Wolf. - movie reviews

National Review, August 1, 1994 by John Simon

* By now everyone must have heard about the beginning of Wolf. Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), the able but unassertive senior editor at MacLeish Publishing, is driving through wintry, nocturnal woods toward New York City and home. His car hits something and skids to the road's edge. He gets out, and a trail of blood leads him to a wolf. A yellow eye opens in the black face, Will is bitten, and the creature bounds off into the forest. It was a werewolf; that is why it did not die on impact. Without quite knowing it, we are in the realms of the supernatural, which is fine, and of the inconsistent, which is not.

To be able to play dead so perfectly, the injured werewolf must be a bit of a werepossum. And as, carrying marsupialness a step or leap further, it goes bounding off into the dark--the leaps will prove characteristic of all the werewolves, even when in human form--it becomes a veritable werekangaroo. And though this werewolf seems unkillable, in a crucial later scene another one is shot dead. So how vulnerable is a werewolf.

Will Randall's growing coarse hair on the hand near the bite mark seems to presage imminent hirsuteness. No such thing. His senses merely become keener, his muscles stronger, his actions bolder. No longer wimpy, he can overhear or sniff out secrets hidden from lesser mortals. A good thing, too, because he is surrounded by schemers so lupine and vulpine as to make his previous rectitude suicidal. There is, first off, the monstrous magnate Raymond Alden, whose conglomerate has just swallowed up MacLeish Publishing (Christopher Plummer in one of his plummier roles), and who now promotes Stewart Swinton (James Spader), Will's fawning, snake-in-the-grassy underling, into Will's job.

Raymond Alden fires Will sadistically as he invites him to a soiree at the Alden country estate cum chateau, and there offers him the choice of quitting or taking the demeaning job of scouting books in Eastern Europe-Bosnia, no doubt, to which there is a flip reference in the script. But Will, his wolf's blood aroused, decides to start his own publishing house with two faithful staffers and his stable of authors. Even Charlotte, Will's wife (Kate Nelligan), so seemingly dependable, lets her husband down. But Will has gained the attention of a far more interesting woman, Laura Alden (Michelle Pfeiffer), the billionaire's restless, renegade daughter, to whom everyone who falls afoul of her father becomes someone to favor.

There is enough intrigue and counterintrigue here--enough homo homini lupus--for Wolf to function very well without recourse to lycanthropy. Mike Nichols, the polished director, can get the most out of urbane backstabbing among sophisticates. And though the initial screenwriter, the macho novelist Jim Harrison, once suffered, he says, a "modest attack of lycanthropy," he and the other scenarists, Wesley Strick and (the uncredited) Elaine May, Mr. Nichols's old partner in satire, could have stayed with the timely subject of skullduggery in publishing. The dialogue has the requisite edge. Alden tells Randall, You're a nice person. Thank God I replaced you." When Randall fights back and outfoxes Swinton, Alden comments appreciatively, "I'd never have fired you in the first place if I had known you were this ruthless."

Jack Nicholson, with or without fangs, has never been better; Michelle Pfeiffer endows a fairly standard role with emotional intricacy; James Spader exudes his usual supremely slimy loathsomeness, but here more appropriately; Mr. Plummer smiles and uses his words as unerring darts on human dartboards. Eileen Atkins, Om Puri, David Hyde Pierce, and Prunella Scales do wonders for smaller roles. With Giuseppe Rotunno's opulent, almost tactile cinematography, the veteran Ennio Morricone's sumptuous score, and Mr. Nichols's pliant, springy direction, which falters only in the film's latter, totally lycanthropic part, Wolf is very enjoyable two-thirds of the way. Nowadays, that's a lot.