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Intersection
Vincent Eastman
....... Richard Gere
Sally Eastman
......... Sharon Stone
Olivia Marshak
........ Lolita Davidovich
Neal .................. Martin Landau
Richard Quarry
........ David Selby
Meaghan Eastman ....... Jenny Morrison
Charlie
............... Ron White
Paramount presents a film directed by
Mark Rydell. Produced by Bud Yorkin
and Mark Rydell. Written by David Rayfiel and
Marshall Brickman. Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. Edited
by Mark Warner. Music by James Newton Howard. Running time:
98 minutes. Classified: R (for some language and
I try in these reviews to focus on
movies that are well-done technically and/or which are liable to attract
major notice from the public. This is not one of those. Reviews of
this film have been negative. However, I think that there
are sometimes theological reasons for a film being bad, just as
there are theological reasons for a film's virtues. (To be
sure, films sometimes mix bad theology with good dramatic quality,
and vice versa.) That is, I believe, true in this case. We need a
few examples of this fact in a book dealing with theology at
the movies. Thus we must deal with a few bad films, as well as a
lot of good ones.
The direction and photography are o.k. Vancouver, B. C., the setting, is a beautiful
area; it seems to me that the filmmakers could have done it more justice.
Most other features are not memorable.
The story is the main problem. The
central character, Vincent Eastman, played by Richard Gere,
is an architect who marries Sally (Sharon Stone) and has one daughter, Meaghan (played by Jenny Morrison
as a remarkable lookalike to Stone). Eastman is
terribly self-absorbed, in an almost typical Hollywood way. His marriage
loses "spark," though his wife is exceptionally beautiful and
indispensable to him professionally and socially, and so he just does what
Hollywood thinks is the natural thing to do: he looks elsewhere. He falls
in love with Olivia, a writer for a magazine. Olivia, played by Lolita Davidovich is potentially an interesting character;
but the script gives her nothing to do except to supply for Vincent the
missing "sparks." We know almost nothing of her as a writer.
Anyhow, things develop, and Vince must decide between Olivia,
who supplies him with sparks, on the one hand, and his long-suffering wife
and daughter on the other. His mind keeps changing, which is the height of
tension in this film. The conclusion presents us with a bit of irony: a
tragic accident to Vince, the two women each
left thinking that he had chosen her. In retrospect, the whole plot seems
concocted to lead to that irony and only to that irony. None of it has
anything much to do with character or real drama.
The biggest trouble here, I think,
is Hollywood morality. Not the two or three sex scenes particularly,
although that is part of it. The problem is that these filmmakers assume
that their audiences are like them: viewing adultery and divorce
not as tragedy, but mainly as a situation in which the perpetrator
is "trying to find himself." We are supposed to sympathize with
his search for sparks, while his wife and daughter are left
hanging. Frankly, I hadn't the slightest sympathy for Vincent's
agonizing over the two women, or for Olivia's
supposedly gallant attempt to (as she puts it to Meaghan
of all people) "make him happy." I didn't want to see Vincent
"happy." I just wanted to see him go home where he belongs. I
did sympathize with Sally and Meaghan. (Stone in
this film plays a woman with some dignity for a change, rather than her
usual nymphomaniac; of course there has to be one brief (clothed) sex
scene for her in the movie for those people who come to see Sharon do her
thing.)
The filmmakers evidently thought
that the viewing audience would be pretty much like them: broad, tolerant,
winking at adultery and divorce, maximizing the importance of
emotional self-fulfillment. This is not always the case, even in
secular films. Although most filmmakers are very liberal in politics
and morals, most films made today are fairly hard on adultery
(though not on divorce). In taking a hard attitude, they realize
that their audiences will respond better to a world with some
moral rights and wrongs. For all the culture critics say, most people today
in the US are not entirely "post-Christian." They still carry
with them a lot of "borrowed capital" from Christianity, and
they still believe in moral reality.
The makers of "Intersection" betrayed their audience in this regard and thereby lost all hope of putting together a quality drama. Drama, whether comedy or tragedy or history, requires a moral universe. Without that it loses not only significance, but also (unless it tries to be really outrageous) viewer interest.