Year 15, Day 62 - 3/3/23 - Movie #4,363
BEFORE: Andie MacDowell carries over from "Love After Love", and I'm going WAY back to 1990 for this one. That's 27 years before the release of yesterday's picture - so yeah, Andie MacDowell's been around a while. And I didn't talk about this yesterday, but "Love After Love" featured her first nude scenes, at the age of fifty-something, and good for her. But she said in some interviews that she almost wished she'd done them earlier in her career, and there's probably a lot of male fans out there who wished that too. OK, maybe female fans, too, whatever. So umm, let that be a lesson to all you aspiring actresses out there, when you're in your fifties, like Andie, you may wish that you'd done more nude scenes in your 20's or 30's. The moral is, don't wait, do those nude scenes as soon as you can! OK, maybe that's a terrible moral.
(Andie seems to have conveniently forgotten about the film "Ruby Cairo". I guess the nude scene doesn't count if I'm the only person who ever saw that movie...)
I also hear you out there, thinking, "How could this guy have NOT seen "Green Card" already?" True, it's been out on the market for 33 years now, and I just never got around to it. It would be like if I never saw "You've Got Mail" or "Pretty Woman", I get that. But that's where we find ourselves, I started this crazy journey 15 years ago to find all the "classic" movies that I SHOULD have already seen, but just hadn't. This one definitely qualifies - watching it now is probably going to be something of an afterthought, but what the hell, let's get it over with and get it off the list.
THE PLOT: A French man who wants to stay in the U.S. enters into a marriage of convenience, but it turns into more than that.
AFTER: As the poster points out, this is the story of two people who met, fell in love and got married, they just didn't do those things in THAT order. Ugh, how conventional, to do things in the same order as everyone else. (For extra difficulty, try getting married, falling in love and then meeting, it's MUCH harder.) The 1990's were about breaking rules and breaking down the system, man, if you weren't there you wouldn't understand. It was a different time, but people were also trying to BE different - men were dating men openly, women were dating women a bit less openly, and people were getting married to foreigners so they could stay in the country and work. Because the word had gotten out that there was this loophole, if you could find an American to marry it was easier to become an American, instead of registering as an alien, waiting a few years to get approved for a job, then there were a few dozen more hoops to jump through before you could officially become a citizen.
I remember working with a woman who was born in the U.K. and was trying to get her green card, and she had to place ADS in the newspaper, at her expense, for her own job, and then she had to have someone impartial (me) review the applicants for the job SHE ALREADY HAD and find reasons why they all weren't qualified to do her job at her salary rate. All this so she could keep working her job at a film production company, she had to prove that she wasn't taking a job away from a qualified American, by showing the INS that there were no Americans with her qualifications. But that means that some of the jobs you see listed are not real, it could just be posted by some immigrant close to getting their green card taking applications for a job that's already held by someone else. What a terrible system.
Or, you know, as an alternative you can sneak into the U.S., get a terrible job washing dishes or picking avocados or something, and try to remain under the radar for a few decades, always looking over your shoulder for the INS while trying to make ends meet. Your choice. But then WHY does the INS go to such lengths to disprove the cases of the people who register with the system the legal way instead of focusing their efforts on the illegals who are trying to hide from the system? Because if they did that, I suppose we'd have nobody to wash dishes or pick avocados.
Now, you may say, of course, we see why this French fellow would marry someone he just met, because he wants to work in America and this will be a shortcut to that - illegal, sure, but for some it works as a shortcut. But what does SHE, Bronte, get out of the deal. Ah, the movie is one step ahead of you, they've got this covered because there's this apartment she wants, but the building's co-op board or whatever is very selective, and they don't want to rent to a single person, they would prefer to rent to a married couple. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is illegal, you can't discriminate against old, young, single, married, gay, straight, male, female when you're renting an apartment. You can do a background check, but just saying "No single people" is a form of discrimination. Yeah, this part doesn't really ring true - Bronte checks all the other boxes, she's got a solid job with the City Parks Department, no criminal record, AND she's offering to maintain the building's roof deck garden as part of her lease. She should be in like Flynn, if only this silly movie needed a reason for her to get married.
The weird thing is, she's got a boyfriend already, so why not just marry the boyfriend, Phil? Instead she agrees to marry a man she doesn't even know, just to get the apartment, and she doesn't tell her boyfriend about this arranged marriage / exchange for a sweet apartment deal. Why not? Maybe Phil would like to live in the very nice apartment, also! Gee, this secret marriage could be a problem later in the movie when Phil finds out about it, right? This is where the story kind of falls apart, because there was a much easier solution RIGHT THERE and the character had to go and make everything five times more complicated to create conflict later.
Then there's the whole INS audit process, which most of us only know about because of, well, movies like this one, where the American spouse and the foreign spouse are interviewed separately by immigration agents to see if they truly are a genuine couple who live together in a very legally binding way, and not a couple of charlatans just trying to scam the system. So why didn't Bronté and Georges know about this, if the rest of us do? Don't they watch movies, too? It's kind of like a version of "The Newlywed Game", where the host asks the husband and wife various questions at different times, and they get points if their answers match - only here if they don't match, one spouse gets deported and the other goes to jail. Fun times.
And it's all for what, GARDENING? She wants the very nice apartment because she's going to do gardening work and restore the building's roof garden as well as the one inside the apartment? And she works for the Parks Department doing...gardening? OK, landscaping, but this is all just way too much garden work for me, I don't get it. This is one reason why I moved out of my parents' house at 18, because they have a giant lawn that I hated mowing. I hated raking leaves even more, so I had to get out of there. Now I have a house with a small backyard in Queens, NY and I hate taking care of that, so it's fallen into disrepair. The first big home improvement we did was to pave the parts of the backyard that were dirt, leaving just a small area for a couple of trees, a rosebush and the grape vines. STILL, the backyard gets taken over every year by weeds and those ambitious vines, and I have to get out there with a giant shears and cut everything back, and I hate hate HATE every minute of the few hours I'm forced to spend gardening each fall.
But these two people weren't fooling anybody, come on, the INS agents were on to their shenanigans from the start. For starters, Georges was here in the U.S. on a tourist visa, which had expired a few months previous, and then he suddenly gets married as a work-around, isn't that blatantly obvious? And then during the initial interview, he doesn't know where the bathroom is in the apartment? You can't live in a place for 12 hours without needing to know where the bathroom is, so that's a tip-off right there. But then the INS agents should have noticed that this couple doesn't fight or argue, see, that proves that they're not really together. If they lived together for any length of time they would know how to push each other's buttons and start petty arguments over nothing at all.
It doesn't matter if they fall in love as part of the process of learning all about each other just to fool immigration - it's still a crime and they need to be prosecuted for getting married. Their punishment should to remain married until they are truly sick of each other's company, like real married couples.
Also starring Gerard Depardieu (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Bebe Neuwirth (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Gregg Edelman (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Robert Prosky (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Jessie Keosian, Ethan Phillips (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Mary Louise Wilson (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Lois Smith (last seen in "Tesla"), Conrad McLaren (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Ronald Guttman (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Danny Dennis, Stephen Pearlman (last seen in "The Horse Whisperer"), Victoria Boothby (last seen in "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)), John Spencer (last seen in "The Negotiator"), Ann Dowd (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Vasek Simek (last seen in "Havana"), Rick Aviles (last seen in "Carlito's Way"), with cameos from Ann Wedgeworth (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Simon Jones (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Malachy McCourt (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities").
RATING: 4 out of 10 faked Polaroid selfies
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