Embeth Davidtz in The Gingerbread Man (1998)

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I was shocked when I looked up the date of this film - did it really come out only a couple of years ago? Shouldn't it be from 1991 or something? No, I guess not. I guess its complete box office insignificance was what played tricks on my memory.

This movie isn't bad when you consider that it is the offspring of a marriage made in hell. In the black trunks, writing the original screenplay, we have John Grisham, champion of the conventionally plotted popular bestsellers featuring corrupt lawyers, the gap between law and justice, and larger-than-life villainy. In the other corner, wearing the white trunks, we have director Robert Altman, the irascible old challenger of filmdom's genre formats, who generally ignores plot altogether, unless he accidentally trips over it.

Altman starts right out by saying this ain't gonna be your usual film noir thriller, when he opens the film with a lengthy, virtually irrelevant helicopter shot of an unpopulated flat Georgia outback, the camera searching all the while for a car. Ah, there it is, and in that car is a semi-sleazy lawyer back from winning another tricky case, blathering away on his cell phone.

He makes his way to a celebratory party, during which Altman establishes for us that the lawyer has a weakness for good times and the ladies. As the fete ends, the lawyer sees a woman trying to catch her own car, which has apparently been stolen.

The woman is the party's caterer, and Kenneth Branagh offers her a lift home, eventually to become enmeshed in her life, a gothic Southern fable of sorts, featuring a feral, apparently crazed father who lurks in the woods half naked with other equally crazed coots, sort of like the House Republican Caucus.

Ultimately, the film becomes sort of a China Moon, Body Heat kind of picture, involving a woman who studies a useful man's weaknesses, and exploits them at every opportunity. To Altman's credit, he supplies some freshness to the usual genre contrivances. He lets all the main characters create personality quirks, and he uses music and offbeat POV shots to infuse McGuffin-like significance to numerous moments that actually have no significance, all the while having a little smirk at his red herrings.

Altman's cinematic tricks are far better than his partnership with Grisham's plotting devices, which are sometimes fumbled. For example, we have an ex-husband who seems to be a nearly-irrelevant cameo planted solely for plot exposition. That's a red herring, and Altman might have made us fall for it, except that he cast Tom Berenger in the role, thereby informing us that the character would somehow be back and be involved in a major way.

That casting was a dead giveaway which spoiled what should have been a surprise. Altman could have kept the tension inherent in the script by casting an obscure, unknown actor. Such a move would have allowed him to successfully and correctly hide the importance of the character. He failed to do so. Everyone in the theater knew that Berenger wasn't in there to play a cameo, and that the ex-husband must therefore have hidden significance which would emerge later.

Hitchcock might have cast the biggest star in Hollywood, a Mel Gibson or a George Clooney, in a major role, then killed him off in the first two minutes, and we'd be wondering when he'd return. That's the kind of trick he played with Janet Leigh in Psycho. Altman, however, isn't Hitchcock, and the casting isn't a trick. He simply gave away the surprise. (As I just did to those of you too dense to see it yourselves.)

In general, however, I thought this was a pleasant watch. The cast is great. Kenneth Branagh was quite effective and understated as the Savannah lawyer. He's quite good with the accent, as well. There are some solid background performances from Embeth Davitz, Robert Duvall, and Robert Downey, Jr. Altman didn't really do much Altmanesque except for the few touches I mentioned.

If you didn't know the director's name, you probably would never have suspected Altman's involvement in such a straightforward genre picture with so little genre deconstruction. Except for the casting mentioned above, Altman let the plot twists work their way forward without too much art or puffery or thumbprinting or character study to spoil the necessarily plot-driven script, but he did add enough characterization to make the characters less cardboard.

I didn't mind it at all, but don't go into it expecting an Altman film, because it really isn't. I suppose it isn't really Grisham, either, since he insisted on having his name removed from the screenplay credit, and the pseudonymous "Al Hayes" is the credited writer. In this case, "Al" is Grisham's story, as rewritten by Altman.

Although it doesn't have many of his touches, I suppose the quality of this is somewhere in the middle of Altman's career output. It obviously isn't Nashville or MASH, but it is a damn sight better than Popeye or Ready to Wear or Dr T. and the Women.

You don't notice this when you are watching the movie, but as I rewatched it, something dawned on me. The main set-up is impossible. How the hell could she have timed the driveaway scene after the party, which was so essential to her seduction of Branagh?

We believed that she was an innocent bystander because of the timing of that scene, but only because such a thing could not be timed, and must therefore have been sheer coincidence. When we find out that she is not an innocent bystander, we are then forced to accept that she did manage to do the impossible. I grant you that detail served to hide the fact that she was pulling the strings, but I'm not sure if it's a valid plot device if one masks the character's motivations by having them do something that can't be done.

In effect, imagine this parallel, so I don't completely spoil the plot for you. Indiana Jones thinks of a number from one to a million. A woman thinks of the same number. Indiana strikes up a conversation with her based on this coincidence, and you the audience never suspect that he is in some kind of plot in which she has arranged to meet him and use him. After all, the plotters couldn't know what he was thinking. This completely convinces you that he is not being set up, and you are drawn into the plot.

But it later turns out that the meeting was not coincidental, and that Indy was being manipulated. Ok, fair enough, you buy all that - but then you wonder "but how did they come up with the same random number"? Can't be, can it? It was just a trick to lure you into the plot, just as it lured him in. Of course, you'd never notice unless you watched the film a second time, which people rarely do with surprise ending movies. A similar thing happens in this movie.

Nudity Report: Embeth Davitz did a poorly-lit full frontal, and later did another scene in which she showed most of her butt in good light "the morning after". In the morning after scene, Kenneth Branagh was naked except for holding his clothes in his crotch.

Critics Vote: Two and a half stars. Ebert 3/4, Berardinelli 3/4, Maltin 2/4.

IMDB Summary: IMDb voters score it 5.9

DVD Info: Widescreen letterbox, 1.85:1, as well as a pan&scan fullscreen version. Full-length director commentary on the widescreen version. I was not pleased with the visual quality of the print. It is extraordinarily dark and not always well resolved.


Written by: Scoopy...Scoopy.net