Attack of the Killer Second Bananas

But then the star turned into the solemn, predictable, self-absorbed Kevin Costner. Before you knew it, Costner was getting upstaged by his second bananas. Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (though Rickman is not so much a second banana as an entire plantation of bananas--all of them overripe) and Dennis Hopper in Waterworld. And then, of course, there is Lawrence Kasdan's bloated, lugubrious Wyatt Earp, which was the first installation in Kevin Costner's legendary Hat Trick of Twaddle (for more details, consult Waterworld and The Postman, which is more than enough). Ponderous, interminable, hamstrung by a cliché-laden screenplay, Wyatt Earp is also stopped dead in its tracks by a clique of ineffective villains and a harem of woefully miscast femmes fatales (whose idea was it to cast Mare Winningham as a hooker?). The only good thing in the movie, the only thing the viewer can actually look forward to, is Dennis Quaid's intermittent appearances as the sociopathic dentist-turned-gambler Doc Holliday. As opposed to everyone else in the film, who speaks in a dumb, literal, 19th-century faux-Amish patois, the courtly but brassy Quaid fires off remarks like, "My momma always told me to never put off till tomorrow people you can kill today."

Generally, second bananas steal the show by being prodigiously evil. It was the casual way Ralph Fiennes picked off moving Jewish targets in Schindler's List that made him a star; as opposed to fire-breathing villains like Christopher Walken, Fiennes perfectly captured the nihilism of Nazi Germany by dwelling on its dreariness and monotony rather than its sadism and depravity. For his concentration camp commander, killing Jews was not a crime against humanity but a laborious and fundamentally unsatisfying nine-to-five job. From the acting point of view, Fiennes's understatedly satanic performance was a classic case of less is more.

One of the strangest experiences a movie lover can have is to go back and watch classic show-stealing performances now that the person who stole the show has gone on to bigger and better things. Nicholson's performance as a dissolute southern lawyer in Easy Rider is still a revelation; he is literally telling Hollywood, "Hire me; dump Fonda." Which is precisely what Hollywood did. And Cameron Diaz, who made her breakthrough debut in The Mask, still seems like a fresh sunrise.

In compiling this tribute, I am aware that many of the very finest second bananas have been overlooked. Rupert Everett clearly steals the show from Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding, just as Matt Damon takes over Courage Under Fire and Owen Wilson upstages everybody in The Royal Tenenbaums--not an easy thing to do. In drawing attention to the great upstagers, I have tried to distinguish them from hams (Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg), wackos (Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, Amanda Plummer) and bozos (basically anyone from "Saturday Night Live"). This list of terrific performances is by no means complete. Still, it would be a craven dereliction of my duties as a film critic if I failed to address the lingering Ciccone Controversy.

Talk to the average person about movies where the second banana steals the show and they will always mention Madonna's screen debut as a brassy punk in Desperately Seeking Susan. Today, with such disasters as Who's That Girl?, Body of Evidence, The Next Best Thing and Swept Away, no one but a few near-sighted cross-dressers in Kansas City still pretends that Madonna can act. But harking back to her memorable debut, people always wonder what might have been had the fading chantoozie chosen other projects like Desperately Seeking Susan, films that utilized her talents to best effect.

But in fact, when we go back and actually look at Susan Seidelman's 1985 film, it is Rosanna Arquette who breathes life into the motion picture and Madonna who seems mechanical and artificial. Because Arquette's career didn't really go anywhere, both the public and the critics tend to misremember this film as a case where the star got the spotlight stolen right out from under her by a supporting player. Not true. It is Arquette who dominates the film with her sweet, innocent, ditzy persona, and Madonna who comes off as the second fiddle. Moreover, she comes off as a hopeless amateur--wooden, reflexively innocent, over-rehearsed, predictable, trashy--chewing gum and sneering to camouflage the fact that she cannot act. In retrospect, knowing what we now know about the star of the lifeless Evita and the moronic Shanghai Surprise, Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan was the classic overpraised dancing bear, the circus animal lauded not for its ability to dance well, but for its ability to dance at all. In short, Rosanna Arquette has been the victim of one of the greatest miscarriages of critical justice in history.

I never thought I would live to say those words.

_______________________________________

Pages: 1 2