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Passion
Fish
(1992)
Directed by
John Sayles
Review by
Zach Saltz
Some critics
will call John Sayles a layman’s Robert Altman, and while the two men’s
paths have been very similar (Sayles and Altman are both Hollywood
mavericks who are not afraid to tackle larger-than-life issues) I think
their films parallel and seamlessly compliment one another.
They’ve made movies set in similar places (the Pacific Northwest
of Altman’s
McCabe and Mrs.
Miller and Sayles’
Limbo),
have focused on similar subjects (the political shambles of Altman’s
Tanner ‘88 and Sayles’
Silver City), and have
profiled similar moods (the vast urban discontent of Altman’s
Short Cuts and Sayles’
City of Hope).
Viewing the two directors together usually makes for an
illuminating and sometimes confounding experience.
In that
respect, Sayles’
Passion Fish
(1992) compliments Altman’s masterful
3 Women
(1977) in many ways.
Both are stories of women healers, who invest so heavily in their
patients that, by the end of the film, the bond between patient and
healer has become all but transparent, as the two enter an extraordinary
oneness with each other.
But where
3 Women
veers into the metaphysical,
Passion Fish stays just this side of the line of reality, though
there are indeed a couple of scenes that convey something discreet about
its two character’s interactions.
The two
women of
Passion Fish are May
Alice (Mary McDonnell), a wisecracking soap star who has been rendered
paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a freak car accident, and
Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), the nurse who cares for Mary Alice in her
brawny house deep in the Louisiana bayou.
The early scenes in the house serve as a time for reflection for
May Alice, who watches old episodes of her soap, downtrodden and upset
that she will never be able to return to her luxurious life as a
television celebrity ever again.
She doesn’t believe that she will ever recover -- physically and
mentally -- from the accident, and sees her life, and any feeble
attempts to improve it, as utterly meaningless.
She goes through about five in-home nurses, each of whom tells
her colorful stories of their own lives, as she passively listens,
withholding the anger she feels, until she displaces it later by
refusing food and promptly driving the nurses up the wall.
Enter
Chantelle, a svelte black woman who has just arrived on a Greyhound bus.
She does not tell May Alice about her life, and it remains a
mystery most of the film.
Their relationship is quiet at first, but as May
Alice opens up her box of inadequacies to the
young nurse, Chantelle remains cool and loyal.
“Didn’t they tell you I was a bitch?” May
Alice
asks her one day out of the blue.
“On wheels,” Chantelle replies.
Sayles is a
master of character study and, as in practically all of his films, he
introduces us to a wide array of colorful personalities.
Many people visit the house, including May
Alice’s Uncle Max (Will
Mahoney), a kind of six-pack Ernest Hemingway, some of her old childhood
friends (including a wonderfully faux blasé woman named Precious), and
some of her old soap friends.
Love interests for the two women enter the picture in the forms
of hearty (and happily married) Rennie (Sayles regular David Strathairn),
and the smooth-talking Creole Sugar LeDoux
(Vondie Curtis-Hall).
But practically all of the screen time is devoted to the
interactions of these two characters, who are so multi-dimensional in
their intimacy and arguments that it sometimes makes the viewer feel
like an uncomfortable spectator.
Some may
mistake
Passion Fish as
boring, and while it is admittedly slow at some portions, I suspect
Sayles is trying to portray the boredom the characters feel, being
trapped in a place neither of them truly want to be.
The pacing is meticulously crafted, like
Lone Star -- just when we
think we’ve got these characters figured out once and for all, Sayles
lays a bomb on us that grabs immediate attention.
This self-constrained flow makes the film not technically diverse
as Lone Star because it does
not have to be.
There is
some great music on the sound track, and occasionally, Sayles will shine
a red light on his characters -- the red light of a developing room, and
the red light of a glorious Bayou sunset.
And there is a key dream at the end that suggests the bond
between the two protagonists is deeper than we think; that they have
literally entered each other’s minds and
Sayles and
Altman are two of the finest unconventional American directors around,
and
3 Women and
Passion Fish are excellent
examples of laconic, rural mise-en-scene transcending its characters
into the ethereal, whether overtly or subtly.
Both films and their directors have something to say, which is so
rare in American filmmaking these days, and their films have the
remarkable ability to say so much while simultaneously telling us
relatively little.
The two
women of
Passion Fish may
very well embody the spirit of Sayles and Altman, their worlds and
families so separate, yet their visions and eccentricities so similar
and oddly familiar.
Rating:
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