Books, Arts & Manners: Exaltation in Alaska, Degradation in Hollywood

FEMALE buddy pictures are getting to be the thing: Thelma and Louise and Fried Green Tomatoes are now followed by Leaving Normal, which, like the first of the above, is both a road and a buddy movie, minus the exaggeration and violence. I wish I could report that this restraint made it better. There are screenwriters to whom honest understatement is of no help. I cannot say whether in the case of Edward Solomon, whose first solo writing venture this is (the two Bill and Ted films, which I missed, were collaborations), dishonest overstatement would constitute an improvement, but this attempt to write about two engagingly oddball women, to whom quaint but not all that uncommon things happen, does not work well for him. The mundane and the madcap are a tricky pair to blend, and the early films of Jonathan Demme (Citizens’ Band and Melvin and Howard) are the only recent examples of good screwball comedy I can think of.

Here we get Marianne Johnson, a sweet young woman whose optimism refuses to bow to the buffetings she has received since early childhood, culminating in two failed marriages. She is on the lam from the disastrous second, fleeing from a brutish husband in the fictitious burg of Normal, Wisconsin, with nothing but the clothes on her back, when she runs into her exact opposite. Darly Peters, a cynical cocktail waitress intimately acquainted with the seamier side of life, is headed for Alaska, where she owns a house and property and expects to make a fresh start away from cocktail lounges and the wolfish lizards inhabiting them.

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John Simon

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FEMALE buddy pictures are getting to be the thing: Thelma and Louise and Fried Green Tomatoes are now followed by Leaving Normal, which, like the first of the above, is both a road and a buddy movie, minus the exaggeration and violence. I wish I could report that this restraint made it better. There are screenwriters to whom honest understatement is of no help. I cannot say whether in the case of Edward Solomon, whose first solo writing venture this is (the two Bill and Ted films, which I missed, were collaborations), dishonest overstatement would constitute an improvement, but this attempt to write about two engagingly oddball women, to whom quaint but not all that uncommon things happen, does not work well for him. The mundane and the madcap are a tricky pair to blend, and the early films of Jonathan Demme (Citizens’ Band and Melvin and Howard) are the only recent examples of good screwball comedy I can think of.

Here we get Marianne Johnson, a sweet young woman whose optimism refuses to bow to the buffetings she has received since early childhood, culminating in two failed marriages. She is on the lam from the disastrous second, fleeing from a brutish husband in the fictitious burg of Normal, Wisconsin, with nothing but the clothes on her back, when she runs into her exact opposite. Darly Peters, a cynical cocktail waitress intimately acquainted with the seamier side of life, is headed for Alaska, where she owns a house and property and expects to make a fresh start away from cocktail lounges and the wolfish lizards inhabiting them.