Parenthood (1989)

I have a distant memory of enjoying Parenthood when it first came out, more than 20 years ago. Today, however, it seems a dated and conventional film, albeit one with a great cast. Steve Martin is the film's linchpin, and without his ridiculous goofing and dark sarcastic asides it would be too sentimental to bear. In the midst of little league baseball game, when his neurotic son manages to catch a fly ball, Martin saves the film from its own melodramatic earnestness by doing a Snoopy dance across the baseball pich. Another typical scene has Martin's live-in grandmother passing through an argumentative family moment, on her way out of the house to wait for the rest of the family in the car, but she takes a moment to recite a heart warming analogy, likening parenthood to a roller coaster. Martin then cuts through the life affirming tone with an unkind but perfectly delivered jibe at her expense ("If she's so smart, why is she sitting in our neighbour's car?", he asks). Martin's turn as "Cowboy Bob", spontaneously filling in for a birthday party performer who fails to show up, is also one of the film's winning scenes.

Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Weist, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Tom Hulce, Keannu Reeves and a very young Joaquin Pheonix also do their best to make the audience care about what happens in this extended family of over-achievers, drop-outs, misfits, carefree souls and worry warts. There are divorces, teenage marriages, children born out of wedlock, and unwelcome pregnancies that come late in life. Yet for a film that purports to be about family, or at least the parental perspective on family, it is odd that it gives the greatest weight to the male point of view. Women (even the great Dianne Weist) are inconsistent and unruly, and prone to bearing children when men least expect it, while Martin and Robards, playing the film's most responsible and serious fathers, are there to save the day every time. This is a film that really should be called "Fatherhood", and it is no suprise to find that there are no women among the screenwriters, producers and director. The male perspective, together with its upper-middle class, white-picket-fence setting, render the film as a reassuring fantasy for suburban audiences. It is certainly unimaginable that any of the characters in a film like this could be gay, and the scene in which the wayward son (Hulce) returns home with a black child, leaving his family speechless with surprise and discomfort, is excruciating.  Moments like that serve as a reminder how much has changed in the last 20 years, and make Parenthood seem embarassingly dated. We can only imagine what a re-make might include, and who might make it, but hopefully it would not be as narrow and predictable as this, or as eager to fall back on sentimentality.

Berlin Express (1948)

Made for RKO Studios in 1948, Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express can be situated alongside other realist dramas filmed on location in post-war Europe - most notably Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) - and also alongside thrillers-on-a-train such as Hitchcock's 1930s spy films. Indeed, Berlin Express initially seems most like a revisioning of The Lady Vanishes (1938). It has a similar cast of characters, at least insofar as they are all self-interested representatives of various broadly drawn European nationaities. The actor Paul Lukas, Hungarian-born but often cast as a German - is once again on hand and playing a German who may or may not be quite what he seems. And Tourneur clearly loves the train setting for exactly the same reasons Hitchcock did: there is plenty of speed and forward movement in the locomotive, yet at the same time the characters are bound claustrophobically to one another. There are private spaces for intimacy, dining cars and platforms for group meetings, and long, narrow corridors for chase sequences. All of this can be found in Berlin Express, within a plot centred on American (Robert Ryan), British (Robert Coote), French (Charles Korvin) and Russian (Roman Toporow) passengers travelling to Berlin, where they will each do their bit for the post-war reconstruction effort. Two additional passengers, a German peace leader (Lukas) and his secretary (Merle Oberon), provide the complications. When a decoy for the peace leader is assassinated, the group are waylaid, and their hunt for the assassin, through the bombed-out remains of Frankfurt, takes a few decidedly noirish (and far-fetched) turns. There are some imaginative shots, but Berlin Express pales alongside the slightly later The Third Man (1949), which has a more distinctive style, more captivating stars and especially a more intriguing story.

Nonetheless, Berlin Express leaves a strong impression for its location footage and its quiet pacifism.  Paris, where Tourneur was born, is shown in all of its Eiffel Tower glory, as having survived the war intact. Yet Frankfurt and Berlin appear utterly devasted, with block after block of buldings in ruins and piles of rubble. Against this backdrop, the attempts of each nation to forgive the Germans, to collaborate with one another and help to rebuild Germany, takes on some compelling qualities. In the ending, the film's united nations of characters say goodbye while standing amid the ruins of the familiar Berlin landmarks: the Riechstag, the Brandenburg Gate and the Hotel Adlon. There is a sense of newly found comraderie and understanding in the air, but also a chilly hint of the impending Cold War. The final shot, showing a one-legged man hobbling through the bullet-scarred remains of the Brandenburg Gate, poignantly suggests that the wounds from the last war have scarcely healed, and so, implicitly at least, it questions the wisdom of embarking on another war. In 1948, that message was a little late, but one cannot help but admire Tourneur for smuggling it into what is otherwise a fairly formulaic and familiar thriller. 

Let Me In (2010)

Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to re-making foreign films. Even when a foreign director re-makes his own film, as with George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988) and The Vanishing (1993), the process of putting the film through the Hollywood machine always seems to render the remake blander and more formulaic. Sometimes, the result is laughably bad, and certainly that is the case with the second version of The Vanishing. In other cases the re-make is merely lamentable, and that is how I would describe Let Me In (2010).

The original Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2008), is one of the most riveting vampire films ever made. Its eerie tone and slow moving story, as well as its lonely, despairing characters, make it seem like an unlikely candidate for Tinsel Town treatment. But Let the Right One In became an international hit, at least on the art house circuit, and, probably more importantly, vampires have recently been big box-office in the USA. Hence, the re-make was inevitable. The good news is that Let Me In is fairly painless. The new director, Matt Reeves, clearly understands what makes the original tick. Snowy New Mexico stands in for snowy Sweden. No showy CGI, or love interests, or last minute save-the-day plot developments were forced into the story. Importantly, an intense young actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee) was found, and he ably conveys the lead character's adolescent despair and loneliness (so profound that the living dead seem preferable to the living). The odd, barefoot girl whom he meets, sitting in the barren and frigid courtyard of a housing estate, remains a dishevelled and distant companion.

The most striking difference between the two films is that some of the mystery is taken out of the story. Part of the appeal of the original is its enigmatic nature. It is odd enough having a vampire film set in snowy Sweden. And the Sweden of Let the Right On In is not the gleaming liberal democracy we might expect, but a land of run-down council estates and hopeless drunks. The plot itself explains little, but keeps the viewer guessing, wondering, and worrying. In the ending, when we can just about put the pieces together, the final revelation (which I won't divulge here) is chilling. But in Let Me In there is too much that is familiar, and too much that is revealed, early on and without ambiguity, to the audience. We are not trusted to wonder, and so we are simply shown what-is-what and who-is-who very early on the film. Thus, while the ending is very nearly the same, it is not a chilling revelation, and it has no resonance or impact.

Let Me In certainly isn't a laughably bad or disastrous re-working of Let the Right One In, but, apart from being very impressed with young Mr Smit-McPhee, I was left thinking the only reason to see the Hollywood film is that it is in English, and, if you have any tolerance for subtitles, that is no reason at all.