Not Enough Wild Things

Not all movies these days are out to cheat our sexual taste-buds with cinematic NutraSweet when they hold back on depicting sex. Ronin is an example of a filmmaker getting it right. In the movie, mercenary Robert De Niro has a few days to kill before the big job he's signed on to do. He's in Paris, the city of lovers, wine shampoos and women with armpit hair. One of his partners in the big job is Irish knockout Natascha McElhone. Here's a sexual opportunity if there ever was one, but he doesn't have sex with her, and it isn't because this film takes the Salt Lake City-approved view of life. The driving force behind the sexual absenteeism in Ronin is the age-old principle of discretion: the filmmakers know we don't actually want to see De Niro have sex with McElhone. De Niro is one of the greatest actors of the past 50 years, but sexual tenderness has never really been his long suit.

He was brilliantly effective ordering Cathy Moriarty to take her panties off in Raging Bull, back-dooring Tuesday Weld in Once Upon a Time in America, sticking his finger in the pubescent Juliette Lewis's mouth in Cape Fear, and murdering Helena Bonham Carter on her wedding night in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But if De Niro is playing a sympathetic character in Ronin, why muck it up with sex? He does get to kiss McElhone, and the scene actually has some sexual playfulness. They're on a stakeout when a police car nears them, and he initiates a fake kiss to make them seem like lovers parked on the side of the road. The car passes without incident and they end their bogus embrace. Then, after they sit there in silence for a few seconds, McElhone leans over and brazenly kisses De Niro a second time. The sexual message is clear: a mere suggestion of capitulation is the better part of valor. Or, as they say over at the Theta House, I coulda fucked her.

Mrs. Dalloway is another exercise in discretion, though a different one. Mrs. Dalloway_ could have had a sex scene or two and been a stunning piece of work just the same. But the fact of the matter is, by not showing sex, the film inspires an exploration of sexual longing that might not otherwise have been as powerful. Vanessa Redgrave, as the middle-aged Mrs. Dalloway, tells her story through narration and flashbacks. We see her as a young woman (played by Natascha McElhone) in turn-of-the-century London with Peter (Alan Cox), her confidant and wild, iconoclastic partner in crime. Although she clearly loves him, she throws him off for a "responsible" marriage to a man so steeped in convention everyone makes fun of him behind his back. Peter takes to travel and failed romances until, 30 years later, he shows up on the day of one of the many parties Vanessa gives as a way of privately clinging to her past freedoms. The two lovers, who never had sex when they were young and aren't going to have it now, dance together in an affirmation of the idea that the real power of sex is in the with holding of it. Redgrave's story is a tale that has sex on the tip of everyone's tongue, yet we don't ever see anyone having it. And we don't object to that--not because we've been "subliminally" satisfied by watching the stars fondle baseball bats or take bubble baths by candlelight, but because in the absence of sex we, like the film's characters, have an experience of that intense feeling for all that might have been.

OK. Question: why is there no sex in Grosse Pointe Blank? It's a dark comedy skewed to a sexually active demographic. It stars the intelligently handsome John Cusack as a yuppie (young underworld professional) assassin - who goes back to his hometown to do a hit while he attends his 10-year high school reunion. In the process of checking out the old town, he discovers the fire's still hot with his old flame, played by the sexually affable Minnie Driver. Witty dialogue crackles like Jiffy Pop (am I missing something? Did every character in this film want to write for "Just Shoot Me"?) and the soundtrack pulses with tunes by The Specials, English Beat and other inoffensive '80s bands. But it's like having at your disposal all the ingredients for a Caesar salad and using them to make a hairpiece. What's the deal?

"John Cusack just doesn't like to take his clothes off," an industry friend explained to me. I don't buy it. My guess is that John thinks sex scenes are demeaning. I'll bet he thinks sex on-screen is mostly just gratuitous, knee-jerk, exploitive, boring stuff these days. Or that it's a mere marketing tool. People who have an inclination to be original--like Cusack--often refuse to do sex. But John cut off his dick to spite his groin. This film should have had an honest-to-Peter love scene in it.

Now for a discussion of movies that dare, even in a bleak pre-millennial era set on jailing our libidos, to show sex onscreen and do it interestingly.

One could claim, without erring on the side of exaggeration, that James Cameron has his detractors. But give the man his due. In making Titanic, he beat the odds. Enough, already, about the drama-club dialogue, the nonexistent character development and the lame "flying" scene with DiCaprio and Winslet on the prow of his Mexican knockoff. Cameron wrote in a sex scene that belonged in the movie as much as the iceberg. Look, if you're gonna get wet forever, you should at least get wet for fun first. Somehow, all the running, lifting, wading and climbing DiCaprio does to keep Winslet alive seems less futile because of that terrific, window-fogging encounter they had in the back seat of that horseless carriage. Of the handful of Titanic movies that preceded Cameron's, none had sex or--even substantial--love scenes. Hats off to Cameron for forging a full-service love story, bodice and all, out of a real-life catastrophe and pulling it off with taste, and without despoiling the memory of those who were lost in the tragedy.

So much for reassuring sex. Now let's talk about The Ice Storm. Lots of people have sex in The Ice Storm. Kevin Kline, who is conducting an affair with his neighbor's wife (Sigourney Weaver), catches Weaver's older son (Elijah Wood) about to get a hand job from his own daughter (Christina Ricci), who's wearing a Nixon mask. His own wife (Joan Allen), who knows of his affair with Weaver, wins Weaver's husband (Jamey Sheridan) in one of those car-keys-in-the-fishbowl antics that swinging couples in the 70s played, and has painfully awkward sex with him in the front seat of a car, an experience made even more pathetic by Sheridan's quick trigger. ("That was terrible!" he cries in embarrassment in one of the most heartbreaking of many heartbreaking moments in the picture.) With the exception of a poignant under-the-sheets interlude between Ricci and Adam Hann-Byrd (Weaver's younger son), none of the sex in The Ice Storm is particularly appealing. But unlike the usual sexual shenanigans, the sex here is necessary, vital and chillingly real. And whereas the use of sexual imagery in movies like City of Angels is as laughable and boorish as your Aunt Floozy on Ritalin, The Ice Storm's imagery is visual poetry--Elijah Wood kissing Christina Ricci in an empty swimming pool cluttered with fallen leaves says many things sputtering candles just can't convey.

Pages: 1 2 3 4