New Archive:
May 2001 Issue
Man Groans over The Man Who Cried
A
film review by Andrew Bender
The
Man Who Cried must have looked great on paper: Christina Ricci plays
a young Jewish refugee from a Russian shtetl in the 1930s, who
eventually settles in Paris as a chorus girl in an opera company headlined
by John Turturro. There she falls in love with a mysterious gypsy played
by Johnny Depp, and when the Nazis come she's forced to choose between
life and love.
Somewhere between concept and screen, however, things went horribly, horribly wrong. What could have been another Casablanca ends up being mush, a spineless string of vignettes with one dimensional characters mouthing dialog that made me want to cover my ears and cry, "No, no, no!"
I should have expected it. It was written and directed by Sally Potter, whose work also includes the interminableOrlando. That film was lyrical, pretty, and storyless, and this movie is its wartime equivalent, leaving you smarting over the loss of the hour and a half that you could have spent doing laundry.
Potter
squanders nearly every opportunity to develop meaningful relationships
between her characters. Case in point: as a little girl, Ricci's character
is first transported to England, raised by a family there and becomes
an English citizen, but that aspect of her life is never revisited. Incredibly,
when the Nazis approach Paris she never even considers returning there.
Whenever characters get close to developing a bond, one of them says something so ham-fisted that it discounts everything that came before, dialog that's just this short of "Curses, foiled again!" Particularly the male characters philosophize and spout exposition, as in this cringe line by Turturro: "Your little friend has become a Gypsy lover." Somebody needs to tell Potter that a tenet of film writing is "show, not tell." At one point I groaned out loud, and my momma didn't raise me to be no groaner.
All of this might have been excusable if the film was based on a true story; plenty of biopics have done worse. But Potter actually went out of her way to concoct this tale.
In the press notes, Potter remarks that she tried to tell the story visually, and when the characters shut up you do notice some lovely, atmospheric shots. The Russian countryside looks idyllic and cold, and Depp's gypsy does a nice nighttime romp on horseback through the Place de la Concorde. Period costumes are lush, and they're worn particularly stylishly by Ricci and Cate Blanchett as her passionate Russian roommate (one of two fully realized performances--the other is Claudia Lander-Duke as Ricci's character in childhood).
Other
costumes, though, seem to hang uncomfortably on the actors. Residents
of the gypsy camp dress like Dickensian street urchins in headscarves.
The lighting, too, was occasionally problematic, casting odd shadows and
appearing in places where there should be no light, such as behind Blanchett
on the wall of her cramped apartment.
The biggest problem with such filmmaking of the furtive glance is that it keeps the characters at a distance. Ricci's character left me surprisingly unaffected, but boy, did I feel sorry for Ricci. She's a cherub, a gorgeous, soulful young thing and an actress I've long admired, but in this film she's forced to sing in a mousy, breathy voice that I can only assume is natural. Casting her as an opera singer simply strains credulity, and rather than dubbing a more appropriate voice to her solos, Potter hangs Ricci out to dry.
War stories are supposed to be wrenching, but not in this way.
----------------------
The Man Who Cried, Written and directed by Sally Potter; Starring: Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro. Running time 100 minutes. Opens in Los Angeles and New York May 25.
Los Angeles-based Andrew Bender reviews films for various JFL websites
and writes about culture, travel, and food for publications including
the Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure, and Fortune. This
former production company executive and sometime screenwriter also reviews
restaurants (and we're keeping his identity secret by not posting his
photo).
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