Last soundbite from Kael for today.
Altered States 1980
An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents -- the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky. The picture deals with the efforts of a psychophysiologist (William Hurt), who has lost his belief in God, to find the source and meaning of life by immersing himself in an isolation tank, and ingesting a brew of blood and sacred mushrooms. Chayefsky's dialogue is like a series of position papers. Russell uses a lot of tricks to spare you the misery of hearing the words declaimed straight, but no matter how hopped up the delivery is, you can't help feeling that you're in a lecture hall and that the characters should all have pointers. There are some effectively scary Jekyll-and-Hyde tricks, and Hurt, making his movie debut, brings a cool, quivering untrustworthiness to his revved-up mad scientist role; this young scientist is neurasthenic, charismatic, and ready to try anything. But Russell clomps from one scene to the next, the psychedelic visions come at you like choppy slide shows, and the picture has a dismal, tired humanistic ending. With Bob Balaban and Charles Haid, and with Blair Brown in an updated version of the thankless role of the worrying hand-wringing wife. She's an anthropologist with a job at Harvard, but all she does is fret.
That reminds me: I still have to write that piece on the role of the wife in Field of Dreams, and why I think it's important and distinct. Some day ...
Posted by sheila