This week's
Hit Me with Your Best Shot heads in a direction I would frankly never have thought of, but I'm so glad Nathaniel picked this movie. In celebration of 1992's
Death Becomes Her showing up on Blu-ray, making the first time ever (I think) that U.S. audiences can own the film in its original aspect ratio, we're all taking a look at that oddly overlooked entry in Robert Zemeckis's directorial canon, the film he made right smack in between wrapping up the
Back to the Future trilogy and winning his Oscar on the shoulders of Boomer nostalgia with
Forrest Gump. It's not a movie anybody much talks about, which is too bad: it's right in line with everything he was up to in that phase of his career, creating a blurry comedy-genre hybrid using bleeding-edge effects (the film took home the VFX Oscar, its sole nomination) as a way of heightening and exaggerating character and story. It's his "horror" film in exactly the way that
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is his "
film noir": an ironic but enthusiastic popcorn movie made by a film geek.
Now's not the time to get all rhapsodic about
Death Becomes Her, though ("review every Robert Zemeckis movie" isn't
not a goal of mine, so that time will hopefully eventually come). Right now it's time to pick a favorite shot, and I have to concede that mine is really not at all adventurous - it's the sort of image that, when you're watching the movie, you can kind of tell that the filmmakers (Zemeckis, director of photography Dean Cundey, visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston) had the intention that audiences would specifically be buzzing about this shot after the movie was over. But one of the things I love about Zemeckis is that he has such a tremendous gift for being obvious in creative, high-quality ways, much like his mentor Steven Spielberg. So here it is.
There are a few different things that the movie as a whole is playing at. It's demonstrating the versatility of CGI effects, eleven months before
Jurassic Park came out; it's indulging in some really nasty, morbid black comedy (the probable reason it was one of Zemeckis's dampest squibs at the box office - only last year's
The Walk really out-flopped it); it's satirising culture's ludicrous beauty expectations for women, and the kind of women who respond by making those expectations their reason for being; it's doing body horror as a breezy summer comedy. My shot doesn't hit all of those - you'd never know from that image that it's a satire, for sure. But I think it gets most of the rest across: the showy effects of a big hole right in the middle of Undead Goldie Hawn's body, and a shot that makes it very clear that they weren't just using a dummy, combined with Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis's more-confused-than-frightened expressions for the comedy. Besides the fact that pointing the camera through a gaping wound can pretty much
only be disgusting or goofy, depending on context, and
Death Becomes Her works pretty hard to make sure that the context screams "goofy". The fact that the hole is out-of-focus, and the bright, cheery lighting both help with that.
Anyway, it's a delightful delayed-reaction gag that's situated well within the movie, but the thing I like most about the shot is that it's an unabashed appropriation of a horror cliché, rejuvenated by the zeal and playfulness of that appropriation. Nobody who's seen more than a few zombie films can remain significantly moved by shots where the camera looks through a hole in a body or head. I'm not accusing Zemeckis of being a grindhouse fan, but I think he must have had some sense that this was corny and tired by the time he set up this shot; that is, in fact, why it works. Put this moment in a horror film, it's worth only a groan, maybe a reluctant nod if it's done particularly well. Put it in a satiric dark comedy, and you get a knowing wink at the horror tropes that the film is travestying throughout. Basically, we'll never find this scary if it's done legitimately, but this isn't legitimate: it's signifying that all of this is faintly ludicrous, because the whole movie is full of awful people behaving ludicrously. It's pure Zemeckis: instead of doing something new, doing something old in a purposefully different, bent way.
Good choice, in terms of unifying the movie's overall comedy over horror bent. But the scene from this movie that will always stand out in my mind and arguably leans a bit closer to horror is when Meryl Streep gets up in the background after falling down the stairs and we see her broken neck bobbing back and forth while still out-of-focus. There's a lot of horror out there I haven't seen yet, but that is legitimately one of the most disturbing images I have ever seen in film. I enjoyed Death Becomes Her, but I'm guessing a lot of audiences were put off by the harsh clashing between breezy fighting-diva comedy and some rather gruesome body horror. Now that I think about it (especially considering some of the fridge horror), Death Becomes Her is actually much more disturbing than that other comedy-horror gig, Ghostbusters.
ReplyDeleteThat's an excellent choice, Tim. It was the exact shot I was looking for when I was doing a piece about Death Becomes Her, and couldn't find. (As you mentioned, the old and busted DVD is full-frame.)
ReplyDeleteI do think I agree with Andrew about the film's most *memorable* shot, however--Cundey doing a little riff on his focal plane horror in Halloween, and, for my money, it's honestly probably scarier than Halloween. That one's working on a cliche, too, but somehow I feel like it was a legitimate attempt to creep out the audience (and it worked).
(Now, cinematography aside, the *best* shot might just be an actor's doing: Isabella Rossellini's reaction shot when Helen guesses her immortal character is 38. Which is hilarious on at least two levels.)
Anyway, Tim, I've been trying to figure something out, and this is a great excuse to ask you. Basically: what happened to Dean Cundey? I know he had some kind of falling out with Carpenter, and anyway the idea that working with Robert Zemeckis was more attractive as a career move makes plenty of sense. But Death Becomes Her was Cundey and Zemeckis' last collaboration, right between Cundey's collaborations with Spielberg on Hook and Jurassic Park. So he did Jurassic Park in 1993, and then... bam. Spielberg meets Janusz Kaminski, and the very next year we find Cundey doing The Flintstones or variations thereof for the whole rest of his career. It's strange and I've always wondered if there was some kind of story behind that.
Man, what a bizarre movie. Would anything so sour, with characters who end up learning nothing, get that kind of a budget these days?
ReplyDeleteThis movie seriously freaked me out. Though it was a bit clumsy the way it made the Bruce Willis character into the moral center at the last minute, presumably having thought, shit! We can't have this be TOTALLY nihilistic!
ReplyDeleteI saw this movie for the first time a few weeks ago, and I was genuinely shocked by what a nasty piece of work it is. All of the characters are terrible and terrible to each other, and the ending is one of the most honestly horrifying things I have ever seen. Meryl and Goldie may have been terrible human beings, but did they deserve to live an eternity as dismembered, badly spray-painted corpse dolls?
ReplyDeleteWhen Bruce Willis is on his A game like here, like Sixth Sense, like Looper… critics still forget about him anyway. I was most impressed by him because to me he's unrecognisable as the cuckold. This is only a year after Last Boy Scout right? Goes to prove if he likes the script he will give a proper performance. (And if he's just cashing a cheque, he'll give you A Good Day to Die Hard.)
ReplyDeleteThis movie is my pick for "Stand-out visual FX of the early 90s", not "T2" nor "JP". The reason why it bombed at the box-office I think is already explained in Tim's write-up and the comments, and it can be seen through the VFX too.
ReplyDeleteThey are revolutionary. But people were readier to accept and understand the VFX in "JP" (animated dinosaurs since silent cinema) and "T2" (robots, familiar concept). Here the VFX are more original, and above all, unsettling. Only fans of gore (despite the movie not being so), horror, were ready for the visuals in this movie, but they were not the mainstream back then. The recent plague of zombie movies was still far away.
Teenagers craving for thrills that turn horror movies into opening-weekend hits would have made this movie a modest success, but they were put-off by the cast and story. If Zemeckis had deployed these VFX in a teenage slasher context he would have had a hit (but of course, what was the studio's opinion on slasher movies in 1992? No way he could have gotten the needed budget. Again, too soon and too late, this movie's fate was inevitable). The proof is in another movie of the same year which also used digital trickery as a marketing gimmick and was a sleeper hit, "Stephen King's Sleepwalkers". Simple as they may seem now (this was a cheap movie), some of the VFX still felt novel back then, and together with the horny-teenagers story, it was enough to make a modest hit.