The Year in Movies: A Welcome Return to Style

Nineteen Eighty-Six might be fondly remembered as the year the movies grew up, the year that--against all odds and expectations--sophistication finally succeeded at the box office.

That's not entirely the case, of course. The top ten movies of the year, led by the bellicose and noisy Top Gun, were pretty much playground stuff; and the biggest star of the year, Tom Cruise, is nothing if not a major teen dream. Still, the downside wasn't abysmal; There weren't a zillion loony slasher/sexpot baby-sitter/MTV inspired movies. Instead, Hollywood emulated upscale TV. NBC had sailed out of the ratings doldrums in 1985 by charting a course away from the lowest common denominator, and last year the movie industry attempted to follow in its wake.

Surprisingly enough, it worked, both critically and financially. Audiences responded like crazy to movies that, in years past, would have been stillborn, or at least fatally crippled, because of their unmarketable concepts. The English film My Beautiful Laundrette, about a frankly gay couple who make it in the suds-'n'-duds trade, was hardly high concept, yet it played to packed houses. Small-town life, which lost its cachet as a film subject 15 minutes after It's a Wonderful Life closed back in the Forties, was the topic of choice, albeit skewed, in Blue Velvet and True Stories, directed by those visionary two Davids--Lynch and Byrne. Unlikely heroes, from "Crocodile" Dundee to Rodney Dangerfield to Sid Vicious, had unlikely successes, while traditional commodities such as Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood and Sly Stallone plummeted on the futures market. There was silliness, of course--Howard the Duck and Under the Cherry Moon spring stupidly to mind--but most of the daffy movies in 1986 ducked out quickly and quietly, dragging studio heads away with them.

The major conclusion is that last year, the real stars were in the audience -- they showed some taste.

During Oscar season, it's pro forma to invent trends and distribute awards, so we will, too. With no further ado, and not even a nod to the best documentary, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award or any bad dancing and lip-syncing, we start with the biggie.

Trend of the Year: Movies for People with Brains

Two late releases of 1985--Out of Africa and Kiss of the Spider Woman--helped raise the tone for all that followed. They were brainy all-star vehicles, and the closest thing to gratuitous sex was a dry kiss between Raul Julia and William Hurt; the love scenes between Redford and Meryl Streep seemed mostly theoretical.

But that classy prologue quite naturally led the way for Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, who seemed to have retreated shyly into the world of the small films after his back-to-back classics Annie Hall and Manhattan, made his first screen-filling movie in years. The characters, the plot, even the laughs, had all grown back to full size. The movie dealt with the complexities of all sorts of relationships--familial, marital, extramarital, even the relationship between a neurotic and his neuroses--but spared us his usual Bergmanesque rantings. Instead, the director himself was out there leading the laughs and--amazingly enough--working out the angst before the closing credits.

Many "smart" movies followed Hannah onto the high ground, even if they showed a disconcerting tendency to plunge off cliffs. Children of a Lesser God and A Room with a View played like state-of-the-art TV dramas, while Legal Eagles made a valiant but most of all expensive attempt to revive the Tracy/Hepburn school of repartee.

Perhaps it's no tragedy that Legal Eagles failed. Yes, it was a dream package: It had three hot stars (Robert Redford. Debra Winger, Daryl Hannah) and a hot director (Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters). But they all seeme to get on like a bag of cats. The moral, if anyone was listening, was this: It isn't the package that counts; it's the content.

The Color of Money, too, had relationships to burn. This time around, Tom Cruise was playing a cocky little squirt with some life in him, as opposed to the cocky little zero-dimensional squirt he played in Top Gun. Playing flint to Cruise's sharp edge was the redoubtable Paul (continued on page 168)Year in Movies(continued from page 98) Newman, as the slowing Fast Eddie Felson. Away from pool-tableside, they were great, but just how many shots of well-trained billiard balls can a person watch in two hours? And those final scenes in the Atlantic City tourney hall--one would expect Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed to come bouncing out for a few rounds.

Still, Cruise's charm kept the balls rolling, much in the same way that Tom Hanks brought his special ironic something to Nothing in Common. Hanks played a self-absorbed young advertising hot-shot who learns more than he ever cared to about familial responsibility when his parents split up. Now, if that film had stuck with reality, Hanks would have let his parents rot. His noble reaction wasn't realistic, so to hell with reality; you can get that for free outside the theater. Why not indulge in an honorable fantasy or two for your six bucks?

Like The Color of Money and Allen's segments in Hannah and Her Sisters, Nothing in Common cashed in on the idea that infantile grownups can learn the value of character. Perhaps it's an idea whose time has come.

Big ideas spread to other genres as well. In 1986, one of the most popular horror films--like a hell-fire preacher--mixed scares with its sermon. The Fly may have filled the screen with ooze and vomit and spit and corroding body parts, but it also delivered a parable of aging for the Big Chill generation.

And The War Movie--in recent years a cartoon genre--lurched back toward chastening realism with Platoon. Oliver Stone's film gave a snootful of hell to its younger audience--the kids who had bought Stallone's revision of the Vietnam war in Rambo--and it reminded the older Springsteen collective--the hordes of people named Wayne and Wendy and Bobby Jean who worship the Boss because they feel he's singing about them--why they dissented the first time around. We can all be thankful it took Stone so long to get funding for the film. If it had been released in the wake of Rambo, the director would have been lynched.

Worst Supporting Trend: Movies about Boys

In any given year, there are dozens of movies glorifying boys. You know, coming-of-age movies in which boys wax manly by losing their virginity, getting drunk, roping cattle, destroying cars or becoming vampires. Nineteen eighty-six was no different. Top Gun was a homoerotic tribute to the Navy and to Tom Cruise's pumped-up jaw muscle. The Karate Kid Part II posed the question "How is manhood connected to chopping a board in half?" Apparently, a great many people were interested in the answer--the movie raked in $114,900,000.

Stand By Me, the story of four touchy-feely prepubescents who come of age while hunting for a dead body, was a huge hit among the boy-worshipers. The movie's appeal stems from grown-up boys' sentimental attachment to the mythical golden days of their youth. Still, it comes off as wishful projection. These kids would make you think that Freudian analysis was a standard part of the seventh grade curriculum.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a Reaganesque boy fantasy for people who wonder, What if you were the richest, most charming kid in school and could get away with anything? The film's message is pretty abhorrent and oddly prescient. Like Ferris, every arrogant Yuppie dreams of being above the law. If this kid were to grow up, God forbid, his career goal would be to outcheat Ivan Boesky.

An irritating corollary to the boy-movie trend was the cinema of arrested development, practiced in such films as Cobra, 8 Million Ways to Die and 52 Pick-up. In each of them, men act like boys pretending to be men: They shoot big guns and kill bad guys and talk dirty. Stallone, particularly, was so monosyllabic and dull in Cobra that the movie died an admirably quick death at the box office.

If the 1986 crop of films proved yet again that boys will be boys, this year, at least, they had to lay down their Uzis and play nice.

The Best-Supporting-Location Award: Chicago, The Beautiful

Last year, Hollywood spurned itself as the film location of choice and discovered--tah-dah!--Chicago. The Rust Belt's prettiest lake front served as a strolling lane for Rob Lowe and Demi Moore in "About Last Night ... "; and Billy Crystal and Greg Hines commandeered a Yellow cab and drove it up onto the EI while chasing bad guys in Running Scared. There were plenty of other Chicago movies, too--Nothing in Common, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Color of Money, Native Son, Lucas and Raw Deal among them. You could get sick of the place without even living there.

Film makers who weren't working in the city that works were hiding out in the jungle or swamps (The Mosquito Coast, No Mercy, The Mission, Down by Law) or making fun of towns so small that they dried up and blew away when the cameras stopped. David Byrne and David Lynch invented the small towns of Virgil, Texas, and Lumberton for their films, True Stories and Blue Velvet.

Byrne and Lynch, who sound like a terrorist team but are not, loaded their movies with that small-town microcosmic feel--the sense that under any rock is an entire world teeming with life.

Byrne, who grew up in Baltimore, for God's sake, condescendingly patted the Virgilians on the head at the same time he was stabbing them in the back. Looking blankly at the audience in his role as narrator, he delivered bizarre, lobotomized lines, but his subtext was murky SoHo obscurantism--Laurie Anderson's specialty. But then, Byrne writes catchier tunes.

Lynch, on the other hand, demonstrated that he was a quintessential Lumbertonian, just one of the messed-up guys. His identification with, and sympathy for, his creepy characters made Blue Velvet the most distinctive, disturbing creation of the year.

One of the reasons Blue Velvet worked so well was that Lynch got at what's appealing and scary about home-town life. That theme was also at the center of Peggy Sue Got Married. Kathleen Turner's Peggy Sue went back to her high school days and saw her parents, her friends and her future husband through the eyes of an adult. Her phone conversation with her long-dead grandma was the heart tugger of the year.

Peggy Sue lived out the ultimate small-town dream: She could go home again. That dream is, in large part, the appeal of these movies. When they succeed, they're a combination of the familiar and the surreal, an odd mix of memory and make-believe.

Best Oddballs in Featured Roles: Rodney and Company

In 1986, Paul Hogan's "Crocodile" Dundee said "G'day" to every New Yorker he passed on the street, and America cast aside its America's Cup prejudices to say "G'day" back. Rodney Dangerfield, at the age of 64, went Back to School and earned some respect, a degree and $90,000,000. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver went slumming in the action-adventure genre and showed that she could keep up with the big boys. And Jim Belushi won 'em over by being a loudmouthed, smartass jerk in "About Last Night ..." perhaps because he provided something to think about while Demi Moore and Rob Lowe had athletic sex for what seemed like weeks.

Oddly enough, the heroes considered most likely to succeed in the class of 1986 were also the least appealing. Clint Eastwood, newly heralded as a cinematic genius, experienced the auteur theory of failure in the horrible, homophobic Heartbreak Ridge. In that film, Clint's mission was to remake scaredy-cat Marines in his own image. The results are tough on the eyes. Suffice it to say that Eastwood has a few kinks to work out on the subject of anal sex.

Clint's big competition in the Christmas season was supposed to be The Golden Child, Eddie Murphy's first film since Beverly Hills Cop. After that huge success, the new film was designed as a star vehicle, but this one came complete with an egomaniac behind the wheel. As Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy was an outsider triumphing against steep odds; that was the fun of it. But in The Golden Child, Murphy himself is the chosen one. The result is an unfunny exercise in ego massage.

American movie audiences love heroes. Yet, from Rambo to Rodney, they prefer for them to strive in the name of a worthy cause, and they especially like to see an oddball triumph. Wisely, Murphy is hustling back to Beverly Hills before "Crocodile" Dundee II hits the theaters.

Best Supporting Trends: The sexy, the Silly and the Sublime

The sex symbol of the year was France's Béatrice Dalle, the star of Betty Blue. In her endless nude scenes, she amply demonstrated that a body need not be aerobicized to be enticing.

America's answer to Dalle was Kim Basinger. In 9-1/2 Weeks and No Mercy, she proved that sex appeal can be enhanced if you are (A) damp, (B) muddy or (C) damp and muddy. She was doused with sweat or some other glistening substance through about eight of the 9 1/2 Weeks, her S/M drama with Mickey Rourke; while in No Mercy, she carried on the light-bondage theme as she was dragged through a swamp handcuffed to Richard Gere. When they finally have sex in the movie, Gere, who usually strips whether or not the script calls for it, doesn't even take off his shirt. It didn't seem like the same actor.

There were sexual-electricity brownouts as well. Oriental slime and dirt didn't do the trick for Sean Penn and Madonna in Shanghai Surprise; and Prince, a fine musician but an extremely tiny person, miscast himself as a big-time gigolo in Under the Cherry Moon.

There were other mysteries: Why, for instance, was Emilio Estevez allowed to go into production as writer, director and star of his own movie (Wisdom)? And why was Soul Man, in which a white kid masquerades as a black to win a scholarship to Harvard Law School, allowed through the theater doors?

Some risky maneuvers did pay off in 1986. Star Trek IV landed happily in San Francisco; and Jane Fonda let her perfect body droop to play a boozy, out-of-work actress in The Morning After. Bette Midler further rehabilitated her undeservedly lagging career with a gutsy comic turn in Ruthless People; and Dexter Gordon hit all the right notes in Round Midnight. In She's Gotta Have It, actor-director Spike Lee reminded us that Eddie Murphy doesn't have an exclusive on black wit. His hilarious story of a woman and her three competing lovers also showed Hollywood that movies about blacks can be something other than terribly noble (Native Son) or shamelessly exploitive.

Summation of the Year: the End

There is a promising conclusion to draw from all this, and it comes from the business itself. Not only did Hollywood supply us with better-than-average stuff last year but the studios made better-than-average money doing it--1986 was the second-best year in history for box-office grosses. Oddly enough, some credit for that happy fact may be owed to the VCR, which provides an increasingly easy and cheap alternative to going to the theater. Faced with a possible mass defection of their audience, the studios were forced to produce extraordinary lures to the theater, and in many cases they did. So, in the afterglow of a year in movies such as 1986, and as VCR sales continue, there's reason to hope for good things in the future as well.