Get your own Free Home Page
Is it just me, or does anybody else wonder why Jodie Foster has recently taken to delivering her dialogue with a breathy restraint that makes you wonder if she left her inhaler in the limo? In Contact it got on my nerves in a large way, but I couldn't recall her continually whispering in previous films, so figured it was some artsy affectation; maybe the character was supposed to have had been raised in a soufflé factory or something. But she does it again in her first movie since taking time off to have a highly publicized but mysteriously parented baby. If nothing else, I'll bet her voice rises a notch or two by the time the kid hits the terrible two's and starts drags out a Silence of the Lambs video.
Anyway --
If you miss the grand, historical, cast-of-thousands epics Hollywood used to produce more frequently before inflation and television came along and made them not only astronomically expensive (literally -- movies these days cost about what the Mars Polar Lander mission did, and often don't get any better reviews) but redundant (why make Gone With the Wind when you can send a camera crew to Bosnia for a lot cheaper?), you might like Anna and the King. It's got costumes, horses, elephants, exotic locations, hordes of extras, and the biggest scratch-built set since the one constructed for what through the 1980s was the most expensive film on record (and still may be in current dollars), 1963's Cleopatra.
Practically everybody's seen The King and I, so you know the basic story. Foster plays Anna Leonowens (sorry, but I can't hear that name without laughing; it sounds like Kevin Kline's line from A Fish Called Wanda, where his inept former CIA assassin tries to concoct an impromptu fake last name under pressure: "It's…Man-fren-jen-sen."), an English widow hired in the 1860s by King Mongkut (Chow Yun-Fat) of Siam to school his children in the language and science -- but not the customs -- of the West. Which is no small task, since he and his many wives and concubines have apparently been having sex on the copy machine, leaving the opulent palace looking like somebody knocked over a very colorfully dressed ant farm. Meanwhile the British and French are jousting to add Siam to their colonial hegemonies, brutal skirmishes have broken out along the Burmese, and Anna and Mongkut are fueling an uneasy tension of their own as cultures and personalities collide.
Whereas the 1946 Rex Harrison/Irene Dunne version Anna and the King of Siam was based on a memoir of Anna's housekeeper, and the aforementioned 1956 Yul Brynner/Deborah Kerr musical was adapted from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway show, this treatment relies more on Leonowens' (snnggkk!) own diaries -- which have been criticized for egotistically depicting herself as Superman without the tights. She comes across as more stubborn than likable, anachronistically PC at a time when it was widely assumed that "the ways of England are the ways of the world," yet saving the day with her taciturn ingenuity.
Director Andy Tennant, whose resume includes two Drew Barrymore vehicles (the quasi-historical Cinderella retelling Ever After and The Amy Fisher Story), has created something that looks like a little of both. The story suffers from occasionally abrupt transitions, and features a couple rather bloody sequences (it's rated PG-13) and an incongruous pyrotechnic finale. But the Malaysian setting is breathtaking (maybe that's Jodie's problem) (maybe that's also the script's problem; the producers had hoped to shoot at the actual locations in Thailand, but the Thai government, still smarting 40 and 50 years after its sometimes buffoonish depiction in the earlier movies, continued to balk after several revisions from the scriptwriters previously did Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home…??), and Chow Yun-Fat manages to prop things up somewhat. Though Hong Kong action films with director John Woo earned him a worldwide cult following before doing The Replacement Killers and The Corruptors in Hollywood, the charismatic actor had a good deal of comedic and dramatic experience (the guy's done 75 films) even prior to that, bringing ample dignity and humor to the role..
Maybe he and Jodie should have traded parts -- in the movie, I mean. C+
Get your own Free Home Page