The Race for the Double Helix: (1987. dir: Mick Jackson) For me, the BBC was always an argument in favor of socialism. What proud American network would ever fund a film whose climactic suspense depends on our interest in postwar boffins seeking the shape of DNA? And they pull it off, without all this "microscope-gazing-as-extreme-sport" absurdity-in-editing one finds now in the 1001 forensics shows one wades through every night en route to the soccer channel. Race is drawn from James Watson's memoir about his time in Cambridge, on his way to the Nobel Prize for uncovering the elusive helix. The first hour or so suffers for it, dragged down by a priapic and celebrity-hungry Watson who seems to have stumbled into science not due to any particular interest in it but because he hadn't got the looks to be a movie star or the social grace to be anything else. Jeff Goldblum brings his usual Jeff Goldblum to the role, working hard every moment to steal focus from anyone else onscreen, a performance that only works because it seems a fair delineation of the equally smart but self-obsessed Watson.
Luckily, it's not a one-man show. Tim Piggott-Smith has a lovely, light touch as Watson's cheerful partner Francis Crick (I love Tim Piggott-Smith. Have you ever seen his Hotspur, or Jewel in the Crown?). Alan Howard is affecting as the bemused, gentle Maurice Wilkins, in whose "province" DNA research ostensibly lies at King's, and who just wants everyone to get along and work as a team. He ends up with a share in the prize but having been shut out of the joy of the discovery, first by the solitary Rosalind Franklin, then by the glory-hunting Watson and Crick. It is a young and baby-faced Juliet Stevenson who really steals the day as Franklin, the woman who did the painstaking physical research and photography on which Watson and Crick based their model. She was dead from cancer by the time they picked up their Nobel, and Stevenson gives us a frank, clearsighted character who is caught in a bleak old-boys'-club of not ill-intentioned men who have no experience dealing with an unconventional woman on equal footing and so tend to avoid her and mock her behind her back. Stevenson's Franklin is no victim, seeing her situation clearly ("They're making me hard... In the end you become the kind of person people expect you to be,") and finding solace in the process of exploration.
It all snaps into focus once the famous Linus Pauling has a go for the prize, and suddenly Watson and Crick are up against a deadline. After that, things move at a run and it's all about the science, which is when it's at its most engaging, even to a scientific illiterate like me. The moment when they find the proper base-pairings puts a chill up my spine, and I've never given a thought to base-pairings in my life.
Safe Men: (1998. dir: John Hamburg) This movie ought to have been awful, but it borders instead on the sublime. First, the actors: Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn are a brilliant comic team, backed up by a second brilliant comic team in the shape of Mark Ruffalo and Josh Pais. It took me a long time to trust Ruffalo, possibly because he emerged full-fledged into the zeitgeist on a wave of hype that roused my suspicious nature. This is the one that sold me, baby. His sad-sack, lovelorn safecracker is about as perfect as it can be, but that's par for the course in this film. Even cameo players exude easy brilliance. Early on there's a scene in a fast-food taco place with Michael Showalter as an overachieving micromanager. It's a tiny scene, maybe half a minute long, and if you picture the words written on a page, there's nothing there, no humor to speak of. He made it up from scratch, created a very funny bit and did it all with delivery. Then there's Paul Giamatti. There's a protracted scene, probably my favorite in the movie, in which he (as a gangster-in-training called Veal Chop) tries to talk Zahn and Rockwell (failed musicians Eddie and Sam, whom he's mistaken for a genius safecracking team) into breaking into a particular house. It's not just Giamatti's flawlessly funny delivery, not just the great reactions by Zahn and Rockwell... it's everything. It's the outrageous backlighting, and the smooth, ambling Al Green song tumbling easily beneath it, and it's the big space they have to work in, the space allowed them by the editors (Suzanne Pillsbury and M. Scott Smith). It's no easy task editing comedy. If you cut off the pause a half second early, it doesn't matter how funny the actors are; the joke's not going to play. I give as much credit to these guys as to director John Hamburg, who was in his twenties when he wrote and shot this with such a firm hand and strong personal style that he may be some kind of freaky comic genius.
The script veers wildly between the inspired and the halt and lame, hovering a lot of the time right over the abyss of near-suckage without falling entirely in. There are certain scenes I fast-forward through when I watch it, but only three or four, and there are others I rewind to watch repeatedly. The thing about Shelly Hack. The scene in the sundry goods store. When Christina Kirk (underplaying beautifully as the straight-man love interest Hannah) and Sam fall in love across the table at Rosh Hashannah, another scene that succeeds beyond its material because the editing is so good.
But I don't want to underemphasize the comic genius(es) of Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn. Rockwell has a bit when he's standing at Hannah's door, rehearsing what he'll say to her, that bears the subtle hallmarks of comic mastery (the pats on his own butt are the coup de grace), and a few of Zahn's many virtuoso moments that come first to mind are his explanation of the term "fence" (again, nothing much as written; it's all in the unique way he says it), and his inability to stop himself from questioning a fearsome gangster's use of metaphor.
The Twelve Chairs: (1970. dir: Mel Brooks) Mel Brooks is in it, and Dom Deluise, so you know the kind of movie it is, right? Neanderthally lowbrow humor, so awful sometimes you laugh at the sheer shamelessness of it. Only this time, somehow, Brooks has managed to create the most convincing snapshot of just-post-revolutionary Russia I've ever seen. Ron Moody is an ex-aristocrat chasing the family jewels, which got sewed into a chair before the government absconded with the furniture. Moody has a physical comedy like Peter Sellers', with a wonderfully expressive face. Frank Langella (as the trickster-beggar who helps him) flows through the movie like a long drink of water, the very personification of grace, beauty, and charisma, handling both the corniest jokes and truly poignant moments (yes! true poignancy in a Mel Brooks film!) with equal aplomb. He was just beginning his film career after a good, strong training onstage, and busted right out of the gate with this and, in the same year, Diary of a Mad Housewife, a darkly humorous classic which has inexplicably never seen the inside of a video store.
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