Stumbling drunkenly.

Tiresome sequel to an iconic movie. ARTHUR 2: ON THE ROCKS is, like its title, uh…

Dudley Moore returns as Arthur Bach, the millionaire who loves a tipple at all hours of the day. He’s not an alcoholic, he’s a drunk. He’s still lovable, but just barely, and his hijinks are producing in those around him television sitcom reactions rather than big screen comedy.

Five minutes in, and Arthur’s wife Linda (Liza Minelli) is talking adoption (because she can’t get pregnant). You know you’ve just lost every single male in your audience, don’t you, writer Andy Breckman and director Bud Yorkin? Relentless, the filmmakers plough on, every single word out of Linda’s mouth from now until movie’s end baby-talk, baby-wallpaper, baby-names, baby-nursery, baby-toys, and I jumped out a window and ran screaming down the street. Like every red-blooded male.

Not before I witnessed Kathy Bates as an adoption manager, in easily the worst performance of her career. You call that acting? I call it Misery…

Then Arthur is bankrupted by his nemesis Burt Johnson (Stephen Elliott), the only way to recover his fortune being to marry Johnson’s vindictive daughter Susan (insipid Cynthia Sikes replacing insipid Jill Eikenberry from the last movie).

Arthur refuses the marriage proposal, and he and Linda try to brave the poverty and get jobs. They try moving to different hovels, but Burt Johnson is dogging their every move and thwarting all their efforts. Just when things are looking their worst, Arthur and Linda get a surprise visit from that terrible actor from the adoption agency – and all hope of a baby to brighten their existence is dashed. When they break up, Arthur ends up in a hostel.

Every element that made ARTHUR a spirited adventure is leached from this plodding, confused thought experiment. Even Arthur’s imperious, imposing butler/father figure Hobson is dead (Sir John Gielgud in the last movie), replaced with a humorless patsy in the form of Paul Benedict as Fairchild. And the supporting cast all prove they’re willing to say anything to pick up a paycheck.

In the hostel, at the film’s lowest ebb, it is suddenly defibrillated uproariously with the appearance of – Sir John Gielgud as Hobson’s ghost! The filmmakers were probably kicking themselves that this character died in the last film, because as soon as Gielgud’s commanding presence is onscreen, ARTHUR 2 springs back to life. Alas, too little, much too late.

Worst of all, the message this movie is trying to convey – that you don’t need money to be happy – is undermined in exactly the same way that ARTHUR’s message was undermined – by having Arthur reclaim his fortune almost magically AND by having that bad actor deliver an adoption child AND by having Linda announce she is pregnant as well! Oh, it’s such fun how everything always works out when you’re rich and in love and drunk and can’t write a good screenplay.

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Little Boy Booze.

The breezy, boozy tale of a wealthy enabled young man who can’t do without money – until he realizes that money can’t buy him what he really can’t do without.

Back when being just a millionaire was sufficient enough to be an absolute arsehole, ARTHUR hits the screen with the impact of passing out and whacking your temple on the table – as we meet millionaire playboy Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) in the back of a stretch limousine, blind drunk, picking up a prostitute, taking her to a swank restaurant and loudly embarrassing his rich peers, then keeping her overnight until his butler loquaciously disposes of her the next morning, whereupon Arthur languishes in a bath sipping on martinis.

Such a lovable arsehole!

But look deeper: within this raunchy opening sequence, thematic seeds are sown that raises ARTHUR above the simplistic alcoholism meme it has been saddled with. During dinner, Arthur asks the prostitute, “Do you like me?” Her answer that he is “cute” elicits insistence from Arthur, “Yes, I know, but do you like me?” The pathos and sadness of his query is masked behind boorish laughter – a defense mechanism we can all relate to – and that, fellow binge drinkers and whoremongers, is the crux of this tale:

Arthur is super-rich, over-privileged, spoiled beyond rotten, and the cavalcade of females through his bedchambers does nothing to make his lonely existence more bearable. He’s aching for something more – actual love and earned respect.

So let’s dispense with the meme that has crippled this movie – Arthur is not an “alcoholic,” he’s a drunk. We have to make this distinction, to differentiate ARTHUR from a politically correct message movie. Arthur doesn’t seek pity for a “disease” which he cannot control – there are many scenes where he is stone cold sober – he drinks merely to punctuate the boredom of his enabled life. Dudley Moore made his inebriated passages such a cackling feature of this movie that that small character trait was misinterpreted as thematic grist.

Arthur’s real spiritual burden is MONEY. It is money he can’t do without. (In that sense, he is just as diseased as any Wall Streeter in this modern age.) When he meets the fun, sexy girl of his dreams, Linda (Liza Minelli), his dilemma has nothing to do with alcohol, but rather, his father and grandmother threatening to cut him out of his inheritance if he marries her, instead of the arranged marriage they have set up in order to unite two business dynasties. Arthur’s arranged betrothed (Jill Eikenberry) represents just another facet of the wealthy lifestyle that Arthur is inured to, yet can’t live without, which is why he can’t stand his fiance, yet accepts he is trapped, and drinks to ease the horror.

Linda’s explosive bubbliness and straightforward manner (as opposed to the sophisticated facades of the polo-playing, horse-breeding yacht-enthusiasts he is surrounded by) provides Arthur with just the right amount of earthy reality check he needs. Not to stop drinking – to realize he can go on without money.

Also providing Arthur with grounding is his liege Hobson (Sir John Gielgud, as tender as a twisted noose), his regal wit deployed as a hatchet is deployed to traitors of the Crown. Gielgud steals the movie, not only with his impeccable high-browed delivery of barbs, but with his poignancy; of someone who knows his end is near and wants his surrogate son to find happiness in life.

Every supporting player is dynamite: from Linda’s starstruck dad (Barney Martin) to the rich girl’s forceful father (Stephen Elliott), who wields a shotgun ostensibly as a big game hunter, but metaphorically reminding us how to term Arthur’s impending marriage; to the flower vendor who was “married once… she’s still alive”; down to the little boy who sprays his breath before dancing with the little girl at the engagement party. And the guy at the diner whom both Arthur and Linda shout at, “Eat your roll!” – is The Thing from RESERVOIR DOGS! (“You’re Mr. Pink – and that’s that!”)

For the plot to work, we have to gloss over a few realities: For Linda, a penniless waitress who resorts to stealing a birthday present for her father, how hard is it to “fall in love” with a millionaire? For Arthur, simply promising to give up his riches to marry her is also vapid, as he has no idea what the lower classes have to do to survive. When Linda rejects Arthur, that is meant to signify that she doesn’t just want his money. When Arthur is cut out of the will and still pursues Linda, that is meant to signify he truly means to become a pauper for love. But everything works out fine in the end when Arthur gets the money AND the girl – so we never know for sure whether each of them could have held to their principles had the worst scenario transpired. Jobless and penniless soon creates loveless.

But wealth will at least always guarantee that you’ll be lovable. Even if it’s just a lovable arsehole.

END

The Race Between Religion and Spirit.

Ah yes, running in slow motion. We’ve all done it. To Vangelis’s music from CHARIOTS OF FIRE.

The loneliness of the long distance cucumber

British production, written by Colin Welland, directed by Hugh Hudson, nominated for 7 Academy Awards, winning 4 (including Best Picture), CHARIOTS OF FIRE is based loosely on two real life British runners in the 1924 Paris Olympics, who run for very different reasons. Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) runs to prove himself above the anti-semitism he’s experienced all his life, while Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) runs to glorify his christian god: “To win is to honor Him” (which should make anyone trip over from laughing so hard. Even in slow motion).

Movie opens at Caius College Cambridge in 1919, when fervor for The Great War (though what made it “great” is beyond my ken) is still high in everyone’s nostrils, and British supremacy was tangible in the world. The British runners all meet here as students.

Different people would perceive different parts of this movie as inspirational. For an athlete, the running in slow motion, the sacrifices and the winning – both Liddell and Abrahams would go on to win their respective races and bring glory to Britain; for a religious fanatic, the nutty equating of Christ with racing – Liddell gives a speech loaded with metaphor, “committing yourself to the love of Christ – that is how you run a straight race” –  demonstrably ridiculous, because Jewish Abrahams ran “straight races” as well, metaphorically as well as literally – by committing to the love of Allah.

And there are so much of Liddell’s ravings and rantings and refusing to run on Sunday at the Olympics, that it turned me off the film. This real life athlete ruined a film honoring him because his character (Charleson) had to portray him as the lunatic he was.

Liddell’s life plan is to visit China as a missionary, but he puts those plans on hold to attend the Olympics, because, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.” Suuure you do. Anything as an excuse to rationalize fun. After the Games, he does actually give up running to spread the disease of christianity in China.

Liddell meets with Olympic and state officials who urge him to compete in his Sunday race, “In my day, it was king first, God after.” Liddell replies, “God made countries, God makes kings, and the rules by which they govern.” God also makes wars. Reconcile that with your missionary work, Running Boy – oh, I forgot, missionary work IS insidious war, after all, on Other People’s beliefs.

This is one of those films where it is pointless speaking of the performances, which are so natural and top notch, it is no wonder CHARIOTS received so many awards: Ian Holm is Abrahams’ trainer; Sir John Gielgud once again defines Spectacularly Imperious by appearing in the dictionary right next to the phrase, and here as a College Master. Sadly, two young American actors who were stars in their own right appear here in their last major feature film before virtually disappearing from cinema, Dennis Christopher (who made his mark as the determined young bicyclist in BREAKING AWAY, 1979) and Brad Davis (who shook our foundations in the disturbing MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, 1978).

Watching both Abrahams and Liddell cheer each other on during their respective races for Britain – though both were mortal running enemies – was a joy that no religion could sully; the physicality of driving human bodies to such extremes of performance; the intricacy of cardiovascular function that fuels the human animal; the tendons, joints, muscles, bones impacting the Earth, surging forward in opposition to gravity; the wonder of the raging human adrenaline machine stretched past breaking point… If only Eric Liddell could have understood there is a much more wondrous power than his mythical Christ – humanity.

Run from the truth, Eric! Run in slow motion!

END