Splash put Tom Hanks on the map as a leading man, though he was not yet filled-in and substantial.  Instead, Hanks was mannered in the way an actor can be after a long stint on a sitcom (Hanks was one of the Bosom Buddies from 1980 to 1982).  The film was also Ron Howard’s biggest feature, and its success would launch his career as the director of competent, workmanlike, earnest and generally dull films.

Hanks plays a love-phobic NYC businessman (derived from a childhood trauma – he fell off a Cape Cod ferry and encountered a mermaid).  In the depths of despair over his romantic failures, he returns to Cape Cod, falls in the water again, and is again rescued by the mermaid, now grown up (Daryl Hannah), who follows him to New York.  She is pursued by a cruel scientist (Eugene Levy), captured and probed to the point of sickness (ala’ E.T.) and then is busted out by Hanks, his brother (John Candy) and a repentant Levy.

Almost 30 years later, it’s a shock to see such a callow and obnoxious Hanks.  His voice is whiny, his character churlish and childish, and he seems too much the boy for the part, light as it is.  Perhaps because a mermaid has no experience with men, she just presumed Hanks was a good catch (ba-dump) but he is not.  He’s aggravating and surprisingly unfunny.

The same cannot be said for Candy, who steals the movie as the heavy, schmoozing, hard drinking,  yuk-yukking brother, excited to have one of his letters printed in Penthouse.  Levy is also good as the nerdly, bitter scientist, and Hannah is appropriately innocent and glowing as the fish-out-of-water.

It’s a cute movie, no more, but it ends in an uninentionally ridiculous fashion.  Hanks jumps in the water, making the choice to live the rest of his live with Hannah under the sea (he cannot, for reasons unexplained, ever return to land).  The credits roll and Hanks and Hannah swim the ocean as she shows him her world.  She has a big fin, he does not (when she was on land, when dry, she had legs and what goes along with them when they meet, and they were able to have a lot of sex).  Her world is murky and humdrum.  “See, this is the ocean floor.  And there is a conch.  And there are some fish.”  And what will Hanks eat?

“This was a poor choice.”

With only five films to his credit (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, Love & Friendship) and all but one of them in the same milieu (upper class young people in comedies of manners), Whit Stillman is overlooked in discussions of  great American filmmakers who are still working.  This despite the fact that Stillman has written and directed all five of his films, and all have been critically acclaimed.  

Barcelona, Stillman’s second picture, reprises two actors from Metropolitan as different characters.  Taylor Nichols plays Ted, a neurotic salesman in 1980s Barcelona. Chris Eigeman plays his cousin, Fred, a naval officer and freeloader sent ahead of the Sixth Fleet in the midst of a wave of anti-Americanism.  Both negotiate their acrimonious relationship, borne of childhood injuries inflicted by Eigeman, a truly obnoxious sort who as a visitor begins to stink after a day (unlike, as Nichols observes, the fish who takes three).  They discuss religion, women, anti-Americanism, sales, history and shaving, all the while falling in and out and in love with various Catalan women.

Nobody writes quite like Stillman. His dialogue is distinct and erudite, but his characters have such a surface forthrightness that what could seem contrived comes out as wholly honest and fresh. Stillman is particularly impressive in presenting a funny, incisive culture clash between the mildly ugly Americans and the bemused, mildly antagonistic Spanish. Both treat each other as curious, and even hostile interactions over politics are amusing and revealing.

Again, Stillman has no bad films on his resume’,  a rare honor.  Paul Thomas Anderson comes close. Though the second half of Magnolia is bad, the sheer perfection of the first half of that film and its overall audacity generally gets him a pass, but The Master is a long, very hard slog.  Scorsese is a great, but Gangs of New York and Shutter Island are very, very bad films, and his later sycophantic rock documentaries are downright embarrassing.  Coppola has some late career dreck (Jack, The Rainmaker) and have you even heard of his last three efforts (Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt)?  Eastwood has his share of humdrum work (J. Edgar, Bloodwork, Space Cowboys).  Try as I might to suggest otherwise, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic is haphazard at best.  Even the Coens, David Fincher, Gus van Sant, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Steve Soderbergh have at least one dog (see A Serious Man, Alien3, Psycho, I Heart Huckabees, Bad News Bears, Solaris).

Woody Allen is closer to Stillman in style but Allen also makes some really horrific pictures (less so now that he’s not acting in them as much), redeeming himself with a great surprise just when you’ve written him off.  Take this list of Allen movies – Hollywood Ending (2002), Anything Else (2003) and Melinda and Melinda (2004).  All pretty bad.  Ballgame, right?  But then, Allen offers a smart Hitchcockian crime movie, Match Point (2005), and he is resurrected.  Two more sh** sandwiches follow in 2006 and 2007 (Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream), but in 2008, Allen comes off the canvas again with the charming and seductive Vicky Christina Barcelona.  And last year, after another pair of clunkers (Whatever Works, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), the best original screenplay Oscar goes to Allen for Midnight in Paris, a movie I hated, but I defer to the Academy. 

Stillman deserves better.

James L. Brooks has the ability to make you laugh out loud just before he brings a tear to your eye, a skill he has honed in Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets. His missteps (How Do You Know, Spanglish) still contain very funny dialogue, even if the whole doesn’t work.  But to be fair to Brooks, Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspooon, Adam Sandler and Tea Leone are not very formidable substitutes for Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, and Debra Winger.

In Broadcast News, Brooks melds a love triangle with a story about journalism and ethics that is prescient.  Holly Hunter is the producer of the Washington bureau of a major news network, Albert Brooks is a gifted but un-telegenic correspondent, and William Hurt is the new up-and-coming golden-boy, groomed to replace the current anchor (Jack Nicholson, in a hilarious cameo).  Hurt is attractive but shallow (as Brooks says, he is against everything Hunter is about).  But Hurt is also sweet and in his own way, genuine.  He fancies Hunter and when Brooks tries to anchor the weekend news in an effort to save his job, Hurt is there, giving him advice, some of which is excellent (“punch” a thought in each sentence) and some of which makes Brooks very uncomfortable (“Just remember that you’re not just reading the news, you’re narrating it. Everybody has to sell a little. You’re selling them this idea of you, you know, you’re sort of saying, trust me I’m, um, credible. So when you feel yourself just reading, stop! Start selling a little”).  Hunter becomes infatuated with Hurt, and as they grow closer, Brooks professes his long love for Hunter and reveals the ethical threat that is Hurt.

The picture is loaded with crisp, witty dialogue, and at its best, it evokes the great Grant/Stewart/Tracy v. Hepburn romantic comedies. The picture also injects something of substance (the deterioration of the news), not with the acid cynicism of Network, but gently, so as not to get in the way of the story and humor.

There is also great physical comedy, provided by Joan Cusack as a gawky assistant producer, and Brooks, who endures the great humiliation of flopsweat during his shot at anchor.  The scene is one of the funniest in film history.

The movie has one problem, but it is a big one.  Holly Hunter is so mannered and quirky that you simply cannot understand Hurt’s attraction to her, much less that of Brooks. Sure, the good looking neophyte might be intrigued by the neurotic but fascinating “other” ala’ Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were.  But Hunter takes “odd” up several notches, and in many scenes, her facial expressions approximate her work in the live cartoon Raising Arizona.  Her temper is also so volcanic as to suggest mental illness.

Certain lines cannot be crossed in a romantic comedy.  I was reminded of the awful Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock vehicle Two Weeks Notice, wherein Bullock has an attack of diarrhea on the highway and Grant has to commandeer a stranger’s RV so she can relieve herself.  This may work for Will Ferrell and Zach Galifinakis.  But no romantic lead can be shown in such an unflattering light.  Hunter does not sink to such depths here, but her portrayal does border on the grotesque and it detracts.

There is also the weakness of the import of Hurt’s great journalistic sin (he recreates a moment of emotion in an interview) .  There is no question – the act was unethical.  But in the context of some of the other stagey and easy shortcuts engaged in by Hunter and Albert Brooks, their high dudgeon (which is critical to the picture) rings hollow, and the film never gives them a comeuppance on this point other than Hurt’s rebuttal to Hunter after she accuses him of crossing the line — “It’s hard not to cross it.  They keep moving that little sucker, don’t they.”