When Truth Is Left Behind on the Streets

When it comes to the depiction of homelessness, Hollywood has taken a benign, almost mythical view of one of America’s most disturbing problems. Glossing over the issue, the few movies that broach the subject have presented a stereotypically sanitized portrait, turning the homeless into noble saints or misunderstood geniuses.

The latest example is Kasi Lemmons’ “The Caveman’s Valentine,” in which Samuel L. Jackson plays Romulus Ledbetter, a down-on-his-luck, Juilliard-trained composer and pianist. An outcast living in a nether world on the edge of Manhattan, the delusional Romulus believes his life is controlled by a powerful adversary he calls Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant. He engages in a dialogue with this impersonal force that emanates from atop the Chrysler Building and represents all the vices of the American way of life.

In the film’s cliched treatment, Romulus is a man trapped between genius and madness. He emerges from his “periodic insanity” to track down the killer of a young model, whose frozen corpse he discovers on a tree outside his cave-like dwelling.

But who would believe the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic? Certainly not his daughter, who just happens to be a police officer, still bruised by her parents’ separation.

And certainly not his new privileged friends of Manhattan’s chic art world, who adopt him. Aiming to be a Gothic thriller with spiritual overtones, “Caveman” is undermined by George Dawes Green’s pretentious script. Defying credibility, the narrative resorts to a routine Hollywood thriller in which a saintly madman stands alone against the universe--and triumphs, hence redeeming himself.

In that respect, “Caveman’s Valentine” follows in the tradition of most Hollywood movies about the homeless. It’s no coincidence that many of these films were made in the early 1990s, following the rapaciously corrupt 1980s. Their narratives often bring the jaded rich and famous to the brink of destruction by confronting them with homeless people, forcing them to do penance for their cynicism.

As original and fanciful as Terry Gilliam (“Brazil”) is as a filmmaker, he too fell victim to cliches in “The Fisher King” (1991), another mythical tale of redemption by Richard LaGravenese. Early on, a TV executive pitches a weekly comedy series about the homeless that will show them as “wacky and wise.”

The movie that follows is not that series, but it is burdened by a cluttered plot driven by a mawkish idea. Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a slick, mean-spirited radio star, an emblem of the cold-hearted excesses of the ‘80s. His career comes to an end when a deranged caller to his talk show, responding to the host’s insults, commits a mass murder in a yuppie bar. Three years later, the demoralized and barren Jack is at the end of his rope when he meets Parry (Robin Williams), an eccentric derelict who takes his cues from visions of “cute little fat people.”

A casualty of that bar tragedy, Parry isn’t a clinical case. Like Romulus, he’s an educated man; he once taught medieval history.

Calling himself “the janitor of God,” he holds that the Holy Grail is “God’s symbol of divine grace,” with him as a knight on a special quest. A gentle soul, driven mad by grief, he chatters aimlessly and cavorts naked in Central Park.

At one point, disheveled, drunk and mistaken for a homeless man, Jack is about to be set on fire by vigilantes when Parry, using a garbage-can lid as a shield and wearing a blanket as a cape, saves him from the attackers. In due course, the two redeem each other, each playing a contemporary version of the mythic hero who finds the Holy Grail.

Many of these films also imbue the homeless with prophetic powers or visions. In “Caveman’s Valentine,” Romulus sees powerful green and yellow rays beaming from the top of the Chrysler Building, and in “Fisher King,” Parry envisions an armored Red Knight riding a red horse, trailing billows of flame.

Even directors well attuned to the zeitgeist look badly out of touch when they attempt movies about more serious issues. Take John Hughes, the king of 1980s youth movies, and “Curly Sue,” the story of con artists Curly Sue (Alison Porter), a smart girl, and Bill, her decent guardian (James Belushi), who wander into the path of a high-powered divorce lawyer, Grey (Kelly Lynch), when she hits Bill with her Mercedes. A heart-tugging sentimentality is laid over the narrative, though Curly Sue, like the girl played by Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon,” is assured, precocious and manipulative.

When she tells Grey, “You got an awful lot of pillows for just one person,” the lawyer’s maternal stirrings are awakened. Then, an immaculately groomed Bill proves his talent by playing “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You” on the piano in Grey’s lush apartment. Only in a Hollywood movie would a lawyer take derelicts home, clean them up, buy them new clothes and discover they are just like she is--only more virtuous and in touch with their emotions.

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Indeed, saintliness played the leading role in Tim Hunter’s “The Saint of Port Washington,” a heartfelt drama about Matthew (Matt Dillon), a gentle soul and victim of circumstances that force him out on the street. Fragile and bewildered, Matthew is unable to fend for himself, and with no address for his assistance checks, he is left indigent and alone.

Matthew is sent to the Fort Washington Armory, a city-operated shelter populated by homeless men. Lyle Kessler’s script shows the evolution of friendship between Matthew and Jerry (Danny Glover), a kindly Vietnam vet out on the streets after his business partner has frittered away their money. Like Romulus, Jerry was once a middle-class husband and father. Spunky and resourceful, as most homeless people seem to be in movies, Jerry takes Matthew under his wing and teaches him how to clean windshields, only to realize that even this job is too much for the childlike Matthew.

Once Jerry grasps Matthew’s helplessness, he becomes his protector--and surrogate father. With the exception of a token villain (Ving Rhames), all the characters are virtuous, just on a run of bad luck; drugs, alcohol and crime are hardly mentioned. Like Parry in “Fisher King,” Matthew turns the tables in the relationship by pulling Jerry up from the gutter end. But it doesn’t strengthen the film that a cloak of nobility is draped over it. Matthew becomes the community’s saint, and the film advances the cliched concept that he possesses healing power over those he encounters.

Alek Keshishian dived into maudlin material in “Without Honors,” a film in which rich Harvard students who befriend a spirited derelict learn there’s more to life than careers.

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Mixing elements from “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “The Paper Chase,” “With Honors” is a politically correct saga about the redemption of Monty (Brendan Fraser), a student of politics whose preppy good looks belie a shy and sincere demeanor.

Clearly more comfortable with Harvard than skid row, the movie suffers from a contrived setup.

When his computer crashes and his thesis vanishes, Monty carries his only printout to a copy store, but it falls through a sidewalk grate. Simon (Joe Pesci), who lives in the library’s basement, recovers it. Sensing a meal ticket, he negotiates a shrewd deal, selling Monty a page at a time in exchange for food, shelter and bath. In the library, Simon just happened to be reading Emil Zola’s “Germinal,” which again signals that homeless people can be educated and even erudite.

But Simon comes across as a caricature: He takes a bubble bath while wearing a Viking helmet and singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He also offers a most idealized take on homelessness: a sidewalk philosopher who outsmarts a renowned professor (none other than Gore Vidal) and gets rousing applause from the class. Wearing its heart and politics on its sleeves, the drama turns symbolic in its depiction of the surrogate parenthood issue, with Simon functioning as a lovable father figure.

We learn that, like Romulus, Simon left his wife and young son decades ago, and that, like Matthew, Monty was abandoned by his dad.

Replete with saccharine and banality, Hollywood movies about the homeless are deeply cynical. Blending satire, whimsy, and fantasy sequences, they propagate the simplistic theory that the homeless are smarter and saintlier than most people. Rather than stick to the plain, hard facts, they become metaphorical, contrasting the sacred and the profane, and showing that more important than the characters’ economic survival is their spiritual quest for redemption.

Contrived and too neat for the harsh conditions they depict, they offer no clues as to how society should deal with the homeless. Their benign approach can’t disguise how little they have to say about a painful problem.

There may be a graceful, responsible way of tackling homelessness on the big screen, but Hollywood hasn’t discovered it yet.