Cousins

I’ve always felt that it was rather unfortunate that Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is regarded as a classic romantic comedy while Cousins (1989) is barely remembered at all. Of course, I’m biased as I don’t really care for the former and adore the latter, a remake of the 1975 French comedy Cousin, cousine, directed by Joel Schumacher in-between box office hits The Lost Boys (1987) and Flatliners (1990). There are superficial similarities between Four Weddings and Cousins as romance blossoms among wedding ceremonies and a funeral – call it, Three Weddings and a Funeral. From there they deviate significantly in pretty much every way but over the years Four Weddings has not aged all that well while Cousins has aged like a fine wine and I find myself savoring it more every time I watch it.

Right from the first scene Schumacher establishes the parallels between our two lead characters with Larry Kozinski (Ted Danson) running late to a wedding thanks to his wife Tish (Sean Young) while Tom Hardy (William Petersen) makes his family late to the same wedding because he doesn’t want his daughter Chloe (Katharine Isabelle) to bring her blanket in his newly-cleaned car, much to his wife Maria’s (Isabella Rossellini) exasperation. Larry and Maria are in respectively unhappy marriages with Tish disgruntled that they have to travel everywhere on a motorcycle while Tom resents Maria siding with their daughter.

Our story begins with the wedding of Phil Kozinski (George Coe) and Edie Hardy (Norma Aleandro). Phil’s nephew Larry, with Tish and his son Mitch (Keith Coogan) in tow, arrive late to the actual ceremony as does Edie’s daughter Maria and her family. Everyone gathers for the reception and it’s exactly the kind of joyful gathering you’d expect from the merging of two large families complete with loud music and plenty of drinking. Schumacher even adds little bits of color, like the two lecherous groomsmen that ogle all the women at the party, complete with running commentary (“Bad tits,” they say of one, and “No ass,” they say of another). There are even two young people that spot each other and lock eyes in love at first sight. You know that they will be a married couple by film’s end.

In the youth-obsessed culture we live in it’s great to see two older people getting married and so happy and in love with each other, which makes what happens to them later on that much more painful because we’ve grown to care for them in such a short time. Larry is the kind of good-naturedly flawed character we’ve come to expect from these kinds of rom-coms as typified when he tries to deliver a toast to Phil only to be ignored by the noisy gathering and then when given the floor to say his piece, ends up delivering an endearingly awkward tribute. On the other hand, Tom is a hothead that gets into an argument with one of Maria’s relatives at the first wedding that almost comes to blows before storming off in a huff. He’s pursued by Tish, who spotted him earlier, and they go off to have sex somewhere.

As everyone leaves, Maria and Larry find themselves without their respective spouses and get to talking. Schumacher bathes them in the warm, golden light of the setting sun that is so welcoming that you are transported there. Maria finds Larry easy to talk to and likes how good he is with Chloe. Tom and Tish finally show-up with lame excuses and the reaction on the faces of Larry and Maria tell us that even though they’re too polite to say anything they know what their respective spouses have been doing.

Maria meets Larry on her lunch break and they acknowledge that their spouses are having an affair. They strike up a friendship and pretend to have an affair to get back at Tom and Tish, but they soon find themselves attracted to each other. Almost 40 minutes in and Lloyd Bridges enters the picture as Phil’s gregarious brother Vince, showing up at a funeral but only from a distance as he says to Larry, “At my age you don’t want to get too close to an open grave,” and then lights a cigarette immediately afterwards. Bridges makes an instant impact with his crackerjack comic timing and delivery of dialogue when Vince confides to Mitch, “God makes me nervous when you get him indoors. Besides, I don’t like to see people in their coffins – they always look so much smaller without their spirits.” He is the film’s most obvious attempt to appeal to the cheap seats and threatens to dispel the romantic mood that Schumacher has so painstakingly established to this point. It is almost as if Vince came from a broader comedy to invade this one and his presence threatens to upset the delicate tone of Cousins.

In many respects Cousins is a cinematic love letter to Isabella Rossellini. A natural beauty in her own right, the camera absolutely loves her and Schumacher makes sure that the actress is framed and lit just right. Initially, though, her hair is pulled back and she wears conservative attire, which visually conveys Maria’s repressed nature. When Larry takes her to see his boat she lets her hair down and begins wearing clothing that is less constrictive. Maria is soft-spoken but with firm convictions. Over the course of the film, she learns to let go and enjoy life but runs the risk of forgetting about her responsibility to Chloe who has been acting out at school. Rossellini does a fine job of portraying the conflicted nature that exists within Maria. She’s been the dutiful wife who’s put up with her husband’s philandering ways for so long that she’s lost touch with her own wants and needs. Larry helps her find them again.

Between his hit sitcom Cheers and popular comedies like Three Men and a Baby (1987), the 1980s was a good decade for Ted Danson. As a result, he was the biggest draw in Cousins. He plays the most relatable character as the fun-loving Larry. Danson doesn’t portray him as the kind of zany, lovable goofball type that comedians like Tom Hanks and Steve Martin made popular during this decade. He opts for a more grounded performance, playing a guy who seems easygoing but it is just a façade and he is bothered by his wife having an affair. Fortunately, his ruse with Maria is a pretty good distraction; however, eventually he has to accept the feelings he has for her if he truly wants to be happy.

The chemistry between Danson and Rossellini in the scene where Larry shows Maria his boat is incredible and feels authentic as we realize that these two people are starting to fall in love. All their scenes together are so enjoyable to watch because we want to see these people happy. Their conversations quickly move beyond the usual flirting to honest talk about their unfaithful spouses. At first, it is a game, tricking their significant others into thinking that they too are having an affair of their own, but the more time they spend together the more genuine their feelings are for each other. The screenplay lets this unfold naturally and in time.

  

In their own ways, Larry and Maria are natural nurturers while Tom and Tish are not. For example, Tom tries to bribe and then threaten his daughter not to bring her blanket in his car while Tish is unable to cheer up Mitch after a disastrous attempt to woo the girl of his dreams. Larry and Maria are completely opposites. She is unhappy because her husband cheats and her job as a legal aid exposes her to the ugly side of love while he is a dance instructor, teaching older couples how to dance. He sees people happily interacting with each other on a daily basis. She is a repressed housewife while he’s a dreamer and they soon find themselves drawn to each other. She’s charmed by his easygoing nature while he’s attracted to her beauty.

Tish starts off as a bit of a shrill stereotype and initially Sean Young plays her a bit on the broad side. It’s a thankless role playing the cheating spouse but as the film progresses she’s given the opportunity to flesh out her character so that we get some insight into what motivates Tish Once she realizes that Larry and Maria are falling in love she regrets her affair with Tom. We also get a nice scene between Tish and Tom as they confide in each other what is lacking in their respective marriages and what draws them to each other. Young does such a good job that you actually feel a slight twinge of sympathy for Tish.

This leaves William Petersen to play the bad guy in Cousins. Tom is a slick car salesman who takes himself way too seriously, even if others don’t, like when someone early on asks if he sells Subarus to which he replies, in a way that suggests he’s done it several times before, “I sell BMWs, I just happen to work out of a Subaru showroom.” He is a serial philanderer who breaks up with three different women so that he can continue his affair with Tish. Larry treats Maria like shit, cheating on her with many women before cutting them all loose for a hot and heavy affair with Tish. He’s a blowhard and a hypocrite, getting angry at Larry when he suspects the affair that is going on with his wife even though he’s having one of his own! Hot off the one-two punch of To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and Manhunter (1986), Petersen brings the same level of intensity to Tom complete with an Alpha Male gusto that is in sharp contrast to Danson’s easygoing dreamer.

For a filmmaker who has made a lot of commercial hits and dabbled in numerous genres, Schumacher is not very well-regarded, due in large part to his most high-profile misfires, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997). Has enough time passed to finally let him out of director’s jail for crimes against cinema? He’s served his time and I think he is due for a career reappraisal. For most of his career he’s made crowd-pleasers for Hollywood and Cousins is no different only that it is in terms of pacing and tone. It bounces back and forth between family drama and passionate romance while juggling several characters successfully. Schumacher brings a deft touch to the film, immersing us in this world and the characters that inhabit it. He adopts a leisurely pace that allows us to get to know these characters and care about what happens to them.

It doesn’t hurt that the script is smartly-written with well-drawn characters that transcend their archetypes (i.e. the wacky uncle, the repressed wife, the cheating cad, etc.) through several brief but significant moments that give us insight into them. With the exception of Tom, there are no clear cut good and bad characters – everyone contains shades of grey and this is what makes Cousins a more interesting film than Four Weddings and a Funeral. Schumacher is one of those directors who are only as good as the material he has to work with and the script by Stephen Metcalfe (Jacknife) is excellent. This allows the director to let his cast have fun with their characters and the situations they’re put in while he utilizes absolutely beautiful cinematography courtesy of Ralf Bode (Dressed to Kill) to create a warm and inviting film.

Producer William Allyn began pursuing the American rights to Cousin, cousine in 1985 and it took three years but his persistence finally paid off. Stephen Metcalfe, the resident playwright at the Globe Theater in San Diego, was hired to write the screenplay. Then, Joel Schumacher was offered the job to direct and was thrilled to be given “something so unusual, so special.” From the outset he wanted to present characters with “human flaws,” that were “heroic sometimes, silly sometimes and they make mistakes.”

Initially, when given the script, Isabella Rossellini was not interested in doing it because she was good friends with some of the people that made the original film and thought they might not approve of an American remake. She soon found out that they were thrilled with the idea and she agreed to do it. According to the actress, Schumacher cultivated a fun, creative atmosphere for the actors. For the wedding and party scenes, Schumacher hired entire families as extras so that all the actors had to do was “step into the atmosphere they created,” said Rossellini.

Cousins received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Rossellini’s performance for creating the chance to “make her into a real movie star; she has the kind of qualities that audiences really respond to.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, “Mostly Stephen Metcalfe’s adapted screenplay succeeds with its burlesque belly laughs, complementing the lyrical affair of the lead pair.”

However, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Cousin, cousine was gently directed and featured an enchanting foursome … Cousins, by contrast, is ponderous and dull.” Finally, the Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “What makes Cousins feel splintered is that while so much of it is delicately written, there is also a jarring crassness at times, sure-fire cuteness, ‘boffo lines’ or characters, like fake-wood siding tacked on to a beautifully constructed house.”

Cousins examines the value of communication between couples. Tom and Tish cheat on their spouses because they don’t know what they want and how to convey it. Larry and Maria get along so well because they speak honestly to each other. Naturally, this is part of what attracts them to each other. The lack of communication is what complicates the lives of these people and it only gets simpler once they figure out what they want from life, or, as Larry’s father tells him, “You’ve only got one life to live. You can either make it chicken shit or chicken salad.” It’s blunt and to the point but also gets to the heart of the matter, inspiring Larry to go for it. Cousins ends up being a thoughtful romantic comedy/drama hybrid with an engaging love affair between two very different people at its heart. Not a bad way to spend two hours of your time.

SOURCES

Farrow, Moira. “Making Cousins: An Excursion into Relativity.” The New York Times. February 5, 1989.

Flatliners

Flatliners (1990) may be best remembered as a film that featured a cast of young actors either on the cusp of being bonafide movie stars (William Baldwin) or who were already there (Julia Roberts). Featuring the likes of Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon, you’d be hard pressed to assemble this cast now but back then the film’s director Joel Schumacher had the Midas touch, making his name with the Brat Pack dramedy St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and the popcorn thrill ride cum horror film The Lost Boys (1987). Flatliners was an attempt at more serious, weightier fare albeit filtered through his commercial sensibilities. It features a top notch premise: five medical students attempt to cheat death by killing themselves for several minutes so as to uncover any evidence of an afterlife. However, once they’re revived what they experienced while dead comes back to literally haunt them.


Flatliners came out at a time when Hollywood was fascinated with death and the afterlife as similarly-themed films Ghost (1990) and Jacob’s Ladder (1990) all came out in the same year. Flatliners resides somewhere in the middle as it shares some of the romantic aspirations and notions of forgiveness with Ghost while also including some of the otherworldly thriller aspects of Jacob’s Ladder. Art directed within an inch of its life by Schumacher, Flatliners was a commercial success (with that cast how could it not?) and received mostly positive notices. It has by and large disappeared from the public consciousness only to pop up occasionally on television. I’ve always been fascinated by its overtly stylish look and its thoroughly unlikable protagonist. Actually, all of the main characters typify the materialistic “me generation” that came of age in the 1980’s. I also admire Peter Filardi’s awkward attempts to tackle substantial issues, like life after death, bullying, and infidelity, in his screenplay even if he isn’t always successful or we’re distracted by Jan de Bont’s atmospheric cinematography.

Schumacher sets the right tone visually as he introduces the film’s central protagonist, Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland), clad in the ‘80s uniform of sunglasses, trenchcoat and black shirt and pants because, y’know, he’s a got a dark side. The camera zooms in on Nelson who says to no one in particular, “Today is a good day to die.” While all of this is happening, the soundtrack blasts an ominous beat straight out of a John Carpenter film only to inject a pretentious choir vocalizing over top. Fortunately, we’re spared any more of this sonic claptrap as Schumacher slam edits us right in the middle of an emergency room as David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon) frantically tries to save a poor woman in bad shape. She’s wheeled into a room so painfully stark white that it resembles the strange bedroom at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Labraccio is a brilliant but impulsive medical student who goes ahead and saves the patient’s life anyway when the doctor doesn’t show up fast enough. He is the brilliant yet angry rebel. He’s such a non-conformist that when Nelson goes looking for him he finds the guy rappelling out his dorm window and down the side of the building because, y’know, he doesn’t have time for the stairs.

Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts) is the smart med student who keeps her colleagues at a distance. She’s fascinated with life after death because her father committed suicide. Rachel does rounds in a ward with a few elderly patients whom she dotes on, hoping to get some insight into what it’s like to be so close to death. The romance between Labraccio and Rachel feels tacked on. In one scene, they’re good friends and in another they’re sleeping in bed together. It feels like a scene was edited out somewhere in post-production that showed them getting together. Joe Hurley (William Baldwin) is the ladies man with a thing for videotaping his many conquests in-between classes with his fellow med students. Joe’s past is the weakest of the bunch because of its abrupt conclusion. He only seems remorseful because he got caught.

Nelson is a master manipulator who knows exactly what to say to the four other med students so that they will help kill himself all in the name of fame and fortune – oh, and science, of course (that’s merely a side effect). We are introduced to Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) repeatedly reciting his future job title as he is already self-mythologizing himself. The film quickly and efficiently establishes the main characters and everyone but poor Steckle gets a backstory that provides motivation for why they are willing to kill themselves for a glimpse of the afterlife. I guess, since he’s the only one who doesn’t die and is then resuscitated, he gets marginalized, which is too bad because Oliver Platt is such an intriguing actor to watch and he’s basically reduced to the role of whiney complainer with the occasional comic relief. He is the handwringing Mother Hen with a sarcastic sense of humor, like when he calls Nelson on his ulterior motives for what he’s doing: “This isn’t for mankind, this is for Nelson. Why do I suddenly see you on 60 Minutes sandwiched in-between Andy Rooney and a Subaru commercial?”

Kiefer Sutherland is a little too good at playing a Preppie prick (also see Bright Lights, Big City) as Nelson is an egomaniac looking to make a name for himself. He has never been afraid to play unlikable characters (see Stand by Me or Mirrors) and despite his karmic comeuppance, there is no real indication that Nelson will change all that much despite gaining closure on his past. There is a delicious irony that we get to see a little kid kick the crap out of him – something I’m sure we won’t see on his career reel if the American Film Institute ever decides to celebrate his filmography. One can see what might have drawn Sutherland to this role as he gets to literally shed his pretty boy image by becoming increasingly battered and scarred over the course of the film. Kevin Bacon is good as the skeptic who goes under in order to put his atheism to the test. He plays the voice of reason. Blessed with his family’s good look, William Baldwin is well-cast as the narcissistic pretty boy. The success of this film led to him headlining Ron Howard’s ode to firefighters, Backdraft (1991) and Sliver (1993), an erotic thriller with Sharon Stone. Julia Roberts makes for a credible caregiver but I don’t quite buy her as a brilliant med student.

Flatliners features one ridiculously over-art directed set after another. For example, the room where our med student protagonists practice on cadavers resembles the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not a med school, but it does look fantastic and creates a semi-solemn mood with its impressive-looking Gothic architecture. Check out Nelson’s “apartment” with its high ceilings, ornate paneling and stunning window frames that look like it came out of an Architectural Digest magazine photoshoot. How does a med student afford a place like that? Of course, he could be a trust fund baby born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In case we didn’t get the whole life and death thing that the main characters wrestle with through the entire film, Schumacher makes sure we do by repeatedly lingering on statues of angels and an engraving of a man in a tug of war with Death while that damn choir sings on the soundtrack again! Hell, we even get a shot of Nelson standing right next to a statute with angel wings. Ok, Schumacher, we get it! The night scenes feature slick city streets and smoke billowing in the background for no apparent reason but it does look cool.

The film’s concept of the afterlife consists of the sins of our past – with Nelson it is accidentally killing a young boy when he was a child; Labraccio verbally abused a little girl when he was in grade school; for Rachel it was witnessing her father committing suicide; and for Joe it is all of his sexual conquests coming back to haunt him. Flatliners equates going to the afterlife with an adrenaline rush – the ultimate extreme sport. The flatline/afterlife sequences are obviously the highlight of the film and are beautifully shot by then-cinematographer, later film director, Jan de Bont who expertly utilizes the widescreen frame. He helps give the streets of Chicago a nightmarish look right out of Dante’s Inferno with alleyway fires and then switches to a cool blue look when Nelson goes through a maze of underground passages in the city subway system.

Labraccio’s afterlife sequence looks frightening enough as it takes place on an atmospherically-lit subway but becomes unintentionally funny when he is trash-talked by a little black girl. It’s supposed to be scary but illicits belly laughs as opposed to chills. Much more successful is Rachel’s nightmarish visions of her father’s suicide. She interrupts him in a bathroom saturated with hellish red light as he shoots himself up with heroin. Roberts’ reaction to this primal scene is pretty bad as her attempt at emoting fails. The most extravagant afterlife sequences are reserved for Nelson, of course, because he is the central protagonist. His childhood nemesis is much more intimidating because of his vengeful demeanor.

Then-unknown Boston screenwriter Peter Filardi got the idea for Flatliners in 1988 based on two sources of inspiration. A close friend of his had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia after an operation and had a near-death experience. Filardi was shaken up by what had happened and it “shook up my imagination too.” He realized that death hadn’t really been explored for his twentysomething generation and thought, “What is more intriguing than death itself?” He wrote the script during the Irangate scandal and the United States elections with words like “accountability” being used a lot. From this, he conceived of a group of “young, ‘90s kids who would learn a lesson,” from experimenting with death. He researched medical technology and CPR techniques. Filardi wrote the first draft in two months but wasn’t sure if it was ready to be read. He continued to work on it while writing screenplays for television.

Meanwhile, his former agent Ben Conway shopped the Flatliners script around Hollywood in January 1989 where it quickly became a hot commodity with a six-figure bidding war breaking out among several major producers. In one week, five bids were received with producer Scott Rudin, who had a production deal with Columbia Pictures, coming out on top. However, he reportedly violated protocol by bidding against another producer on the lot – Michael Douglas and his production company Stonebridge Entertainment. Then studio president Dawn Steel stepped in and gave the project to Douglas while Rudin left Columbia for Paramount Studios. Douglas sent the script to director Joel Schumacher during the summer of ’89. The director was in pre-production on his passion project, an adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera, but found himself drawn to the themes of atonement and forgiveness in Filardi’s script.

Schumacher was hired to direct and worked with Filardi to fine-tune the script, including changing the setting. The screenwriter had originally set it in his hometown of Boston but the director changed it to Chicago because he preferred the locations. Filardi also originally envisioned a more realistic approach but Schumacher went for a more Gothic look. Before the start of principal photography, Filardi asked Schumacher about this and the director told him, “I want the film to look as daring as the characters are daring.” To his credit, the director had the screenwriter on set every day doing rewrites when necessary and listening to actors’ suggestions, sometimes incorporating them into the dialogue. To prepare for the film, Schumacher read books on near-death experiences and listened to tapes of people relating their experiences. The cast did some medical research and acquired video tapes of medical procedures. There was also a doctor and a nurse on standby when the actors were on set dealing with needles and CPR equipment.

Flatliners enjoyed most positive reviews among mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “There were some hazards in this project – with the wrong note, they easily could look silly – and yet they take their chances and pull it off. Flatliners is an original, intelligent thriller, well-directed by Joel Schumacher. In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “But when taken on its own stylish terms, Flatliners is greatly entertaining. Viewers are likely to go along with this film instantly or else ridicule it to death. Its atmospheric approach doesn't admit much middle ground. The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “Flatliners is a heart-stopping, breathtakingly sumptuous haunted house of a movie that takes off where Dracula and Dante left off and CPR began.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “The cast is similarly exemplary, a quintet of outstanding equals, and for all the deadliness of its conservative conclusion, Peter Filardi’s script, his first to be produced, is alive with smart med school talk.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “Director Joel Schumacher taps his strengths: the ensemble work of St. Elmo’s Fire combined with the neo-gothic scares of The Lost Boys.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Julia Roberts' fans will be disappointed to see that her follow-up to Pretty Woman (this one was made before anyone knew she was a star) is such a dud, and that she has a relatively minor role in it. The part doesn't give her much of a chance — but then she doesn't do much with it except to stand around and look beautiful and concerned.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington felt that the cast was trapped “in this great cavernous museum of a movie, with a dry little pea of an idea rattling down echoing hallways. It almost seems a cheat that the filmmakers don't show any inkling that emptiness and flashy camp may tinge their ‘philosophy.’”

It may seem like I’m criticizing Flatliners for its unrealistic stylistic flourishes but they are an important reason why I continue to be fascinated with this film after all these years. It is such a product of its times and has a fantastic premise as well. It’s hard to sympathize with most of these characters because they are self-absorbed in nature and so it is up to the actors and their natural charisma to get us to care about what happens to them, hence the casting of people like Bacon, Roberts and Sutherland who were all popular movie stars at the time. Roberts and Sutherland in particular were front and center on the pop culture radar having recently become romantically involved during filming. Ultimately, Flatliners is about sins that must be absolved and perceived guilt that must be eliminated. Both of which stem from their respective childhoods. Once they confront the sources of these issues and apologize or get closure only then are they able to be redeemed.

 
For further reading, check out Erich Kuersten's awesome review over at his blog, Acidemic. His article is actually what inspired me to write my own.

SOURCES

Emerson, Jim. “To Sutherland Work is More Than a Job.” Orange County Register. August 7, 1990.

Fox, David J. “Flatliners Rookie Writer Hits It Big.” Los Angeles Times. August 7, 1990.

Stanley, John. “Flatliners New Writer is Dead-On.” San Francisco Chronicle. August 5, 1990.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “At the Movies: Life and Death.” The New York Times. August 10, 1990.