Hollywood has always had the ability to turn something that is very new into something that is very old very quickly. Right now that seems to be happening with the retro duds genre. What started out as a good idea with films like Dazed and Confused, Boogie Nights and Velvet Goldmine--which introduced the young to the terrifying fashions of the '70s, while serving as a grim reminder to Baby Boomers who had lived through that sartorially toxic era--is now getting a bit out of hand.
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Weird '70s styles have dominated films from Auto Focus, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Ali to The Ladies Man, Undercover Brother, The Banger Sisters, Moonlight Mile and, of course, Almost Famous. This obsession with the lifestyles of the rich and/or oddly dressed now also encompasses the '60s (Catch Me If You Can; Down with Love; Girl, Interrupted; the Austin Powers series), and the '50s (Far from Heaven, Mona Lisa Smile, The Hours). If Hollywood doesn't get a grip soon, we're going to have Rosie O'Donnell dressed like Twiggy.
Obviously, there are clear advantages to setting movies in the relatively recent past. One reason the first two Godfather movies have not dated is because they were set in a dimly remembered period where people apparently wore some pretty swanky clothes. (The same is true of Chinatown, one of the best and best-looking movies ever set in the '30s or any other era.) Unlike other movies made in the '70s, where the clothes and hairstyles now look preposterous (The Parallax View, The Killer Elite), the Godfather movies still look absolutely fantastic. Unencumbered by bellbottoms, paisley and shags, they look as "classic" today as they did when they were made. At no point do the clothes and hairstyles hijack the motion pictures; the clothes are simply things that people wore. After all, you can't whack stoolies in your birthday suit.
By contrast, Auto Focus was almost entirely about clothing. Indeed, one of the most engrossing aspects of Paul Shrader's creepy biopic about Bob Crane, the doomed, twisted star of TV's "Hogan's Heroes," is guessing what unnerving outfit Crane's pal, played by Willem Dafoe, will turn up in next. Throughout the film, it was a mystery to me why Crane could not see that his unhealthy relationship with his babe-procuring sidekick would ultimately lead to homicide. As soon as Dafoe turned up in the checked bells, most men would have realized that this unwholesome liaison was heading straight for a date with the mortician. A grown man who would wear both checked bells and a Beatles perm was obviously capable of anything. I'm surprised a platform shoe wasn't the murder weapon.
Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven is another example of a film that is literally bludgeoned into submission by retro fashions. Cunningly disguised as a tribute to the inane Douglas Sirk films of the middle '50s, Heaven strikes me as a fierce attack on the preposterous banality of the Eisenhower Era. Whatever it is, its examination of sexual and racial mores of the '50s quickly runs out of gas, pounded into submission by the flared skirts, high heels, heavy makeup and extravagant hairstyles. It isn't a movie about how people lived in the 1950s. It's a movie about how people dressed in that strangely inanimate era.
It's not easy making sure that you put the right people in the right clothes when you're making a period film. The sappy, manipulative Moonlight Mile, which takes place in the early '70s, gets the music, hairstyles and clothing right but the actors wrong. Asking Dustin Hoffman to play a middle-aged husband and father during the Nixon years is like asking Luis Guzman to play a fop in the court of Louis XIV or casting Giovanni Ribisi as Alexander Hamilton. But the most common mistakes directors make in setting films in the recent past is exaggerating the ubiquity of the clothing styles at the time. If you look at a classic like Dog Day Afternoon, you can see that the costume designer realized that not everyone was wearing flared bell-bottoms and massive Afros back then. The suits then dressed pretty much like the suits dress now: cheap, serviceable office clothing, conservative hairstyles. Twenty years from now, if somebody decides to make a movie about the first years of the new century, chances are they'll do their research and have everyone wearing gangsta basketball jersies with lots of tattoos, doo-rags and chains, or low-rise jeans that barely cover the butt. Take a look out the window and see how many people are actually dressed that way. Most people look like they shop at Wal-mart. Most people do shop at Wal-mart.
The really smart directors avoid this trap. In Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Leonaro DiCaprio dresses like a flashy young stud, but Tom Hanks is decked out like the schlemiel that he is. The movie evokes the mood of the '60s but is not trapped by the fashions of the '60s. Contrast this with the dismal Down with Love, which futilely tries to capture the spirit of the Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn era via a blitzkrieg of slips, girdles and stringy neckties. Attention, filmmakers: There will never be another Audrey Hepburn. Nor will there ever be another Doris Day, for that matter.
In the end, the retro duds movement is an attempt to make an uninteresting story seem more appealing by outfitting the cast in leisure suits and incorporating a lot of music by The Gap Band. This isn't going to work. Chicago didn't succeed because of garter belts and spats but because it was a great story. Not that I have anything against garter belts. Especially when Catherine Zeta-Jones is wearing them. Road to Perdition would have succeeded without all those Homburgs and Tommy Guns; the story was engrossing. Gladiator isn't about tunics and helmets; it's about good versus evil. The reason Chinatown works and The Two Jakes doesn't is that the former has a memorable story. (Well, that and the fact that Roman Polanski directed the first and Jack Nicholson the second.) Not even Madeleine Stowe in an extraordinarily tight girdle can save this mess. Clothes don't make the woman. They don't make the man.
And they certainly don't make anyone want to see the movie.
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