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It’s about time somebody gave at least a cursory nod toward examining the most identifiable recent trend in movies since teenagers rediscovered meat cleavers and Chaucerian crudeness: the amorous pairing of actors and actresses whose age disparity almost equals the length of time it’s going to be before Cleveland Park opens again.
In Autumn in New York, a fabulously successful NYC babe-magnet lothario restaurateur played by Richard Gere falls in love with a witty bohemian hat-designer (?) played by Winona Ryder. And at first it appears they’re actually going to make an attempt to discuss the fact that his character is nearly 30 years older than hers, rather than do the usual Harrison Ford thing and simply assume that all women are aching to get flat and forked* for older men as long as they’re heroically handsome. But early on the plot turns weepy when he learns she suffers from an incurable cardiac ailment and has less than a year to live, and it’s adios, discourse.
Realistically, Gere and Ryder are both such preternaturally youthful, attractive figures (do you suppose Ms. Ryder ever got even with Primus for their naming a song after her and the aquatic rodent whose name serves as a euphemism for the female nether region?) that it’s difficult to question their mutual attraction anyway, whatever their ages. By the time director Joan Chen (remember her from “Twin Peaks”?), whose directorial debut last year was the even more tragic, dreary Chinese film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, uncorks an arty lovemaking scene, it wouldn’t make any difference to us if Gere had been born during the Harding administration.
Which is sad. With other actors we might have paid more attention to a script (by Allison Burnett, whose chief credit to date – talk about an odd pairing – is Bloodfist III) peppered at least intermittently with smart conversation, than to his perfect hair, their perfect skin (particularly Faustian in Gere’s case), and her perfectly cute proclivity to drag out her r’s.
Then again, how many people would watch a May/December duo like Jack Klugman and Janeane Garofalo? C+
*I apologize for using such crudity, but I once heard a grizzled old aircraft mechanic wield that colorful term when nostalgically recalling the effect that a guy’s announcing he was a pilot used to have on the baser strain of girl back in his youth, and have been looking for a sentence to sneak it into ever since.
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