The Truth About Cats and Dogs, directed by Michael Lehmann (Heathers), is a Rock Hudson/Doris Day vehicle retooled for a postmodern audience, which means the characters do the same ridiculous things Hudson and Day would have done, only with the knowledge that Hudson and Day already did them. The movie is slight and enjoyable and much more deft than last year’s similar While You Were Sleeping: the performers don’t peddle their charm, and the dialogue amuses without resorting to incessant one-liners—it has zing instead of zingers. As in the Sandra Bullock movie, though, the movie yokes its characters to a sitcom wheeze of a plot and never allows them to break free. That they realize they’re behaving like sitcom saps doesn’t help. Watching dull characters flounder in uninspired farce is merely boring; watching intelligent characters in the same situations is exasperating.
The plot involves a radio talk-show host, Abby (Janeane Garofalo), who dispenses advice about pets on a program called “The Truth about Cats and Dogs.” When an intriguing caller, a photographer named Brian (Ben Chaplin), pushes her for a meeting in person, the short, soft, brunette Abby worries that she won’t measure up to his mental image of her. Panicked, she convinces her leggy, angular, blond neighbor Noelle (Uma Thurman) to meet Brian in her stead—thus fusing Abby’s personality with Noelle’s appearance in the hapless Brian’s mind.
For the movie’s first half, we don’t mind the set-up, mainly because the movie concentrates enough on the characters’ developing relationships to distract us from the dopey plot (which has Noelle introduce Abby to Brian as someone else—don’t ask). Particularly engaging is the growing friendship between Abby, who exudes confidence in everything but her looks, and Noelle, whose scummy boyfriends have convinced her that looks are all she has. And Brian is a bit more interesting than the usual movie dreamboat. He’s flustered to find the gorgeous Noelle/Abby something less than ideal and thinks there’s something wrong with him. After Brian and Abby share a marathon evening over the telephone, ranging from a commisseration on tuna sandwiches to steamy phone sex (a genuinely sweet, romantic scene), we expect the movie to jettison its feeble gimmick and explore the more interesting question of which Brian prefers: Noelle without Abby’s personality, or Abby without Noelle’s body.
Instead, the movie maintains the Abby/Noelle confusion for so long that it makes all three characters appear stupid—especially Brian, who never catches on that Noelle’s voice and personality are nothing like Abby’s on the phone. The screenwriter, Audrey Wells, frames the movie as a discussion of what men seem to want from women and how women act in response. However, by dragging on the charade until the last 15 minutes, the movie obscures all the issues it raises about the nature of attraction, desire and gender. Since Brian supposedly thinks Noelle is Abby, he’s off the hook for not being attracted to the real Abby, whom he later does become attracted to—oh, the hell with it.
Anyway, can a successful farce even be built from just three characters? The form requires an escalation of outside events and misunderstandings that go beyond the participants’ control. (That’s why The Birdcage needs those tabloid reporters, who otherwise have no function at all.) Since any one of the three characters in The Truth About Cats and Dogs has the power to end the confusion instantly, the complications become annoying rather than amusing.
The movie’s flaws wouldn’t be so glaring if the rest of it weren’t so frequently delightful, especially the actors. Despite being cast for the second time this year as that sappiest of creations, the unapproachable male ideal, Uma Thurman proves herself a rapturous comedienne: she delivers her lines as if the words just popped into her head, and her flouncy walk calls to mind a fluttering cartoon ostrich. Somehow, this makes her even more carelessly dazzling. (Her reaction to a plate of cake is a demonstration of lust, sensual derangement and innocent greed worthy of a classic vaudevillian—she takes each forkful like a baby bird sampling a caterpillar.) Ben Chaplin, best known for a minor role as a footman in The Remains of the Day, strikes a perfect note of fumbling grace as Brian; his touching awkwardness keeps him from being some dashing romance-novel drip.
As Abby, Janeane Garofalo represents everything that’s simultaneously winning and irritating about The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Here, as in her role on The Larry Sanders Show and her stand-up appearances, Garofalo makes sarcasm defiantly sexy: her dry delivery of outrageous lines hints at a mind full of nasty, quick-witted thoughts. She’s been used in movies mostly as a wisecracking Eve Arden type—a gal’s gal—but in her first romantic lead she carries the movie effortlessly. And she’s adorable—perhaps even too much so. After a few too many moist-eyed Stella Dallas-style close-ups of Abby, the character’s “plainness” starts to seem like an unwarranted bid for sympathy.
Unfortunately, critics have taken the bait and joined a nationwide referendum on Garofalo’s looks, pointing out, with the depressing regularity of a mother on prom night, how beautiful the actress really is. This seems to be the reaction the filmmakers want: They score easy jokes off people ignoring Abby for Noelle and then offer homilies about what’s really desirable. The movie has even less confidence in our aesthetic sense than Abby has in Brian’s. Only in Hollywood—and movies like The Truth About Cats and Dogs—would we be asked to feel concern for someone who looks like Janeane Garofalo. —Jim Ridley
Pulp Affliction
Have you ever opened your mouth to tell a story and realized—before two sentences have escaped your lips—that you’ve forgotten the point of the story or why anyone might possibly find it amusing? Something like this gasping amnesia must have struck director Lee Tamahori and screenwriter Pete Dexter once the cameras started rolling on their new film Mulholland Falls. This pastiche of 1950s crime dramas comes on strong, whipping up a pulpy brew of burly detectives, murdered bombshells, nuclear scientists and shadowy government agents. But by the time the film meanders into its second half-hour, it’s painfully obvious that Tamahori and Dexter, though they know where they’re going, are unclear why they even began the journey in the first place.
Mulholland Falls stars Nick Nolte as the leader of a secret Los Angeles police force known as the Hat Squad, which was reportedly a real entity (and definitely the inspiration for a crummy TV show). By Nolte’s side are interchangeable partners Chris Penn, Michael Madsen, and Chazz Palminteri; collectively, the foursome operates on the fringes of the law to eliminate organized crime in L.A. Their most effective tactic is to drive suspected gangsters down a secluded stretch of Mulholland Avenue and push them down an embankment...hence, Mulholland Falls.
The Hat Squad veers into dangerous territory while investigating the death of a party girl (played by Jennifer Connelly, whose performance rates about a 38D). As they dig into the floozy’s past, they uncover secrets involving a sickly general (John Malkovich), his overzealous colonel (Treat Williams) and a homosexual smut filmmaker (Andrew McCarthy, giving full vent to one of the most offensive gay stereotypes in the history of cinema). Soon, the L.A. musclemen are themselves being muscled by the U.S. government, who fight harder and dirtier to protect their interests—which, in this case, is unlimited nuclear testing.
There’s a good story to be told in Mulholland Falls—about the limits of strong-arm tactics, the dawn of the nuclear age and the soul-sickness under the tan skin of Los Angeles—and Tamahori and Dexter are certainly capable of telling it. Lee Tamahori’s previous film, Once Were Warriors, was heavy-handed but loaded with tense drama; and Pete Dexter, when he’s not dabbling in screenwriting, writes critically acclaimed novels like The Paperboy and Paris Trout. For some reason, though, both men fail to create intriguing characters or dialogue. Besides Nolte’s captain, the only Hat Squad member who gets any play is Chazz Palminteri, whose character quirk (he’s in therapy) is milked until it becomes less a running joke than a running groan. Mulholland Falls feels like a sequel to an earlier film—one in which we learned who these people are and why we should care about them.
Equally baffling is how many ripe themes get bypassed or shortchanged throughout the movie. Despite a couple of limp speeches by Malkovich, Mulholland Falls features no real attempt to compare and contrast the legal vagaries of the Hat Squad and the federal government. The optimism of the ’50s, which contained at its center the pessimism of the decades to come, is left unexplored. Even radiation sickness, a wonderful metaphor for how shady dealings stain the insides, is relegated to a minor part of the story.
And at the center of the movie there’s a terrific symbolic and narrative device that remains, like the movie’s other elements, criminally underused. Mulholland Falls opens with a grainy black-and-white home movie that has been cobbled together from other home movies. There are images of a poolside party, a military base, a nuclear blast, a cancer patient, and a sexual encounter between Connelly and Malkovich—in other words, a clue reel, which leads our detectives to the truth and could lead Nolte to the heart of his obsession with Connelly (with whom, we learn, he has had an affair). Unfortunately, though the revealing film pops up occasionally throughout the story, it never becomes a significant piece in the movie’s thematic puzzle.
It boggles the mind to think what a director like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, John Sayles or Joel Coen could have done with this story. For that matter, the mind fondly remembers how others have handled this sort of material: in the novels of Raymond Chandler, the Roman Polanski/Robert Towne film Chinatown or the clean line of old EC Comics Crime SuspenStories artists like Harvey Kurtzman and Johnny Kamen. Their level of artistry is missing from Mulholland Falls. Indeed, the only people involved with the film who seem willing to tear into the meat of the piece are cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who gives the film a harsh, blinding glare revealing to those who don’t shield their eyes) and composer Dave Grusin (whose score sounds like a jazzy riff on ’50s B-movie musician Albert Glasser).
All Tamahori and Dexter do is race forward, zipping past all their pre-arranged plot points and hoping to blur the story’s lack of substance. By the time Mulholland Falls ends, the whole film resembles the mysterious home movie at its center—a series of clues for which the mystery has been long forgotten. —Noel Murray
