by Mark Waters, 1997.
Starring Genevieve Bujold, Josh Hamilton, Parker Posey, Freddie Prinze Jr., Tori Spelling.
Rating: 7/10, 7.5/10.
There is a scene near the end of The Man Who Fell To Earth where Thomas Jerome Newton points a gun at Mary-Lou and fires. We jump, because we don’t know if the gun is loaded. It’s not (though I guess it’s got something special in it so that it fires when it’s not loaded? I don’t understand guns), and, finding herself not dead, Mary-Lou gets happy and, well, they get it on. Throughout the whole brilliant (and gorgeous—naked Bowie!) scene, Thomas and Mary-Lou fire the gun at one another joyously.
There is a scene around the middle of The House Of Yes where Jackie-O (Posey) points a gun at her twin brother Marty (Hamilton) and fires. We’re relieved, because although we thought the gun wasn’t loaded, we weren’t completely sure. It’s not, and, both of them alive, well, they get it on.
The scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth is unsettling and confusing, but still, as I said, somehow joyous, and very, very erotic. Not so the scene in The House Of Yes. Here, the gun is part of a ritual for the incestuous twins. He sits on the couch, she stands at a distance. "I’m him," he says, and begins to wave like JFK from his car. "I’m her," she says, and, pointing the gun, fires. He jerks back his head, and she runs over to become Jackie Onassis, trying to "hold the top of his head on." Then one thing leads to another...
Posey’s Jackie-O is an intensely disturbed woman. She’s just returned home from the hospital, in fact, though she’s still not quite what one would call "well"—she just almost killed herself boiling flat soda, trying to put the bubbles back in, for example. One thanksgiving, her brother returns home with a fiancée (Spelling), which, predictably, sets her off—after all, when he left in the first place, she tried to kill him to keep him there. And now he brings a fiancée into the house? Trouble.
The name Jackie-O is not a coincidence, by the way. On the day JFK was assassinated, one of two things (the truth is one of many impenetrable things in this film) happened to her father: either he left, fed up with the insanity in the house, while the mother (Bujold) tried to keep him there, or the mother shot him dead with the very same gun and buried him in the backyard. Four months later, at an Ides of March party (a good idea, if you ask me; I wonder if they actually happen), Jackie-O comes dressed in the famous pink coat and matching pink pillbox hat, with macaroni and ketchup for the brains and the blood. (We don’t see any of this, though I kind of wish we had, if only because 14-year-old Jackie-O, in the framing scenes where we do see her, is played by Posey’s Josie & The Pussycats co-star Rachel Leigh Cook.) It is after this party that her and Marty’s relationship takes that step to the next level.
I just realized that I’m kind of going around in incoherent circles in this review, which strikes me as appropriate. The movie did the same thing, though I think its circles were there on purpose (unlike mine). In fact, it’s also appropriate that I started off this review talking about The Man Who Fell To Earth, since I felt similarly about that film. For Roeg’s effort, I said that the movie was incoherent and poorly made, but that somehow I got the impression of greatness from it, and consequently liked it. It’s a little different in the case of House Of Yes—here I think the film was quite well made. It just fails to work on some deep level (I like to think that it was just on the level of transition from play to film—more on that later—but I think it was more in the subject matter and the way it dealt with it), but it so clearly has ambitions of greatness that I’m almost tempted to forgive all its weaknesses and say, yes, this film is great.
Again like The Man Who Fell To Earth, it’s not a problem with the cast, which here is particularly strong. Posey is at the top of her ridiculously great form; Hamilton’s calmly nervous (eh?) amusement (what?) strikes exactly the right note, even if I don’t know how to describe it. Bujold gave the impression of someone who might have slept around to the point where she doesn’t know who the father of her children is and later on killed her husband, but for whom all of that is in the PAST. Which seems necessary for the role, and honestly I didn’t know how she did it, so praise for her, even if she does sound Transylvanian ("Don’t forget to pack your toothbrush"). Spelling shocked me by giving one of the best performances in the film. In fact, the only remotely weak link was Freddie Prinze, Jr., who put me uncomfortably in mind of Keanu Reeves, though not nearly that horrific.
So if the problem isn’t with the cast, where is it? There are three main culprits the way I see it.
The first is the fact that plays and movies simply don’t work the same way. When you turn a play into a movie, you can’t just take it line for line and expect everything to work out. It just doesn’t work. You end up with a bunch of people asking each other post-modern questions. Talking heads, like. What works on stage does not necessarily work on screen, and I don’t think that whoever adapted the play for the film understood that.
The second is the direction. It seemed at times that the direction was deliberately trying to remind us that we were watching a movie and not a play, by making weird angles or doing things like panning down Tori Spelling’s dress until it became the curtains on the windows on the floor below, or having Parker Posey run into a bunch of shadows on the first floor and then having Tori Spelling run out of what looks like the same bunch of shadows, only now we’re on the second floor. A lot of things like this in the direction seemed to place a lot of emphasis on the difference between the first and second floors (though I’m not sure what this significant difference was meant to be) and on the idea that all the characters were essentially the same character (though I’m not sure why this should be). It was confusing and distracting and kind of just didn’t work.
The third is the music, which is the only thing about the film I would call truly awful. I don’t even want to think about it enough to describe it. Hideous.
But still, something in the film—the performances and the goodness of the original writing, I suppose—shone through all the flaws, and I appreciate that.