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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (March 2, 1978)
Julia Heilman’s memoir of love delicately crafted Julia is a story of two friend ships, is a movie concerned with distances, is a beautifully-crafted, unsettling film experience. ... the boat is no longer on the open sea.. Simple drumbeats in darkness. A slight pause of silence, then chamber music so loud it startles, bringing on the title and opening credits. A simple technique, it an nounces one of many conflicting opposites that comprise the rhythm and tempo of Fred Zinneman’s film of a Lillian Hell man memoir. Delicate balances of such conflicts hold and move this film. A painterly shot of a lone figure fishing on a lake from a rowboat dose to shore, blued with dawn, or distance in time. A voice — Jane Fonda’s Lillian — admits the falli bility of her memory save on a single dear subject: Julia ‘‘I am old now and want to re member what was there for me then, what is there for me now.” We see an old woman's eyes gaz ing through the fishing scene, but they do not see us: they are cast ing their gaze towards a past we are told is true. “Memory, like a poet, lies so that we may focus on what mat tered." Though written concerning Eugene O'Neill, that same tension r and less time for play-going and love-affairs: Julia is increasingly concerned with ideas, liberty, op portunity for the disenfranchised. This brings her finally in open bat tle with the cancer of European 1 By ERIC WURZBACHER resides in Julia. Director Zinne man and screenwriter Alvin Sargent have focused on the es sentials of Heilman's poetic sketch, with the result being an expansion on the original. “I didn’t know much more about Julia than you do, assuming you've read the story,” Sargent told one interviewer. “But not knowing maybe even worked for me. Julia was a memory, an idea.” The portrayal of Julia given us in the film is just that. We see a girl grow into a woman of intellectual and moral passion who has less fascism in the 1930s. Despite the film’s title, however, Julia is Lillian's story about Lillian growing into the Lillian that re members, for us, that story. Zin neman has managed to balance both of Lillian’s loves so that the love of two women exists along side that of man (writer Dashell Hammett as played by Jason Robards) and woman. Indeed, they represent the two aspects of Lillian’s conflict that Zin neman sees as the central issue of the story: both are mentors to Lillian, both are essential to her life and growth, both steer her to wards what they see as her own good without forcing her into it. By this, Zinneman avoids making either a feminist or sexist state ment, and instead gives us a work of art about friendship, a non political work about the polariza tion that is politics. There is little doubt that Lillian understands Dash, however frus trated she seems to become with him. One wonders (as does Julia several times): does she under stand Julia’s consuming pas sions, or Julia herself, at all? In the hospital where Julia lies inert and battered, Lillian drifts into sleep and a dream, of the two of them sailing on a lake. Julia cap tains the boat, takes care of Lillian as always when they are together. Much later in the film, when they reunite in Berlin, Julia's distance is nearly complete. Once more she takes control, runs the show, those wide blue eyes somewhere else. Lillian, though, has changed, and Zinneman shows us this as she boards the train from Berlin: she looks back at the nameless man who has seen her safely aboard the train, a man she will never see again who has risked his life to help her to work against Hitler even as Julia does. Yet she does this without aban doning her own commitment to writing: she begins to see her writ ing within a larger context. The central conflict remains, as it must for any creative individual, but now incorporated within her rather than between two exemp lars of mutually exclusive ways. The delicate balance is main tained. "I remember them both,” muses the older Lillian s voice at film's end as we are returned to the opening scene on the lake. There is a note of quiet triumph in the statement. Friends die, memories alter, love clarifies. Though never at the tiller during her own story, she is the one tel ling that story, finally in control. Like all good stories, it grows with the telling, revealing more, as does the film with each viewing. Go see it with a friend or two. Coma Directors perspective cant cure flatness Coma is a film so overloaded with commercial qualities — a strong, or at least central, woman character, a trace of science fic tion, several chase scenes, and even some superficial social commentary—that it seems more like a package than a film. This may be just as well since, as film entertainment, particularly as a mystery-thriller, Coma is curiously fiat, predictable, and unexciting. Much of the blame for the film’s flatness must surely be placed on screenwriter-director Michael Crichton (Westworld), a licensed physician and best-selling novelist (The Andromeda Strain). Crichton's medical credentials are no asset to his direction of Coma since almost all the film’s action takes place in a hospital. In theory, EL COMEDOR MEXICAN RESTAURANT Specializing in zesty CHEESE & BEEF ENCHILADAS Delicious with our special sauce Cheese-$1.15 Beef_$1.05 On Oakway Road just behind the Oakway Mall Open Mon -Sal. 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sundays noon to 8 p.m. MEXICAN AT ITS BEST the eye of an insider should give the film a good feel for its setting, but a hospital is one place where the doctor’s perspective is vastly different from that of the patient; one works there all the time, while the other is there only for birth, death, and other, only slightly less traumatic events. As a result, Coma’s solemn matter-of-fact view of hospital life seems remote and even irrelevant to the audience’s experiences. Equally detached from the audience's perspective are the operating room mishaps in Coma. While everyone who faces even a minor operation has some fears of a fatal mishap, Coma focuses those fears, on the possibility, not of surgeon incompetence, but of malice. By implicitly displacing the (plausible) risk of accident with the (implausible) possibility of homic idal conspiracy, Coma offers un convincing assurance that doc GIGANTIC Shirt Clearance Sale 30% OFF yy ^ ^ W_s/s Oregon Wilderness Supply EMU Lower Level tors do, in fact, know what they are doing. Crichton’s literary success, based primarily on his ability to craft suspenseful stories, is also irrelevant to his direction of Coma, where he consistently fails to de velop or maintain suspense or au dience involvement. Even the film’s central character is so per functorily sketched that, from an opening lover’s quarrel to a final humorous implications of an organ auction are lost when the sequence is treated merely as a distraction from an interminable chase sequence; not even Elizabeth Ashley's grotesque seriousness as the auctioneer can compensate for the film’s cursory and ineffective handling of the se quence. The heart of Coma is its treat ment of the great American pas By DAVID COURSEN trip to the operating room, she re mains almost completely inscrut able, even as we are asked to identify with her. The film is, in fact, poorly crafted. A hackneyed romantic in terlude is presented with virtually no unsettling overtones, as if the woman could forget her suspi cions of the man, as well as the assorted creepy events she has witnessed in the preceding hour of screen time. A similar changing of-the-rules occurs when a hired killer, told to make one killing "look like an accident,” uses a gun to stalk a second victim, as if hospital authorities might mistake a fatal shooting for a case of “accidental lead poisoning.” The film is also damaged by di rector Crichton’s lack of a sense of humor. Even several visual gags with cadavers are undercut by the non-human appearance of the props. Similarly, the blackly time of paranoia, and here, too, Crichton’s dull direction causes problems. A woman’s belief that a whole hospital staff may be part of a murderous conspiracy, or that men are pursuing her in the night, is straightforwardly presented with no humorous overtones. No thing much is made of the prob lems and ironies of distinguishing real and imagined persecutors. The mechanical qualities in Crichton’s direction are perhaps most apparent in the resolution of the “surprise ending,” a surprise only because Crichton has cheated in several earlier se quences. Finally, what defines Coma is not so much its dullness as its cyn ical contempt for its audience. Crichton evidently feels that, with enough commercial “hooks,” a film can dispense with details like a suspenseful, coherent story line, consistent characterizations, or visual imagination. ^Kimbutf s . House Of Strings A FHE SELECTION OF NEW j RARE VINTAGE FRETTED INSTRUMENTS MARTIN • VfGA • OVATION • TAK AMINE SERVICE & 537 WIUAMETTE repair 687-0814 =Z
