Ang Lee’s nineties hit is such a curious film. On one level it is a hideous examination of suburban USA, a world where the bad haircuts and fashions match the dubious morals in the time of Nixon. On the other it’s a tender-hearted coming of age tale, peopled by a whole school of future stars, including Maguire, Ricci and Wood. Lee skewers the vacuous suburban world with real dexterity, helped by some great acting from Kline, Joan Allen and Weaver. At one moment, Weaver, on her hilarious waterbed, one of many succinct touches, is seen reading a Philip Roth novel. We have been transported into a ghoulish world of wannabe predatory men who are in real life a bitter disappointment to their women, either as husbands or lovers. Only the children, lead by the gloriously off-beat Maguire., hold out some kind of hope for a better future, once the ice has melted. (Of course we now know that the ice is melting far too fast and the better future is as illusory as ever). It’s intriguing to see how effectively the outsider, Lee, disembowels the North American culture, in a fashion neither Hanecke or Wong Kar Wai, for example, managed. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see any of his other films in the Cinemateca cycle. A last note - the strangeness of hearing Bowie’s voice at the end in the song that covers the closing credits. For all that Bowie might have ended up spending the last years of his life in New York, he sounds resolutely un-American, faintly out of place, like the man who fell to earth, albeit, the Englishman who fell to earth.
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