The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

According to our Netfilx "Rental Activity" we first watched this movie about two and half years ago. We were surprised that we didn't remember much about it because it was quite a good film. Pippa Lee (Robin Wright) seems to be an ordinary housewife married to a much older man, Herb (Alan Arkin) but her "private" life (before marriage) was probably not something that her neighbors in the retirement community she lives in can possibly guess. Our Winona's role is small, yet pivitol. She spends most of her on-screen time crying and/or apologizing.

Final Verdict: Four croquet balls

The Age of Innocence

Although quite sure this was the third time we'd seen this film, neither of us remembered it very well. We had some sense of the mood, and the period, but could not remember the plot at all, much less that Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer also starred in this piece. Our Winona was nominated for an Oscar for her work in this critically-acclaimed film. The movie also received many other awards and nominations, including Oscar for Best Costume Design. It was a very good movie - a classic love triangle story in a beautiful setting, with a bit of comic relief.

To Pam's brief review I have only two additional comments. One is that the costumes impressed me very much, so I impressed myself by having noticed, along with the Academy! 

Second is that although this is a love triangle, and one of many years duration, a key question remains: does Our Noni's character know that there is a love triangle? Things are handled with such Victorian understatement that this is not clear to me ... so I'm not impressive at all in reading those clues!

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

The Iceman

In this film based on the true story of hit man Richard Kuklinski, Our Winona plays Debbie, Kuklinski's clueless wife. Living in suburbia with her blinders on Debbie raises her two daughters and enjoys the fruits of her husband's labors. She believes her husband works in currency arbitrage on Wall Street. Michael Shannon plays Kuklinksi - "Richie" to his family and friends. Richie is a doting husband and father, except occasionally when his work gets in the way. He goes to great lengths to hide his true identity from his family, but ultimately it all comes crashing down.

Our Winona plays this well, and she puts on a lovely Jersey accent for the role. Overall, though the story was fascinating, we did not enjoy its telling, which reveled in the gruesome murders and blood, with shadowy characters who are literally shadowy -- murmuring in so many dark corners that the plot was difficult to follow.

 The problem with being a completist is that in order to do so, one must watch films that one might not otherwise enjoy.

We did like the soundtrack.

Final verdict: Two croquet balls

Staying Cool

Maybe it is just an indication of how much our recent viewing of The Last Word had lowered our expectations, but this film was a bit more fun, with at least a few clever bits in the writing.

Henry McCarthy (Mark Polish) is an author of low-brow nonfiction who attempts to Stay Cool as he returns to his high school as a commencement speaker. He attends classes and events for several days in an effort to "reconnect" after almost two decades away from school. Decidedly low-key antics ensue.

Our Noni is Scarlett Smith, Henry's old flame, though the romance never burns bright enough to warrant the use of her fiery first name. Although Henry pursues her early in the film, he is equally interested in Shasta, a flirtatious student played by Hilary Duff. She pursues Henry as he pursues Scarlet, but nobody involved seems to realize that a love triangle has been formed. Henry simply drifts back and forth between the two in alternating scenes. It was actually rather refreshing to see nothing come of this triangle. There was no stupid scene in which one of the women involved "discovers" Henry with the other woman, and then makes the type of ugly face that movie directors think women make when they see such, which is then followed by the woman not talking to the guy for a long time, then coming back around to him in the end. None of that happened. It was also pleasing to see Duff's character played with more agency than one would normally expect in a film about high school hi jinx.

Some tension does develop between Henry and Scarlett's Neanderthal old boyfriend Brad. Her ex is as overplayed as is Henry's gay friend, known simply as "Big Girl." Chevy Chase as Principal Marshall is the only character to develop beyond a single dimension, or at least to play his single dimension with some imagination.

The film does have a couple of small brushes with relevance. Watching this during commencement season here in the Boston area, we were interested in the school administration's attempts to pre-censor Henry's speech. Student-led protests have led to a few cancellations in our area, for politics rather than prurience. It is during a "safety drill" in the library that Henry learns -- to his only slight dismay -- that preparations for active shooters have become routine in schools. Both issues are touched upon only lightly, though, as this film does not stray far at all from a predictable path.

"The library is still a sanctuary for the socially challenged."

Even the disparagement of the library is clichéd, though we can thank the writer for not putting any librarians in glasses and tight hair so that we could see them magically unfurled later in the film.

Final verdict: The high side of three croquet balls; a good-enough diversion for non-fans and better than some of the other mediocre works that characterize Noni's work in the decade of the Aughts.

The Last Word - Just like the first time

Evan (Wes Bentley) is a writer who earns his money by writing suicide notes. He meets with his clients several times, finds out what they are feeling, and ultimately writes their poetic good-byes. He is very methodical and unemotional about his work until he meets Charlotte (played by Our Winona); and Abel (Ray Romano). Charlotte is the sister of a recently deceased client, and Abel is a current client. Evan unexpectedly falls in love with Charlotte, and forms a friendship with Abel. The love affair is doomed from the start as it begins with a lie - Evan does not want to reveal how he knew the deceased, and so claims to have gone to school with him.

The Last Word is not Ryder's best work, nor is it her worst. Her role could have been played just as well by any number of other actresses. We remembered having seen this film before, but neither of us could recall any details about it. Even while watching it very little seemed familiar. It wasn't a bad story, and it didn't have a completely Hollywood ending. It just does not have too much else to recommend it, though, and is not as clever as the premise suggests it could have been.

Final Verdict : Three Croquet Balls

The Crucible - Noni, You Devil!

Pam writes:

It is always a good thing when two of our interests come together. In this case it is Winona Ryder and Rebecca Nurse  - one of the first victims of the Salem witch trials, and Pam's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

In this movie, based on Arthur Miller's play of the same name, Our Winona plays Abigail Williams, the instigator of the witch hunt. Abigail is the ring leader of a group of several young women and girls who accuse their neighbors of dancing with the devil. Daniel Day-Lewis plays John Proctor, a former (married) lover of Abigail. Abigail accuses John's wife Elizabeth of witchcraft in the hopes of getting her out of the way. Elizabeth Lawrence plays Pam's ancestor.

Ryder is wonderful in this film. She shows a range of emotion, (some of which is pretense on Abigail's part). There are some historical inaccuracies in the film, but overall one gets the idea of how superstitious folks were, and how those superstitions played into their fears. We also get a pretty strong sense of the conditions of the jails, and the injustice of the the "justice system".

James adds:

A third interest in this film, of course, is geography, though the family connection and Winona involvement that Pam mentions are also crucial. The film was shot in at least six locations, though IMDb (as of this writing) lists only five. The one missing from IMDb is the most important, and is also the only one that is historically accurate.

GoogleMaps has changed, so the embedded version does not work well. Please explore this map in more detail, noting that the yellow markers are for memorial sites that are neither in the film nor in the original events. 

As with a lot of films -- especially those representing an earlier period in time -- a far-flung set of locations was needed to take advantage of places that have the appearance of a single location in an earlier age. Plimoth Plantation, for example, was carefully constructed in the 20th century to resemble a 17th-century settlement. And from what I can discern from online images, the harbor area of Shelburne, Nova Scotia resembles the harbor area of Salem, but perhaps without overhead wires.

The interesting geography here is that these great efforts are undertaken to maintain a geographic misconception about the events described. The trials were in Salem, but as with Bridgewater and many other Massachusetts towns, Salem was a much bigger town at the time. The entire witch-trial story took place in the part of the town where Rebecca Nurse resided, and which is now in Danvers.

See note above regarding this map.

Rebecca Nurse was among the more prosperous members of the community, and amazingly, her house and grounds remain intact, though all of the historic and commercial remembrances of the trial itself are in the harbor area that remains part of Salem. What IMDb fails to note is that much of The Crucible was actually filmed on her homestead, both in and around her house and in a meeting house built on the homestead specifically for the production.

All films require a great deal of planning, of course, but the planning for this one must have been extraordinary, creating an illusion that would work well for viewers who have not been to the various filming locations. Often we see characters moving almost seamlessly from Danvers to Plymouth to Ipswich, as if they were walking across a single lawn.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is both beautiful and profoundly moving, as it includes a memorial build by some of her other descendants. When we visited, our guide was a very young man who was very well versed and clearly conscientious about his role as an interpreter of the site. It is well worth a visit, or at least a Facebook "like" -- yes the Homestead has well over a thousand Facebook followers ...

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

Great Balls of Fire - Child Bride Noni

Pam writes: 
This film, from Our Winona's Heathers era, tells the story of Jerry Lee Lewis' (Dennis Quaid) marriage to his thirteen-year old cousin. Our Winona plays said cousin, Myra Brown. Displaying an amazing range of emotions from the naive smitten teenager, to the stunned bride, to the wealthy young wife who does not know what to do about all the media attention, we see Ryder in just the kind of role she was meant for. She and Quaid have a very natural chemistry as an unlikely couple who are both outraged by the media's attention to their marriage. The couple is so sympathetic, in fact, that viewers may find themselves at times confused about what to make of the media frenzy.

Watching this movie I wanted to turn away when I saw grown man Dennis Quaid bedding Ryder (who, although she was about 18 when the film was made, made a a very convincing 13-year old). The film focused only on a short period of Lewis' life - his rise to fame and fall from grace, which apparently all took place in the space of about a year. The film tells what appears to be a love story, and seems to set out to vindicate Lewis, so one would never guess that the marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. There is not even an epilogue indicating the fact that Lewis was married several more times following his divorce from his cousin. He is currently on his seventh marriage (the one to Brown being his third).

James adds:
I certainly shared Pam's aversion to the bedroom scenes, which would normally not be a problem in a Winona film! Even knowing that the actress was technically of age, the context was beyond creepy. I also wondered about the fact that all of the ire was directed at Lewis himself, and none of it at the institutions that legitimized his ongoing statutory rape. The church and state colluded in putting a sheen of legitimacy on a relationship that most agreed was transgressive in the extreme.

This film also explores the complex relationship Lewis had with another cousin - the Revered Jimmy Swaggart (played by Alec Baldwin, who also starred with Our Winona in Bettlejuice). It helps to explain the strong anti-rock crusades of the evangelical movement in the 1980s, which James encountered in Kansas City. A friend from church was a DJ at one of Swaggert's radio stations, and none of us could understand the extreme nature of the rules against rock music there. After viewing this film, it is easy to imagine that the famous preacher heard each rock song as a provocation from his more famous cousin.

Toward the end of the film, it occurred to me that although Quaid had to develop some piano skills for the shots that revealed his full arms (and, sometimes, legs) at the piano, a talented piano player was his double for many close-ups of the keyboard. "Who did they get for that?" I thought, not for a second imagining the answer: Jerry Lee Lewis himself was hammering the ivories in this film.

The film makers did not refrain from showing many of the deep flaws in his character, but his presence on the set surely tempered the overall tone.

Despite the high creepiness factor, this is an outstanding film, and among the best of Our Noni's performances.

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls