Afterglow

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by John Simon

RECENT months produced a spate of films even Argus couldn't have coped with. Let me dispatch a few with condign unceremoniousness. The Canadian Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, from a seemingly better novel by Russell Banks -- about a school bus that skids into icy waters drowning a number of children, and what that does to the morale of a small town -- is marred by several things, chiefly Egoyan's screenplay. Ian Holm plays a well-meaning but officious lawyer who tries to make the grieving families sue for damages, but inhibiting skeletons come out of everyone's closet, including his own.

As usual, Egoyan cannot resist his terminal pretentiousness. He introduces visual/verbal quotations from the poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," as if Browning had bearing on Banks, which is manifest nonsense. He also invents an endless framing conversation on an airplane that detracts more than it adds. He allows the odiously attitudinizing Mychael (sic) Danna to compose a preposterous score, and casts a number of small-time actors in roles that make too large demands. Except for Holm's performance and the silverpoint-like wintry landscapes, everything about the film matches human disaster with artistic catastrophe.

Similarly icy panoramas prove photogenic in another clinker, The Winter Guest, starring Emma Thompson and her mom, Phyllida Law, as mother and daughter. That may be the only point of (dubious) interest in this contrived and exasperating bore, adapted by Sharman Macdonald from her play, and directed by the actor Alan Rickman, apparently not content with playing heavies. Against bleached-out land- and seascapes in provincial Scotland, daughter Frances mourns her dead husband and threatens to leave for Australia, while mother Elspeth natters at her trying to stop her from leaving, God and mother only know why.

Intercut with this are three subplots. 1) Two young boys preoccupied with childish, largely sexual, problems. 2) A couple of crones haunting funerals for free meals and arguing with each other. 3) Frances's young son almost getting seduced by the neighboring sexpot, but kept from consummation by the sight of a snapshot of his late father. The psychology is almost as thick as the Scottish burrs; the symbolism, outdoing the snake in Macbeth, is not even scotched, never mind killed. Arlene Cockburn may be the most unappealing seductress in recent movie history; Emma Thompson, with a full crop of tricks and spikily close-cropped hair, brings to the wintry surroundings a bit of Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, scene 2, line 10): "thorny hedgehogs, be not seen." Neither should this movie, with its symbolically frozen-over sea -- at least not until hell follows suit.

Try as they might, these stinkers cannot hold a candle to 1997's nadir, Afterglow, which, unsurprisingly, has garnered a number of (after) glowing reviews. The writer - director, Alan Rudolph, has learned only one thing in the 15 films he has churned out: how to make each worse than the one before. But even he will have serious difficulties trying to surpass the horror of his latest. Rudolph, a toady and protege of Robert Altman, has all his master's defects, plus a few uniquely his own. Afterglow is an enchiridion of every known literary and cinematic cliche; racking my brains, I could come up with only one Rudolph overlooked. Even in that field, I guess, perfection eludes him.

How many times have we groaned at characters trying to remember the names of Disney's seven dwarfs? Or a woman pretending to talk about a friend when she means herself? Or leaning back, drained, against a door closing after a man in her life? Or a spouse tossing a snapshot of bygone connubial bliss into the fireplace? We get a man in a bar picking up the smoking woman next to him with "Smoke gets into your eyes," and promptly ordering "A bottle of Dom Perignon and two glasses." (If at least it had been Perrier-Jou -- t!) "You're the most fascinating woman I met in my whole life," he adds.

Elsewhere we get "Ever wonder about women being like fine wine?" Again, "The worst part is finding out late in life that nothing lasts," and "I like the way you smell -- like a man." Also a more recent visual cliche (first seen in an Altman movie) of a woman (irrelevantly) using a toilet, and three separate gratuitous overhead shots with the camera rotating 360 degrees, not one of them -- shot or degree -- justified.

Rudolph excels at subtle sexual innuendo: e.g., "Turn me on; make it wet," from a young woman to her sexy plumber. Or explaining her skimpy dress to her sexually uncooperative husband, "I'm ovulating," a gentle hint to impregnate her. Or the middle-aged wife of the philandering plumber asking upon his return home, "How was work? Unplug a few tubes?" Or take this dazzling paradox: "I don't know what I like, but I know what art is." The story concerns two troubled couples, the middle-aged Lucky (!) and Phyllis, and the young Jeffrey and Marianne, in sexual interaction that results in nothing. The scene is Montreal, which seems to contain only one apartment building, the famous Habitat, with which Rudolph is obsessed.