccol, and Sam Mendes. Now, with ALFIE, he seems to embrace his winning genetic lottery ticket, playing the character with his charm turned all the way up to eleven. Alfie’s a seducer, able to bend every woman in his life to his will with a well-timed smile or the right compliment at the right moment. He gets the fat old lady down the hall (Renee Taylor) to clean his apartment with a little flattery and by making her feel beautiful if only for a few fleeting seconds. He juggles the women in his life, making sure no one ever gets too close to him, and that’s just the way he likes it.
There are, of course, certain women that he favors, like Dorie (Jane Krakowski), the married woman whose husband never touches her anymore, or the nurturing Julie (Marisa Tomei), a single mother who gives him a comfortable life he can slip on and off like a jacket. The closest he wants to get to something real is living vicariously through his best friend Marlon (Omar Epps) and his girlfriend Lonette (Nia Long). Alfie glides across the surface of his own life, and at the start of the film, it all seems to be working for him. Shyer cast the film well, and everyone plays their roles just right. Most audiences will recognize Krakowski from her work on ALLY MCBEAL, but they may not be prepared for how Shyer shoots her. She’s luminous, like we’re seeing her through Alfie’s eyes, and there’s one shot in particular where she is just about too damn sexy to tolerate. Same thing with Tomei. There’s an inviting warmth to the way she’s filmed, appealing in a very specific way. Then there are the scenes between Epps and Long. She’s never been more sexually intoxicating than she is here, and it’s like Alfie catches a contact high from the energy between the two of them.
What makes this more than just a cookie-cutter confection is the way Alfie’s life unravels after the idealized bachelorhood of that opening reel. The famous theme song from the original asked the question, “What’s it all about?” and the point of the film seems to be that he has no goddamn idea what the answer is.
Alfie is, to put it bluntly, a shit. Law makes him likeable, but there’s no getting around the fact. As we watch, his elaborate juggling act falls apart, and Alfie has to deal with the results, slowly figuring out just how much he doesn’t know about his life and how to get through it without hurting the people around him. Even as certain doors in his life close, others open, new opportunities arise, and Alfie really struggles to make them count. Nikki, a crazy beautiful party girl who enters his life by accident just before the holidays, turns out to be one of the most important lisasons of his life. At first, she seems to be a female reflection of him, all he could ever want, and he even entertains the idea that she’s “the one.” When reality sets in, though, Alfie has to deal with looking in the mirror and seeing something he no longer likes. Sienna Miller, who plays Nikki, is more than just a pretty face, giving this crumpled beauty a really lovely dignity even as she falls apart. I never watched KEEN EDDIE, so I missed her there, but I look forward to seeing her in Matthew Vaughn’s LAYER CAKE next spring.
On the prowl again, Alfie ends up in the sights of Liz (Susan Sarandon), a wealthy businesswoman who turns out to be more like Alfie than he’s prepared to handle. I find it sort of amazing that she’s just as potent an object of lust today as she was in ATLANTIC CITY almost twenty years ago. Sarandon is the eternal-MILF, and she’s got great chemistry with Law. As the film progresses, what really works is the way Shyer heaps all of these lessons on Alfie without ever seeming preachy about it. There’s just a natural way that it all plays out, and Law is a marvel of nuance in the role. He’s onscreen for pretty much every moment, and he spends a lot of time talking directly to the camera, but he never seems artificial or over-considered. Even the ultimate resolution of the piece refuses to wrap things up in an easy moralistic bow. This isn’t a film about Alfie solving all of his problems, and it’s not a film about redeeming him and rounding off his rough edges. Instead, it’s just a journey towards some degree of self-recognition.
There’s a Dostoevsky quote I’ve always been fond of that strikes me as particularly apt when thinking about this film and its message:
”What is Hell? I maintain that it is not being able to love; and for that, one does not need Eternity. A day will do, or even a moment.”
When the big-studio romantic comedy is so often used to sell generic happily-ever-after horseshit to us, it feels brave to see someone make one as relentlessly realistic and even pessimistic as this. Oddly, it’s this cad, this bastard, that may finally make Jude Law a full-fledged movie star here in the U.S. He manages to make you care about this guy even at his lowest moments, and there’s something genuinely affecting about watching him struggle for his soul. Shyer wraps the film in all the slick you’d expect from a fall release by a major studio, including new songs by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, but it’s not a meal of empty calories. Instead, this is a case where a remake has resulted in something that stacks up honorably against the original. It will never replace it, but it definitely respects it even as it expands upon it.
This week, I’ve got an extra-large DVD column and a column where I’ll review a group of micro-budget marvels you might see in a theater near you either right now or in the near future. I interviewed Jude Law, so there’s that transcription to prepare, including stuff about SKY CAPTAIN, ALFIE, and LEMONY SNICKET. I’ve also got that MOTORCYCLE DIARIES review finally, as well my take on I HEART HUCKABEE’S, a review of DIG!, a peek at the IMAX presentation of THE POLAR EXPRESS, and a report from the 10th Anniversary Event for THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Tons of stuff, so I’d better get to it.
Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
