Forget Paris. - movie reviews

National Review, June 26, 1995 by John Simon

AH, THE romantic movie! It will, I trust, always be with us in one form or another, but it has been somewhat recessive of late. True, there is the unsatisfactory While You Were Sleeping, and French Kiss, which I haven't had the stomach to face. And now we have Forget Paris, whose premise is that though one glorious week in Paris can lead a couple to the altar, it cannot make them stick.

Or can it? This movie is produced, co-authored, and starred in by Billy Crystal, which already is too much of a not so good thing. He plays Mickey Gordon, a short but dauntless basketball referee who can stand up to the tallest guys and make his call stick -- but a call is not a marriage. This in itself is a problem: a romantic film that dawdles over basketball to capitalize on the presence of actual basketball stars is obviously hedging its bets. If the thing is about romance, forget basketball. But okay. We go first into screwball comedy, which is compatible with romance. Mickey, who has rightly hated his worthless just-deceased father, has undertaken, in an act of filial pietas, to take the coffin to Normandy and bury Dad, according to his wishes, among his fallen Army buddies. But upon arrival at the Paris airport, Dad is missing, coffin and all. To help, in comes Ellen Gordon (Debra Winger), an official for the French airline that is Air France in disguise. The day Air France hires an American -- and one whose French is as thickly accented as Miss Winger's -- for such a job is hardly at hand. But okay, forget verisimilitude. The coffin is finally retrieved in Switzerland (cold storage?) and buried in a small Normandy churchyard. And who shows up to prevent Mickey from being the sole graveside mourner? You guessed it: Ellen. In this film, one or the other lover will always pop up where least expected, thus making the unexpected unsurprising. But okay, forget surprise. I suppose Ellen felt so sorry for an American whose French was even worse than hers, she had to do something extra for him. Back in Paris, the film shows the pair raptly visiting all the most obvious sites. It would appear that the City of Light has at least four Eiffel Towers, because one of them seems to make it into almost every frame. The Pont Neuf is Number Two on the hit parade, an awed Mickey exclaiming that they are standing on the very bridge danced upon by Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in An American in Paris. Centuries of French art and architecture have not labored in vain: they produced a set for a movie that thrilled a future American basketball referee. And so we rattle around the prize Parisian movie sets -- though, mercifully, we are spared the Sacre Coeur. But then it's back to America and basketball for Mickey. Still, he and Ellen do get to pop up in each other's lives until he pops the question and she marries him. But in L.A., where he is always away refereeing, lonely Ellen can get only a lowly job with a dinky domestic airline. (The good jobs, presumably, all go to Frenchwomen.) But okay, forget about the dumb story. Forget Paris has a helluva framing device. The Mickey - Ellen affair is told, partly in voiceover, by a set of the couple's friends foregathering for dinner in a Los Angeles restaurant. Andy (Joe Mantagna), Mickey's sportswriter friend, starts telling it to his fiancee, Liz (Cynthia Stevenson), who is often moved to tears by it. They are joined by a married couple, Richard Masur and the obnoxious Julie Kavner, who become the successive storytellers. Then another friendly couple arrives to inherit the narration. Then -- but forget about the framing device; let me just tell you about one more father. This is Ellen's, a lonely, senile widower (William Hickey, creepier than ever), whom Ellen moves in with her and Mickey, and who does nothing all day long but sing the same Toyota commercial, suggesting that the only good father is a dead father. Crystal's co-writers were the notorious team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, responsible for a good many fizzles since their initial Splash. I'd like to think it was they who are responsible for this Paris exchange: ``Ellen: Would you like to see the Eiffel Tower? Mickey: That's here?'' After that you keep telling yourself things can only improve; but don't believe everything you tell yourself. Mickey tells us how sentimental he was about his high-school sex partner: ``I used to carry a picture of my right hand in my wallet.'' And the grammar is on a par with the humor: we hear ``get off of me'' and ``that big of a difference.'' Debra Winger, a likably spunky actress, doesn't look right here: perhaps it is the fault of Judy Raskin's unflattering basse couture; perhaps Miss W.'s two (count 'em: two) special hair stylists fought with each other. Yet, ever a good sport, Miss Winger earns her wings with a scene in which a pigeon gets glued to her hair and she must embarrassingly parade with it through a crowded doctor's office on her way to a pigeonectomy. Billy Crystal, who, whatever his role, plays a stand-up comic, is far less likable. Worst of all is Cynthia Stevenson as Liz. I myself would rather wear a dovecote on my head than have her in my hair. Forget Forget Paris.