Miami Rhapsody (1995)
'Til There Was You (1997)

Rhinechick

Sara Jessica Parker is perhaps at the peak of her career, best known as the star of the HBO series Sex and the City. From the conversations I've had, however, people tend to talk about the show in terms of the incidents, and the information about contemporary mores they supposedly convey, more than the acting. (People talk about what Samantha did, not Kim Cattrall. One of the reasons I prefer movies to TV shows is that you get used to the performers on shows, you follow the series because they're reliable. Whereas a new movie starring someone you love can feel like an occasion, your expectations can really swell.) Movie audiences didn't fully appreciate what they had in Parker, either, even in the movies people saw--L.A. Story (1991), in which she had a supporting role, and Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), in which she co-starred. She is an unusual figure, a Jewish actress whose evident intelligence comes wrapped in sirenic sensuality. (Both her sexiness and her brain-to-mouth responsiveness are as upfront as Streisand's and Winger's, but she's less divine, and, to be frank, less threatening to men, than the former and less everyday-earthy than the latter.) Parker grooms herself like a Rhinemaiden, with ringletted blonde tresses to go with her crystal-blue eyes, the whole package encased in mermaid-tight sheaths. But then her elongated face with its beauty-spot mole is something else again, excessively elegant for the cuddly type she dresses as. Her face lends her some of the dignity of Judith Anderson, seconded by her skill at the craft of acting. So although the outfits tell you she's a chick prowling, and she can get a girly squeal in her voice when she's excited, she maintains an unusually intelligent reserve.

I don't think the combination has ever been put to better use than by David Frankel in Miami Rhapsody, the feature he wrote and directed. Parker plays Gwyn, an aspiring comedy writer who works in the meantime for an ad agency and lives with her boyfriend in Miami, where her parents and siblings also live. We follow Gwyn in flashbacks as she recounts to her new gynecologist the moments when she received disconcerting news about her familymembers' romantic relationships. At her younger sister's wedding, for instance, her father (Paul Mazursky) shares his suspicions that her mother (Mia Farrow) is having an affair. When she tells her mother about what she considers his ridiculous suspicion, mother is shocked, not that her husband would suspect her but that he's intuitive enough to have figured it out. Gwyn's family, including a rambunctious sister married to a pro football player and a brother who's cheating on his pregnant wife with a print model, is a minefield of news of this sort. They seem to scratch every variety of itch that straying (heterosexual) males and females have.

Gwyn's fiancé calls her cynical and asks why she always assumes the worst about people. (In a word: "statistics.") At the same time she's comically naïve. In that early scene with her father, she parries the revelations with jokes and he complains, "You're not taking this seriously," to which she replies, "No, I am--I'm sorry, it's just, it's just, you know, I just can't imagine Mom having sex with another man, you know, I mean, I still shudder when I think of Mom having sex with you." Her brother cheats on his wife after the birth of their child because she's stopped sleeping with him. He justifies his departure to Gwyn by saying, "I need sex, Gwyn, ya understand, I need a lotta sex," at which she attempts, "Okay, but do you have to have it with another person?" The marriage celebrated in the opening hits the rocks, for the kind of petty incompatibility that you can't believe, and yet do believe, a couple might not figure out until they were hitched. When Gwyn catches her sister cheating, the incredulous gape on her face could serve as the comic mask representing the news flashes that light our way into the world of everyday adult corruption.

Smart Kid's Mistakes

On the one hand you get the idea that though Gwyn is brainy she has somehow accepted the whole storybook of male-female relationships. And you sense another smart kid's mistake: to think that your cynicism will enable you to keep emotional messiness at a distance with theory. Gwyn is cynical in the abstract about humanity, but naïve in reality about all the people closest to her, including her fiancé and herself. Gwyn ends up doubting the wisdom of her own engagement and makes the mistake of talking about it, thinking that talking won't change anything. The smartest woman in the movie sees nothing coming. But once her fiancé has left her, she takes her place in the ronde when she has a fling with the Cuban hunk of a male nurse (Antonio Banderas) her mother had been seeing.

From One Comedian to Another

At the same time, Gwyn always maintains a certain distance from the goings-on, which we see in the way she responds in conversation with the irony, exaggeration, and self-deprecation of a stand-up. The debt to Woody Allen is clear and yet the picture has a sensitivity to women that Allen has never shown. Frankel treats Gwyn not as a muse but as one of his own kind, an unparalleled act of sympathetic imagination on the part of a male American comedy writer-director. The articulate girl reporters of the '30s and '40s were men's women, the kind men wanted women to be--not mushy, not clinging, just drinking buddies in skirts. Frankel's is an infinitely closer, more liquid identification with his female star. It's the most difficult kind of identification, too, a chameleon change of markings without losing his species definition as a comic writer. I don't know of another American comedy that filters everything through the mind of a female comedy writer, and I can't think of another young actress now who could pull off a role consisting largely of comic cappers worked into realistic situations.

The fact that Gwyn requires Parker to combine punch line dialogue with realism shows a debt to Mazursky as writer-director as well, and Parker leads the cast in living up to this high standard. (If Miami Rhapsody is less robust than a Mazursky picture, it's also less sketchy than an Allen picture.) The punch lines don't necessarily make you laugh out loud but help the gorgeous Steadicam cinematography and production design, both in lurid tropical vacationland colors, to create an ongoing texture as the movie unrolls before us. Frankel maintains the cocktail effervescence at the same time that all the interactions have a semi-improvisational looseness. Within Gwyn's family, for instance, each person has his or her set role, as family members tend to, but the casual exchanges that set the familial atmosphere don't feel rehearsed (or aimless, as in Woody Allen). Farrow is a stand-out. She admirably doesn't overdo her character's Jewishness, instead letting it come to her. Farrow plays this soft-voiced woman as an Olive Oyl who can noodge her daughter about setting a date in the same fey, lulling tones that she uses to get her mother's nursing home attendant to kiss her. The soft side of Parker as Gwyn has a maternal source in Farrow's performance.

Parker's stunned reactions make her a kind of Candide, but one capable of the truest sense of adult discovery, the kind that teaches you to live with unanswerables, to accept that you can't necessarily distinguish between a "real" reason and a rationalization, certainly not before the person whose behavior you're attempting to judge has changed his mind again. (It's an ironic rather than romantic rhapsody.) When her mother says, "Sweetie, it's perfectly normal in a healthy relationship to give up some of your own identity," we know what Gwyn means when she answers, "Well, I don't wanna do that, you know, because … because I … don't have any extra," and yet the lines, and Parker's delivery of them, as if they were of Gwyn's rather than Frankel's making, create that identity out of the character's confusions. It's a peculiar role: as Gwyn points out she has a big mouth, but isn't tough, avoids conflicts. Similarly, her role in the story is to listen and react, and yet to serve as the focus our reactions to what she hears. She has to be a star reactor, and stammering her way to the punch lines she makes them seem not like shtick but the way Gwyn runs confusing experience through her mind. Parker keeps it all fresh, which with this kind of comedy writing is an extraordinary feat.

However, I don't want to underrate Frankel's jokes. If you don't laugh out loud it's in part because there's a lot to pay attention to and you don't want to miss anything. He's also a sharp moviemaker. The editing, which may join two scenes in the middle of a sentence without a break of sense, or segue to a new scene with voice over while we're still enjoying a reaction shot in the last one, keeps us in this state of expectation. And the material is really good: writers who have to work in commercial subgenres to pay the bills will especially sympathize with this exchange between Gwyn and her fiancé when she says no to sex because she has to "rewrite a perfectly good ad"--"It's ten o'clock at night, you can't possibly be creative at this hour"--"Yeah, that's what I'm hoping."

Self-Conscious Enjoyment of Style

In 'Til There Was You Parker has a harder stylized look, her hair bleached pale and hanging in a straight bob, for her role as Francesca Lanfield, a former child TV star (of a Brady Bunch-like show) who everyone thinks is dead but who is alive and currently marketing her drug recovery and survival. Strictly speaking, Parker probably has too much theatrical high style for a former child star of a sitcom but you'd have to be very rich indeed to despise such surplus. In her first scene, Parker is both whiny and flirty, a desirable, powerful and petulant young woman. And when Francesca is capriciously commanding, in order to exult in the pleasure of having her way, we can see that the actress has just the right touch of self-conscious enjoyment of style. This last is something the otherwise intelligent movie, written by Winnie Holzman and directed by Scott Winant, lacks, both behind and in front of the camera.

Realistic production design has been one of the biggest flaws of comedies in the '90s. Comparing the 1993 and 1950 versions of Born Yesterday points this up. Garson Kanin's dessert melodrama doesn't require expanses of realistically furnished interiors; in fact they drown the comic counterpoint. Unlike the remake, George Cukor's original movie version has just the right kind of barely 3-D settings to function as backdrops to the basic, pungent interrelations. 'Til There Was You likewise could use simpler, more stylized settings. Woody Allen has learned to do it so well that even location shots look like designed stage flats and this compact artificiality often encloses his scenes, capturing the atmosphere (when there is any to be captured). 'Til There Was You is more cleverly intricate than almost any Allen movie of the decade, but the pointless, bland details of setting bore your eye. Parker to the rescue, with her intriguing variety of angles of head tilt, adjustable at variable speeds, and her ability to make every display of will visibly an act of coquetry. She embodies Francesca's self-possession so clearly, standing out from the screen as if she were a figure in a holographic allegorical fresco, that the busy settings recede.

At the same time, the script uses the fact that Francesca is an analysand to give the role, which is technically that of the melodramatic villainess, more texture. Francesca has such facility with therapeutic schemata that she's able to analyze a guy not only at the same time she seduces him, but as a means of seduction. When she first goes to the apartment of Nick (Dylan McDermott), who is a hot young architect and so shouldn't be living in such a dump, she looks around and says, "You should unpack," to which he replies, "This is just temporary." She says, "Like insanity?" and then continues, "Oh, I get it: you can't unpack because that would mean you really live here. Which you don't. You live in this place in your mind that's so perfect it's too good for you. 'Cause who are you to deserve someplace perfect--you're this slob who can't even unpack." And Parker does a great bit of random-seeming strolling, circling like a shark around the poor shipwreck victim as she takes playful-but-serious little bites out of him. Before asking where the bedroom is.

The movie is a bit divided about Francesca. In one sequence they put her in a silver blue dress and make her up so pale that she looks like she's in an older, shimmering black and white movie. During this sequence, a woman interrupts a tense exchange in a ladies room between her and the protagonist, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, whom she's hired to ghost write her life story, and Francesca snaps at the intruder, "Yes it's me--No I'm not dead!" with Sunset Boulevard flash. So Francesca has to function on the one hand as an autocrat presiding over her own celebrity. But when it turns out that the woman just wanted to know if it was okay to smoke, Parker does masterful fiddling with her spaghetti strap to indicate the extent to which Francesca can feel embarrassment, and the scene cuts to all three women smoking and talking about men. Parker thus has to go back and forth between a star's arch display and the probing of the surprisingly self-aware woman inside, and she succeeds in making them seem like two modes of temperament in a woman used to being the center of attention. Watching the petite, outsized Francesca in 'Til There Was You, you actually do feel that something Norma Desmond said applies: the movies may not be big enough for a female star like Parker anymore. But even a minor thing like 'Til There Was You shows what she can make of any opportunity that is worthy of her.