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Life (and Lust) in Hell
by Terry Francis
• My Left Foot ★★★★
Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot is a film of
extraordinary humanity. It recounts the life
of the Dublin writer-painter Christy Brown,
who lived every second of his life gripped by
the neck with cerebral palsy.
But My Left Foot is no disease or social
problem-of-the month movie. The purity of
feeling one derives from the picture comes
from its insistence that we understand exact
ly how Christy feels living his life in a body
racked by a crippling disease.
The texture of the film is prodigious. We
come to know Christy in terms of his emo
tional, intellectual, even sexual development.
We’re convinced of his position not only
inside his own family, but within the poor
working class neighborhood where he lives. -
My Left Foot is blessedly free of the
modem-day cant about how a disease or dis
order ennobles or enriches the human spirit.
Christy Brown knows he’s paying a hellish
price to keep his sanity and produce the art
that means something to him. And he’d hap
pily spit in the face of anyone who tried to
tell him his suffering was some mysterious
force that had humanized him.
Bom to an Irish-Catholic family of ten
children—one of those families deemed a
model by the church; one in which it is per
fectly acceptable for a woman to forego birth
control and min her health, or even die pre
maturely in the service of enlarging the
parish—Brown was at first considered men
tally deficient.
Ultimately he established himself as a
rich and animate human intellect who, when
given opportunity and encouragement, com
manded attention.
As Christy Brown, Daniel Day-Lewis
gives a performance beyond the gifts of any
one in Hollywood of comparable age; his
artistry is of the first magnitude. He renders
the soul of this man manifestly, in all his
despair, his joy, his sexuality. Driven by the
need to paint. And to write so that his head
doesn’t explode.
Day-Lewis makes us understand Christy
Brown’s humiliations, his triumphs, his
seductiveness, his rages, his courage, his lust
for drink. And he makes clear Christy’s
demand that people who call him fijiend also
understand his hell.
The lives depicted in My Left Foot are
full-bodied, flesh and blood dramas of exis
tence. There’s no sentimentality in any of
the performances, including that of Brenda
Fricker as Christy’s dutiful but exhausted
mother. The film celebrates her as surely as
it does Christy, paying tribute to effort in the
face of great odds.
Sometimes a fist clinched in determina
tion is all we have in the world, says the
film. And, as Christy Brown properly under
stood, it may be all we need to build a freer
life for ourselves.
• Revenge ★
Kevin Costner stars as an aging Navy
Top Gunner who retires to Mexico with his
dog to pass some time as the guest of a man
(Anthony Quinn) whose life he once (unac
countably) saved. Costner and Quinn’s beau
tiful, decades-younger wife (Madeline
Stowe) take an instant shine to each other,
possibly accounting for Costner’s ease
among the Quinn's sinister household staff: a
group of men in dark suits who wander the
lavish grounds day and night in black sun
glasses and whisper suspiciously into
walkie-talkies. All the Mexicans in the film
look greasy and sweat profusely; almost
every woman is both liar and whore; and
predictably Costner and Stowe have a fake-
torrid affair—with one good ass-shot of each
thrown in for commercial good luck. Shortly
after Costner and Stowe have a meaningful
post-coital conversation in the nude concern
ing American war policy in Vietnam, Quinn
and his henchmen take their revenge. They
beat Costner to a bloody pulp and Quinn
slashes Stowe’s face, packing her off to a
whorehouse where she’s raped round the
clock. And yet, because the film is so ludi
crously bad—the writing, photography and
acting all superbly overblown—Revenge is
enjoyable in a heated-up, sick kind of way.
It’s self-satire without meaning to be. At the
whorehouse where Quinn’s wife is repeated
ly raped by immensely fat, sweating
Mexican scum—she’s looked after between
rounds by a male transvestite decked-out in
rouge and glistening pearls—who sends
them both into orbit with a hypodermic load
ed with dope. Star and Executive Producer
Costner has made a complete statement of
men’s mistrust and contempt for women,
and although it should be mortifyingly
offensive, can we really hold to account the
work of people who are possibly mentally
defective?
•Loose Cannons No ★
Dan Aykroyd and Gene Hackman star in
yet another buddy movie. In this one
Aykroyd plays a forensics expert who suf
fers from multiple personality disorder, a
tragic mental illness which the film views as
hilarious. Hackman plays the SOB cop try
ing to solve a series of killings presumably
linked to an underground gay Nazi porno
film starring Adolf Hitler and possibly the
next leader of W. Germany. Vile and homo
phobic, a disgrace for all concerned.
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