New Movies and the Power of Unpredictability

Movies are full of surprises and would be deadly dull if they weren’t. But the surprises traditionally have taken place within comfortable and comforting expectations.

The good guys will win. The attractive couple will end up in a chaste embrace. The hero will be noble even if circumstances have forced him to become a reluctant lawbreaker. There will be someone to root for. It will be easy to tell good from bad and right from wrong without a score card or footnotes.

It’s perilous to violate those expectations but it can generate power as well. Hitchcock’s “Psycho” jolted the audience by killing off its female star, Janet Leigh, hardly a third of the way into the film. Wait a minute; what’s going on here? Then Martin Balsam gets it, and he had become our hope of a tidy and traditional solution. By then we were, so to speak, defenseless before Hitchcock’s (and Joseph Stefano’s and Robert Bloch’s) grisly surprises, mummified Mummy and all.

This looks like a season of anti-expectation films, and more power to them. Bill Forsyth’s “Housekeeping,” as Michael Wilmington pointed out in his review, resembles Forsyth’s earlier comedies like “Gregory’s Girl” and “Local Hero,” in its antic eye, its unpredictability and its essential humanity.

But the tone is darker, wintry, unsettling. Christine Lahti as the wandering aunt come to care for two orphaned teen-age nieces seems at first a wonderful eccentric, a kind of kooky rain country free-spirited Auntie Mame (a familiar enough movie type). Settle back for some laughs--and there are some--we’ve been here before.

Then it grows clear that Lahti is more than eccentric, not lethal but off-center if not quite clinically disturbed, a danger to herself and maybe by inadvertence to the girls.

The watcher’s sympathies get tossed about like dice in a cage, because the civic forces of good sense and sweet reason are made to seem dreadful and there is always much to be said for the unfettered free spirit (a movie tradition honored by Capra among others).

In its quiet way, “Housekeeping” is tightly suspenseful and its ambiguous ending raises hell with a whole other set of expectations about how movies are supposed to finish. But the ending seems oddly, uncompromisingly correct. It’s a fine and original film (from the Marilynne Robinson novel) and Lahti’s performance ranks with the year’s very best.

Once upon a time, the attractive young public defender and his beautiful but irascible client would realize after two hours of stiletto-sharp exchanges that the verdict is love. But that, of course, is not what Tom Topor’s play-into-film “Nuts” is about.

We as audience may suspect that Richard Dreyfuss and Barbra Streisand realize with a tinge of regret that they are ships that have collided in the night before passing on. But, against conventional expectations, they keep going.

Any other resolution would have mucked up the focus of a very lively drama, a histrionic tour de force inevitably dominated by Streisand but in fact an ensemble piece well directed by Martin Ritt, with charismatic work by Dreyfuss and supporting performances by James Whitmore, Karl Malden, Maureen Stapleton, Leslie Nielsen, Eli Wallach and Robert Webber that are pleasures to watch.

What is fascinating about Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” is that it is another kind of tour--a tour of China present and past, an exploration of an extraordinary slice of history whose details must previously have been unknown to almost everyone in the audience.

John Lone gives a fine, intense portrayal as Henry Pu Yi.

But Pu Yi is by no stretch of the imagination a sympathetic figure, a tragic victim of history. He is, it may be, an object lesson in the corruptions of power. But we don’t get close enough to read in him the survival of the human spirit against all odds (another movie staple). In this case I don’t think it matters; the film’s undoubted appeal is in its glimpses of the previously unseen, its revelation of the long-hidden.

In “Empire of the Sun,” Steven Spielberg continues his remarkable and probably unique testing of the possibilities of the movies--probing, as it seems to me, the limits of wide audience appeal and the extent to which intimacy and spectacle can be combined.

As an exercise in spectacle-making, “Empire” extends the logistical command that has been part--although not all--of Spielberg’s signature. He has re-created 1941 Shanghai, a Japanese prison camp and a nightmarish march with pinpoint fidelity on a mammoth scale.

For much of the film, he has also defied expectations and his own tradition of open-heartedness (as useful a word as sentimentality in his work). The real, adult world has a cutting edge; the resident British in prewar Shanghai look like arrogant idiots, and a costume party portrait at the edge of the Japanese invasion is razor-sharp satire.

The transformation of Jim from a dreamy schoolboy, unconsciously reflecting the grownups’ attitudes of cultural and racial superiority, into the shrewd, cynical, calculating but caring Artful Dodger of the prison camp seems the more interesting because we experience it through his eyes.

Young Christian Bale as Jim goes against expectations by being a pragmatist and not an idealist, not a patriot in short pants plotting an escape. He first admires the Japanese for their planes, their efficiency and their dedication. He admires the Americans for their style and then for their planes and their efficiency. It is a rounded portrait of an individual, not an archetype.

In the end, Spielberg allows Jim a good, relieving cry, as if giving him permission to be a small boy again. He never will be, of course, and both J. G. Ballard’s novel and Tom Stoppard’s script were rather more austere about that. Yet the cry is itself ambiguous in the sense that it does not deny the nightmare memories will come back forever. It only suggests the living nightmare is finally done.

It is relieving for the audience as well. Spielberg, whose logistical gifts have never been in doubt, continues to try the other, subtler gifts in the film maker’s treasury.