BEFORE: Harry Dean Stanton carries over from "This Must Be the Place", and I'll admit this film is a leftover bit from last year - I had to make some cuts in the closing days of 2020 to meet my deadline, while allowing for three Christmas-based films instead of two. Originally this was supposed to fit between "Seraphim Falls" with Anjelica Huston and "Dead Man" with Robert Mitchum. But since Michael Wincott appeared in both of those films, I was able to cut this film out of the mix, and the chain neatly closed up around the space. Thus I could squeeze in "A Very Murray Christmas" and end the year on a high note, and "Mr. North" was rescheduled for the earliest possible return. No harm done, except that Anjelica Huston then didn't make my year-end countdown, because she was only in two films, sorry.
Still a couple more weeks to celebrate Women's History month - today's the birthday of comedienne Moms Mabley (born March 19, 1894), Marjorie Linklater, Scottish campaigner for the arts and the environment (born in 1909), Glenn Close (born in 1947). It's also the birthday of Harvey Weinstein (born in 1952) and I guess you could say that there wouldn't really be a #metoo movement without him. Umm, that's not a good thing.
THE PLOT: Mr. North, a stranger to the small but wealthy town of Newport, RI, quickly has rumors started about him that he has the power to heal people's ailments. In his adventures he befriends an old man who is a shut-in and helps him rediscover the world.
AFTER: This makes three films in a row that I just don't GET, so now I'm starting to wonder if there's something wrong with ME, instead of the films. I mean, I understand what HAPPENS in this week's films, but I'm having trouble trying to understand WHY they were made, where is the relevance to the stories? Weirdly I've been through all of society's classes in just three days - "Angela's Ashes" was about lower-class Americans moving back to become lower-class Irish, "This Must Be the Place" was about a Goth rocker touring America's middle-class workers, looking for a Nazi, and today it's a visit to the upper class living in Newport in the 1920's.
Really, it's about Mr. (Theophilus) North, a visitor to Newport, he's not really upper class himself, but then what IS he? A con man, a pretender, or just someone aimlessly moving through this society? I can't really get a read on the character - people pay him to read books to them? Can't they read the books themselves, or are they so rich that they feel this is beneath them? When we first see him, he's reading books to children, which I get, but then he gets hired to read books to an older rich man, was this a thing back then? Then he lives at the YMCA and teaches tennis to kids, this I understand. But he pals around with the lower servant class, people who used to work at the rich mansions, but no longer do that, they just hang around and drink and play pool at dine at boarding houses, and you know what, that doesn't sound too bad. Being a poor person in Newport sounds pretty nice, especially compared with pandemic life, where even those of us who GOT our vaccinations can't go out and play pool yet or visit all the restaurants, when so many of them are still closed.
I'm fairly familiar with Newport, RI because I used to go to an annual Chowderfest there, in the before-times of course. My BFF and I started going there every summer because the Boston Chowderfest started to really suck, we watched it go from 12 entrants one year to 10 the next down to 8 and when it got to 5, we decided to seek greener pastures. The Newport Chowderfests had THREE categories: Clam, Seafood and Variety chowders, with up to 10 entrants in each category, PLUS clam-cakes for sale and you got to vote for your favorite in each category, so democracy in action. We'd taste each one with our keen palates and then vote with our hearts, factoring in such intangibles as "booth spirit", "free merchandise" and penalize the ones who didn't hand out proper oyster crackers or had too many uncooked potatoes. Then after we'd hit a local diner for, of course, more chowder and more clam cakes, this was called the "victory lap", especially if we'd tried every chowder on the ballot. But then this event went downhill, too, when it was moved from the waterfront marina to a nearly state park, and the lines became too long and poorly managed. This was roughly the same time Taylor Swift bought a house in town - coincidence?
Anyway, Newport is known for its beautiful mansions, and that usually means there are rich people living in them. Surprisingly, the rich people in this story aren't corrupt and evil, they're quite friendly, and for some narrative reason, they're besieged with ailments like rheumatism, possible brain tumors and male pattern baldness. Mr. North has the freakish ability to retain and generate static electricity, and these citizens get this crazy idea in their heads that getting shocked by Mr. North is the miracle cure for everything that ails them, though there is never any hard evidence of such. Most likely there is a city-wide placebo effect in play, they believe that being touched by him will cure them, and that belief causes relief when they are touched, which results in them all feeling better, if not actually being cured of whatever.
The local doctor suddenly notices that his appointments are being cancelled across the board, and that means no income, so he has Mr. North arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Only North has made no claims of having healing abilities, and has not charged any money for his services shocking people, and openly admits that the few pills he did dispense gratis were merely mints. Therefore the judge finds that no crime has been committed, and the doctor gets locked up, as everyone who files a losing lawsuit should. It feels like this is an analogy for something that I can't quite put my finger on, is it supposed to be some spin on the Jesus story, suggesting that Jesus didn't really heal the sick or raise the dead or make blind men see, but if those things happened, it was just due to the faith of the sick people? Something to think about, perhaps - this is based on a novel written by Thornton Wilder, but the plot summary on Wikipedia is woefully non-descript.
Mr. North also seems attracted to Sally Boffin, a maid who works at the estate of his main patron, but even though they kiss under the July 4 fireworks, she's promised to another, Mr. Ennis, and so that's a bit of a romantic dead end. There seemed to be a "spark", pun intended, between him and Elspeth Skeel, who was (mis-?)diagnosed with a brain tumor, but felt better after Mr. North touched her forehead. Nope, she's much too young for her. North here seems to end up with his patron's daughter, despite never really meeting her during the course of the film, she only turns up near the end to dance with him at the ball - really, at this point the whole thing's turned into some kind of gender-flipped Jane Austen story, right? She really comes out of nowhere, but we're supposed to believe she and North are perfect for each other - well, he does have rather magic fingers, after all.
I guess I'm supposed to be glad that Mr. North came to town, found himself and found a purpose, even found love in the end. Did he change the lives of the wealthy residents, or did they change him? But other than that, what was really achieved here? It all feels like a watered-down version of "The Great Gatsby", only without any characters dying or any grander point being made. So, it's really some weak sauce by comparison. I feel like if I could go back and take high-school English class over, I'd really ace it this time - not that I didn't do well before, but the second time I'd really feel free to speak my mind. Thornton Wilder was a HACK, and "Our Town" was corny and hackneyed when he wrote it, then it just got more so over time. And "Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton is a boring, terrible book that nobody should be forced to read. It also might be the START of that horrible trend where a narrative starts in one place, then flashes back to the past to detail all the events that led up to it, and this technique is now used in like one out of every three movies.
The man who played the YMCA clerk here was playwright Christopher Durang, and I met him once when I was a P.A. on a shoot for an episode of "Alive from Off Center" that was called "Words on Fire", it was six short vignettes that each illustrated that title somehow, and Durang played a man who found it easy to be inactive concerning things he was passionate about, like being in love or solving global warming. And this was back in 1990, before most people even considered global warming a problem, and in fact, some still do. I just recorded an hour on PBS that explains how we fixed the hole in the Earth's ozone layer, I should probably watch that, because I'm curious about it. Anyway, I hope Mr. Durang is doing well (he never calls any more...) because he doesn't have any IMDB credits after 2001, but Wiki says he had a hit play in 2011, called "Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike", which sounds like a spin on Chekhov.
I'd love to find a copy of that "Alive from Off Center" episode, because it's one of the first things I ever worked on that aired on TV, unless you count music videos for Rick James ("Wonderful") and Apollonia ("Since I Fell for You"). The credits for this show seem to have not made it to the IMDB, but I remember one actor (Robert Joy) talking fondly about how to light a cigar and another actor reading a great passage from "The Tempest" the one that stars with "Our revels now are ended" and includes "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..."
Also, the actor who played Neidermeyer in "National Lampoon's Animal House" is in this film, just in case you were ever wondering if he ever co-starred with Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum. (Geez, it reminds me of that time Steve Guttenberg made a film with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. Look it up, that happened.) If you're a child of the 1990's and not the 1970's, he's also the villain/father in the Twisted Sister video for "We're Not Gonna Take It".
Also starring Anthony Edwards (last seen in "Motherhood"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "Dead Man"), Lauren Bacall (last seen in "Dogville"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Mary Stuart Masterson (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Joy"), Tammy Grimes, David Warner (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Hunter Carson, Christopher Durang (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners"), Mark Metcalf (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Katherine Houghton (last seen in "Billy Bathgate"), Thomas H. Needham, Richard Woods (last seen in "I.Q."), Harriet Rogers, Layla Summers, Lucas Hall, Thomas-Laurence Hand, Linda Peterson, Cleveland Amory, Christopher Lawford (last seen in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"), Ellen Latzen (last seen in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation"), Marietta Tree (last seen in "The Misfits"), Richard Kneeland.
RATING: 4 out of 10 tennis rackets
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