IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
CRUSH
Written and Directed by John McKay
R, 115 minutes
This movie might just as easily have been titled "A Few More Weddings and Funerals", which are to be found liberally strewn along its shameless path. Actually, it was originally to have been called "The Sad F**kers Club", the working title that took it up to post-production, until writer/director John McKay decided that this might embarrass its target audience of middle-aged women ("They don't mind reading such language, or hearing it in a film, but they don't necessarily want to say it to a ticket clerk...") So he went back to the title of his theatrical play, "Crush", from which he adapted this screenplay.
There is some fine acting, but without the writing to back it up, that's not enough. England is lousy with fine actors. Shake the curtains at any regional rep and Tom Wilkinsons and Judi Denches of all ages will come rattling down into the orchestra pit. Good acting in an English movie is as much to be taken for granted as film. And if you're worried about it getting too good, you can always import, oh, say, an Andie MacDowell from across the pond. This will also reinforce the connection to the abovementioned weddings and funerals.
Who amongst you has ever imagined the lovely, languorous Andie as the headmistress of a proper British private school nestled in the Cotswalds? This is certainly inventive, if not persuasive, casting, that smacks of an eye on the U.S. box office. MacDowell is always appealing, but she's not remotely believable in this character. In her introductory scene she is lecturing a schoolgirl on the evils of smoking; then, when the girl slinks trembling out of her office, she lights up the confiscated fag. She may be a hypocrite, but she's no square.
The club of the discarded title is made up of three fortyish women: Kate (MacDowell), and her best pals Janine (Imelda Staunton), a bouncy divorced cop, and Molly (Anna Chancellor), a bitter, thrice-divorced doctor. They're an odd assortment of friends. They meet once a week to smoke, drink wine and gin, and talk about how a good man is hard to find. They regale each other with stories of the losers they've shagged and shed, and the nights they've spent alone. The owner of the saddest tale of the week wins a box of chocolates.
There are moments of wit and style in this soapy melodrama of desperate and disloyal women and their obsession with men, and in a calculated move these moments are crowded into the trailer, to give the impression that we can expect a light, amusing sex comedy. But that's not the case.
Things start falling apart for our gang of three when schoolmarm Kate goes to a funeral, and is moved by the organ playing (the word "organ" is called up several times for comic effect) of handsome young Jed (Kenny Doughty), a twenty-five-year-old former student of hers. She is so moved, in fact, that she winds up in a horizontal position with him among the gravestones, with so little ado that one shudders at the thought of how she'd behave at a Pinchas Zuckerman concert.
When the slap-and-tickle shows signs of turning into a serious romance, the other two women spring into action. After all, what are friends for? They do what they can to scuttle the affair, and pretty soon everything has gotten out of hand and we've switched gears into one of those tubes-and-stretchers hospital weepers.
But, as Bob Dylan cautioned in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", "now ain't the time for your tears." The story lumbers on. To say what direction it takes would mean giving away clues better kept under wraps, but there is a particularly mean-spirited scene of projectile vomiting at the altar for our amusement.
At last we get to the denouement, the thematic cul-de-sac toward which all this has been pointing, and the message is this: female bonding is forever, there are no friends like girlfriends, and there is no betrayal so vile and egregious it can't be fixed by a liquid "I'm so sorry" and a good laugh. And now is the time for your tears.
In an interview, McKay was asked how he came to cast Anna Chancellor ("Duckface" in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"), and he gave this reply: "Anna was the last one to be cast. When she came in and did a test she just lit up the room. She was terribly sexy and funny, and a complete cow! I was impressed by the fact that she came in and told me it was a terrible script and that the character was badly written!"
From the mouths of babes.....
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