Green Card (1990)

In Peter Weir’s Green Card, Andie MacDowell really wants that New York apartment with the dilapidated greenhouse.  Gerard Depardieu has overstayed his tourist visa and desperately requires citizenship.  He also has a juvenile criminal record.  Thanks to their mutual friend, there is a single solution to both their problems.

After their impromptu civil wedding, they go their separate ways.  But shortly thereafter, there’s Depardieu coincidentally serving MacDowell and her fellow renegade gardeners, the Green Guerillas, in a French restaurant.  He even references what they just went through.  She’s the only one who gets the joke.

Why does MacDowell need to get married just to live in a fancy building?  Well, the fussy old owners, one of whom is amusingly tiny and is quite the busybody, aren’t exactly fond of noise, something they believe only single people are guilty of.  But don’t married couples become unusually animated during rompy pompy?  And how on earth does she get away with all those rather obvious “8”s on her new marriage certificate?  (Because the movie is set days before Valentine’s Day 1990, MacDowell tries to make it look like her marriage is ten years old and therefore, more authentically established than it actually is.)

Were it not for her extensive knowledge of horticulture the whole misbegotten venture would be all for naught.  Once inside her rather spacious apartment she sees potential with that greenhouse.  In no time she restores it to its proper, vegetative lustre.

Meanwhile, the feds are cracking down on these phony green card marriages.  (Republican George H.W. Bush was the President at the time.)  And sure enough, a sighing MacDowell gets that dreaded call.  If only she could find her husband.

No longer working at that French restaurant (he was either fired or quit), a helpful waiter passes on her urgent note to him and there he is at her door.  There is barely any time to work out a fake history when a couple of INS agents enter and start interrogating.  There’s a briefly funny moment when Depardieu instantly realizes he doesn’t know where the bathroom is.  But then the joke is beaten to death as the clueless Frenchman uses process of elimination and a weak excuse to get through this pitiful ordeal.

When they first meet in the opening moments of the film, I felt an instant chemistry.  But after the always reliable Robert Prosky (Mrs. Doubtfire), MacDowell’s trusted attorney in his only scene, suggests they temporarily live together, since they’re going to be questioned again in separate government rooms, and finally work out a proper, hopefully convincing backstory, it curiously slips away.

That’s because Green Card settles disappointingly into Romantic Comedy Formula.

First, there’s awkwardness.  The big, lumbering Depardieu, think a better looking Quasimodo without the hump, clumsily and accidentally breaks a picture frame.  He also takes it upon himself to remove some of MacDowell’s plants and replaces them with vegetable seeds.  He doesn’t even bother to clean up his mess.  (To be fair, she’s fine with the fish he brings her.)

Then, there’s tension.

He’s right-wing (well, more of a domineering guy than anything else), she’s protested for abortion rights.

He devours fatty meat.  She eats “birdseed”.

He’s a slob.  She might as well be Adrian Monk.

He’s open with his emotions.  She’s closed off.

He’s a smoker.  Not on her watch.

Then, there’s anger.

She’s not happy about him suddenly showing up at an important dinner party.  And then there’s their obligatory Big Fight which erupts inconveniently just before their crucial follow-up interviews with the already suspicious immigration police.  They have to haul ass on foot when their cab gets stuck in traffic.

At no time beyond their early encounters is it ever believable that these two opposites, only paired for mutually selfish convenience, would suddenly lust and care for each other by the very end of a single, tightly wound weekend.  The whole thing feels very forced today.

I’ve neglected to mention a crucial plot point.  MacDowell already has a real boyfriend, a fellow gardener who we meet briefly at the start.  Then, after a badly timed phone call (he rings her right in the middle of that first INS interrogation), he disappears for more than an hour only to return to face a grumpy, territorial Depardieu upon entering MacDowell’s apartment for the first time.

This does not make her look very sympathetic.  In fact, if I was her boyfriend (who wouldn’t date this gorgeous gal?), I would be very insulted by this shocking turn of events.  I mean, the moment you think about marrying someone, albeit for a very dumb reason, you select this giant French douche instead of me?  And you’ve kept it a secret all this time?

The boyfriend, who MacDowell says she loves but who knows (their relationship doesn’t sparkle, either, and he seems controlling, too), makes an idle threat against his sudden rival and then exits for good.  I would’ve loved to have seen a post-credits sequence where the two exes still have to work together cultivating gardens for inner city youth.

Green Card is both a drama and a romantic comedy and that’s a problem.  Peter Weir, the film’s writer and director, is not known for hilarity, and this story, when it’s not trying to be funny (and it needed to try a lot harder, quite frankly), can’t be taken at face value.  It’s too absurd to be moving and not absurd enough to be consistently amusing.

Weir is more famous for serious fare like Witness and The Year Of Living Dangerously, although yes, he did direct Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.  For what it’s worth, I thoroughly enjoyed Fearless, his seriously underappreciated 1993 drama about a Christ-like Jeff Bridges experiencing a temporary, euphoric reawakening while his fellow plane crash survivors struggle with their own traumatic guilt.

It’s hard to find the right balance of tone in a hybrid film like Green Card.  Weir is unable to achieve it.  Curiously, I felt differently 29 years ago.

Having just completed a second screening, though, I’m not so fond of it today.  I did prefer it as a teen when I saw it with my mom at the cinema but I don’t remember laughing that much.  I must’ve preferred the dramatic elements and viewed it more through that limited scope.  Indeed, there are only four laughs in the entire film, all of them contained in the first half.  The biggest coming from an unexpected argument about the stunning Bebe Neuworth’s artistic merit.

She plays MacDowell’s best friend who she encounters unexpectedly at the grocery store.  The saucy, supremely confident Neuworth, who may or may not be a porn star (which is way more intriguing to contemplate than this sizzle-free romance) but is most likely a provocative artist, takes an immediate liking to Depardieu who invites her to lunch in MacDowell’s apartment.  (The uneasy wife isn’t happy about this.)  The usually funny Neuworth, still best known for being cold, deadpan and detached on Cheers and Frasier, is better than the lines she’s given, although during the dinner party, I was amused by her positive reaction to Depardieu’s unorthodox piano recital.  As an aside, her leg muscles were incredible back then.  (She’s also had great success on Broadway in shows like Chicago.)

Ah yes, the dinner party where we learn that Depardieu really is an aspiring composer and not just using MacDowell as a free ride into America.  Let’s just say John Cage is a bad influence on him.  “It’s not Mozart,” indeed.  And give me a break with that regurgitated spoken word shtick.

I had forgotten almost everything about this movie except the finale when one massive slip-up by Depardieu (which I didn’t quite remember perfectly) somehow gets MacDowell off the hook but him that much closer to a plane ride back home.  It upset me more as a kid than as a man.

When they famously reunite at the cafe seen earlier in the film it’s supposed to be this big pay-off, this heartbreakingly ironic realization that through the shameless charade of creating a fake history between themselves (which includes taking a whole lot of staged Polaroid selfies) they’ve somehow connected in a real way.  They just can’t carry on being together any more because of the law.  But of course, what’s stopping her from visiting him in France?

I have a longtime crush on MacDowell who was so much better in Groundhog Day and Four Weddings & A Funeral, two of the best romantic comedies of the 90s.  Like Neuworth, she passes Gene Siskel’s Movie Star Test.  She looks fabulous in close-up, even today in her early 60s.  (She was in last year’s skipable Ready Or Not.)  But as likeable as she is in the movies, I wonder what Julia Louis-Dreyfus could’ve done with this part instead.  Louis-Dreyfus has this wonderfully comic physicality about her, so evident throughout her long, celebrated run on Seinfeld.  You know a lot of that isn’t scripted.  It’s purely her masterful interpretation and anticipation of Elaine’s body movements and facial expressions.

There are a number of times when MacDowell, an expressive actor in her own right, is called to do something similar, usually in reaction to a gesture or lie by Depardieu or the very real terror of her strange secret being exposed.  However, those sometimes wide-eyed reactions just aren’t funny, like they should be.  But it’s not entirely her fault.  This material is really begging to be a more fully invested screwball comedy, instead of the half-assed, comically limp drama it actually is.  I’m genuinely surprised now that Neuworth doesn’t bed her husband.

As for Depardieu, he was so much better in the excellent Cyrano De Bergerac, released the same year as Green Card.  This time, though, I fail to see the slovenly charm that MacDowell quietly falls for.  (Yes, she agrees with him, privately, that her exquisitely dark, curly mane looks best down on her shoulders but man, everybody knows that.  It’s not exactly an insightful observation.)  He’s too domineering at times when he’s not oddly self-deprecating (not sure that uncanny pig sound is a big turn on) and left adrift without any good zingers.  So strange that their instant chemistry at the start is long absent by the time they move in together.  After all this time, I’m no longer taken with their sped-up, dishonest romance.  I much prefer rocking out to the talented young street drummer during the opening credits.

30 years after its Christmas Day release, Green Card is a lesser entry in the Peter Weir catalogue, a peculiar curiosity that I’m sure holds some appeal for fans of the genre but for me, three decades later, it’s now a badly dated miss.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, July 24, 2020
3:27 a.m.

The Invisible Man (2020)

It is far too easy to get in and all but impossible to get out.

To find yourself unwittingly trapped in an abusive relationship is to find yourself the unwelcome star of your own private horror movie.  Lured by an attractive charmer only to discover you’ve fallen for an insecure beast, a most terrifying dilemma.

Cecilia Kass knows this all too well.  For over two years, she’s been involved with a mad scientist named Adrian.  He controls every aspect of her life:  what she eats, what she wears, what she says, even what she thinks.  He knows a lot of her secrets.  He uses violence to punish her for even the slightest “infraction”.  He cannot and will not accept her as autonomous and independent.  He’s R. Kelly in whiteface.

They live together in a modern-day fortress.  Car alarms in the garage, security cameras everywhere else.  There’s even a giant wall separating his labyrinthian property from the outside world.  Only the truly courageous would ever attempt a departure.

But in the gripping opening eleven minutes of The Invisible Man, a petrified Cecelia through pluck, luck and skill manages to do just that on her desperate quest to achieve long sought liberation.  In an instant, we understand her fear.

As played by Elizabeth Moss in a breakthrough performance, she is so traumatized by Adrian she remains on high alert.  Two weeks after escaping, there she is still unable to doze off, standing and staring transfixed out of the window while her cop friend James (a wide-eyed and sometimes sarcastic Aldis Hodge) tries to comfort her and convince her that she’s no longer in danger.  She’s become so agoraphobic, even making it to the mailbox just steps from the house is an unbearable ordeal.

But once she manages to do it, there’s a letter that will change her life.

Adrian has apparently committed suicide.  (Is that urn even full of anyone’s ashes?)  His brother Tom (slimy Michael Dorman), a lawyer representing his estate, informs Cecelia, in the presence of her loyal, no-nonsense sister Emily (Harriet Dyer), she has inherited five million dollars to be paid in $100000 monthly installments.  Adrian has also left behind a bitter parting statement.  Tom only gets to read the beginning because an indignant Emily rightly cuts him off.

As a thank you for taking her in, Cecelia buys James a new ladder which his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid) climbs to discover an envelope that reveals a college fund has been established in her name.  The champagne flows and the mood, for once, is jubilant.

But, of course, it will be short lived.  Cecelia will soon discover what the audience already knows.  Adrian faked his death to secretly spy on her.  That’s not all he does.

Through clever special effects, we see just how easy it is for the now invisible Adrian to wreak havoc on Cecelia’s already fragile state without being detected.

He secretly drugs her, cleverly sabotages an important job interview, steals a big knife from the kitchen counter while surreptitiously burning her bacon and eggs, sends a brutal email to her deeply insulted sister (the victim-blaming is not cool) and continually attacks her on multiple occasions.  In a very effective scene, she is startled to find him standing on the comforter he yanks off her and Sydney in their bedroom.  In an even better one, they have a violent struggle in the kitchen.

When Adrian attacks Sydney out of nowhere, the poor kid, completely disoriented and confused, wrongly blames Cecilia.  A now infuriated James removes his daughter and himself from the scene (instead of conducting the more obvious eviction suggesting he’s conflicted about truly abandoning her longterm) leaving an increasingly mortified Cecelia alone with her attacker.  Dialing her persistent ex’s cellphone leads her up to her friend’s attic where she discovers the knife and her missing architecture drawings.  She also confirms her suspicions.

It’s all too common in horror films for the heroes to be disbelieved despite being absolutely right about what’s happening to them.  The disbelievers tend to be portrayed as gullible idiots.  The genius of The Invisible Man is that the manipulative Adrian, always a couple of steps ahead, justifies their doubts about Cecelia by making it look like she’s responsible for his diabolical acts in very convincing ways.  When she rightly pleads her innocence it’s plausible to believe she’s the one who’s delusional and paranoid based on the available evidence.

The shocking scene in the restaurant being a key example.  How can you prove you’re innocent when you’re the one holding the murder weapon?  Not only is Adrian able to get away with so much cruelty, he has a co-conspirator.  Cecelia immediately senses this, as do we, long before that belated confession.

Running a little over two hours, The Invisible Man, which has next to nothing in common with the H.G. Wells novel beyond the title, despite having some familiar, predictable elements, never once feels bloated or overlong, a rarity for horror films that run longer than a hundred minutes.

From the very beginning, we’re on Cecelia’s side.  She is sweet, necessarily resourceful and no longer resigned to being a victim.  We appreciate her complicated sister.  We like James and Sydney, too.  There’s a very good scene where father and daughter are attacked in their own home.  Storm Reid’s emotional reactions are disturbingly effective.

Elizabeth Moss reminds me a lot of Jodie Foster with her similar look and low-key vulnerability.  The greatest instrument a horror actor has is their face and Moss makes the most of hers like in the scene where she walks into her friend’s bathroom and just stares blankly into space still processing Adrian’s “suicide”.  Or that intense look she gives Tom when he offers her two shitty deals to end her suffering.  It’s a testament to her talent that she made me forget she’s a dopey Scientologist in real life.

The mostly unseen Adrian is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen who, when we do see his face, resembles Adam Levine but with a creepy smile.  We despise his misogyny and his heartlessness.  He’s like Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List.  He doesn’t want to kill Cecelia, despite frequently assaulting her, he would rather torture her for the rest of her life by pinning all his crimes on her and force her to live with him in perpetual misery.  When he kills, and he kills a lot of people in this movie, it’s to transfer his guilt onto her.  He’s an absolute master of gaslighting.  The goal is to make her submit and completely dependent on him.

But he’s also quite arrogant.  Despite coming up with a pretty good scheme to explain away his disappearance, Cecelia is on to him.  There’s a scene where she returns to his fortress and makes an important discovery.  That eventually pays off in an expected way during the film’s satisfying conclusion.  His sudden nice guy act fools no one.

Some will question her morality but many, who know firsthand the nature of abusers, and how the “justice” system is incapable of holding them to account and even reforming them, will be envious and hopefully find catharsis.  On the other hand, I suspect many survivors will feel too triggered to even watch this.  There are a lot of tense moments.

A cross between Sleeping With The Enemy and Hollow Man, but a whole lot smarter and scarier, The Invisible Man is an unexpected sleeper.  Written and directed by frequent Saw & Insidious collaborator Leigh Whannell, this is easily his best work.  Were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, it would’ve been an even bigger theatrical hit than it already was.  Surprisingly made for less than ten million and earning over a hundred million internationally, it is a deservedly profitable success.

The Australian filmmaker understands what Cecelia is going through.  In a later scene where she’s trying to explain to James the cop that Adrian remains a threat to her well-being despite the final events in his house, she correctly observes that his whole motivation is to make her out to be “the crazy one”.  To his credit, James is no longer a doubter, ditto the teenage Sydney.

Whannell has sympathy for his heroine, except for the ill-advised comment a wounded Emily makes about Cecelia being too “weak” to leave the formidable Adrian on her own.  That should’ve been scrapped and feels needlessly mean.  He apparently has less sympathy for Adrian’s dog, Zeus, who remains on his property seemingly all alone with no one apparently caring for him, except for the few moments where he runs into Cecelia.

Because Adrian is so determined to control her entire life from the shadows, we see firsthand the power an abuser, especially one with institutional and financial protections, can wield for so long with zero consequences.  He even manages to make himself look sympathetic at one point.  When you can control the narrative in seemingly endless ways, you are invincible.  Perhaps that should’ve been the title:  The Invincible Man.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, July 5, 2020
10:27 p.m.