But with eyes like two huge sun-bleached Maltesers Sarandon looks very clever – like she might be
But with eyes like two huge, sun-bleached Maltesers, Sarandon looks very clever – like she might be secretly translating everything you’ve just said into Latin.Two Girls and a Guy stars Robert Downey Jnr as a slippery performance artist with two girlfriends (Heather Graham, Natasha Gregson Wagner). It’s a film about a woman who lives for other people and who wears the requisite hunted expression. One day Sarandon decides she likes Roberts, offers her children to the stepmom, and puts on that bobble hat.This is a film about decent people doing the decent thing (meanwhile, the audience, refreshingly made up of people who have no problem whatsoever with being difficult, sit there thinking, “Somebody punch somebody”). These are Hollywood dinners – the kind where everybody orders whisky and then leaves in a hurry without eating even a salad. Harris still isn’t given very much to do, except snog Roberts like he can’t believe his luck whenever she’s not tending the sick Sometimes Harris goes out for dinner with Sarandon. Sarandon and Harris have two adoring children who hate Roberts, the unreliable usurper She’s a photographer with very good skin.
For the first half of the film, Sarandon and Roberts stand in kitchens putting each other down and flouncing off to sit, mute and regretful, in those enormous family jeeps. Harris isn’t given very much to do, but sometimes looks sad that his children are chock-a-block with a registry of hurts.
For the second half of the film, Sarandon is diagnosed with cancer, and everybody decides to get along. It’s amazing how one word and two faces can unearth so much testiness. At my local Tube station, people keep colouring in Roberts’s eyes and giving Sarandon incipient acne with Biros Bravo. In the film, Sarandon plays the ex-wife, Roberts the live-in girlfriend, and Ed Harris the chap. The poster’s saggy too – Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in bobble hats, under a watery sun. Stepmom (12) Two Girls and a Guy (15) Very Bad Things (18) A Man and a Woman (PG)
As titles go, Stepmom is particularly dithering.
A quarter of a century later, similar hopes were invested in Tony Richardson’s modishly larky Tom Jones, scripted by another playwright, John Osborne. And in 2025 there’ll be – well, who knows, but you can be sure there’ll be something.. His The Private Life of Henry VIII, starring Charles Laughton as a Henry of gargantuan appetites and outrageous marital antics, was the Shakespeare in Love of its day. (Shakespeare in America?) To a film for everyone I continue to prefer a film by someone.Curiously, the British cinema has been here before, more than once. In the mid-1930s, it was Alexander Korda who dispelled (for a while) our domestic industry’s chronic sense of inferiority towards the Hollywood product.
And every single aspect of the film has been so calculated to appeal to the widest possible audience that, even if it has an unhappy ending, it cushions the blow by seeming to intimate that there might actually be a sequel in the offing. Not one of the performers has been encouraged to act against type or offer more than we already know he or she is capable of – most notably, Judi Dench as the beady-eyed, sharp-tongued monarch (these days there would appear to be only one way to play a British queen, be it Elizabeth I, Victoria or Elizabeth II). The period reconstruction resembles every other period reconstruction you ever saw (think of the lightness of touch a Richard Lester, say, might have brought to it). But there’s not a spark of specifically cinematic invention in his work.
