*1 ARTS The Michigan Daily Friday, November 1, 1991 Page 8 'Billy continues movies' r 'y marriage to the mob Billy Bathgate dir. Robert Benton by Aaron Hamburger Billy Bathgate is a beautiful, well- crafted movie with fine per- formances, lyrical cinematography and believable dialogue. It's a shame that the film has absolutely no rea- son to exist. Based on the book by E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate follows the adventures of the title character (Loren Dean), an Irish kid from the Bronx. In the film, Billy works his way up the ranks of the local mob, run by the violent, desperate Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman). Along the way, Bathgate falls in love with Schultz's sultry paramour, Mrs. Preston (Nicole Kidman, with a convincing American accent), a woman Billy has sworn to protect. Director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the heart) has carefully constructed the movie, which never missteps from begin- ning to end. Each individual scene is well-shot, believably acted and well-written. The fluid plot is ex- citing and easy to follow. So why complain, you ask? Because at the end of the movie, you're left with nothing. What ex- actly is the theme of Billy Bathgate, anyway? The only consistent ideas advanced by the narrative are that it's good to be lucky and that being in the Mafia can be dangerous. So what? I've seen The Godfather. I've seen Goodfellas. Credit screenwriter Tom Stop- pard for the failure of this movie. Stoppard's script for The Russia House, another bestselling novel that should have made a good film, had similar problems. Although Stoppard does a better job elucidat- ing the plot and creating believable characters with Bathgate, he fails to give Bathgate's script a central theme. Dean does as well as he possibly can with a depression-era version of the Ray Liotta role from Goodfellas - the insider who sees all, but is just far enough removed from the action to be an observer. The critical difference between Bathgate and Goodfellas is that'in the latter film, the audience got to see the observer's reactions through Liotta's voice-overs. Here, all we get is Dean's blank, unexpressive face, which isn't enough to give this picture the central focus it so des- perately needs. In the role of Dutch Schultz, Hoffman hardly raises his voice, yet manages to show the dangerous, un- controllable side of his character through sudden flare-ups. Hoff- man's face doesn't move a muscle when, without warning, he shoots a man in the face during an argument. His Schultz believes that he can control any situation, which is ironic, since Schultz's lack of con- trol over his own temper causes his downfall. A lot of talent and dedication went in to the making of Billy See BILLY, Page 9 :' James Spader and Kenny G reminisce about kumquats and the time they were locked in a closet together, as Karen Peris suddenly realizes husband Don is wearing her spiked heels. The Innocence Mission takes post-Godspellsuccess day by... Dustin Hoffman brutally tortures Bruce Willis in the only redeeming scene in the film adaption of E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate. These guys have got some pluck by Jeff Rosenberg She speaks softly: "I don't know why we thought of that name. We liked the idea that it was a name that might give people a picture, a name that people could see and have their own impression of. It doesn't have a definition. I always have a picture of a grade school or an old house - an old family house. I like to think that it's that kind of place." Karen Peris' warm, fuzzy non- definition of her band's nom de plume, the Innocence Mission, may help distinguish the band's sound from contemporaries like 10,000 Maniacs - which the Innocence Mission certainly is not. Most of the Mission's member met in a high school production of Godspell, and they've stuck to- gether for a total of nine and a half years of jamming. "We feel really grateful to have each other, and... there's so many shared experiences with high school, and our families and so many things, that we feel that we understand each other," Peris says. The band's second album, Um- brella, is quite different from its self-titled debut. But the lyrics on Umbrella float along just as well as on Innocence Mission, as seen in "You Chase the Light" - "You get out of my head/ You and your colors/ You and your painting/ I can forget you/ Probably." The album also has Cocteau-Twins-like guitars which lurk dreamily in many of the spaces that were filled by piano and synths on the first album. "The 'i always have a picture of a grade school or an old family house. I like to think that it's that kind of place' -Karen Pens, on the 'Innocence Mission' keyboards are much more subtle on this album," Peris notes. Harmonies and acoustic-guitar work stand out in "Revolving Man." And the niftiest track may be the last - "My Waltzing Days are Over," which sounds just like you think it would. Why "Umbrella", a less promi- nently guitar-based tune, as the title track? "That song connects with some of the other songs on the al- bum, and (perhaps) what it stands for, what I see as my weaknesses, and frailty," Peris says quietly. So after all the murmuring and soft speaking Peris does, can she sing, you ask? Oh yes. She waile briefly and deeply on the heavy- beated "And Hiding Away," and- stretches her voice endlessly long, on "Joan." Recently, Peris and her husband Don, the band's guitarist, teamed up- with Peter Himmelman to do a tune, and Ms. Peris also sang on re- cent works by John Hiatt and Joni Mitchell. She considers it an honor to have worked with each of these artists. Is there some message the Inno-, cence Mission would like to give to the masses? "People should get a picture, maybe of things they thought to themselves, but haven't spoken out loud," Peris whispers. THE INNOCENCE MISSION plaj tonight at the Blind Pig. Tickets are $7.50. 1' Liz Patton The string quartet is an esoteric genre, whether you're talking about he classics of Mozart or modern standards like Bartok and Hin- demith. But, insists Eugene Drucker, one of the two "first violinists" in the Emerson String Quartet, "The string quartet is alive and well. Most composers who are really serious about their craft try to write string quartets. This has been the case since the eighteenth century, and it doesn't seem to be diminishing." Celebrating 50 years of chamber music at Rackham Auditorium, the Emerson String Quartet comes to Ann Arbor for their second appear- ance. They will play a new work, Richard Wernick's Quartet No. 4 (1990), as well as two more tradi- tion al works, Mendelssohn's Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 No. 3, and Beethoven's Quartet in A mi- nor Op. 132. The Quartet actively commis- sions and performs modern music. Richard Wernick's quartet was commissioned by Emerson and pre- miered in April of this year. Performing a new work is not at all like dusting off a score of Mozart or Haydn - living composers can be very critical of a rendition of their work. But Wernick has been very supportive and positive about Emerson's work with this piece, says Drucker. "Composers can be really spe- cific about balance of chords and in- tonation, something that we might not hear right away, because the chords are very dissonant," he ex- plains. "More often, what com- posers are looking for is the flow, the shape of the thing." Composers might explain the artistic reason for cadences at a certain point, or sug- gest how tension should be main- tained through dramatic pauses, Drucker says. "These are things that can't re- ally be spelled out in manuscripts," he continues. The composer may not even think about such things until hearing the piece played for the first time, he says, because the experience of hearing it in "real time," rather than "mental time," is different from the act of conceiving music. What does the group look for in commissioning a new work? "Well, we never know quite what we're go- ing to get," says Drucker. "We can't know whether a brand-new piece is going to last in historical terms. "We just want something that will be convincing on its own terms. And we hope that the lan- guage will not be so backward-look- ing that we're playing a re-hash of something from the nineteenth cen- tury, because there's plenty of great music from the nineteenth century. On the other hand, we don't like things that seem totally abstract in their musical language. We want something with an emotional, vis- ceral impact." In addition to challenging them- selves with new music, each member of the quartet continues with solo work and teaching. "We try to keep ourselves fresh in that way," says Drucker. "We keep our contribution to the quartet fresh by finding ex- posure in other ways. It strengthens our individual identities. That's part of what our quartet is based on: hav- ing four strong individuals who come together in a dynamic way." On top of a busy touring sched- ule, the Emerson Quartet issues a steady stream of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. In 1990, the group became the first chamber en- semble ever to win the Grammy award for Best Classical Album, with a recording of the complete Bartok string quartets. Capitalizing on its recent fame with this set, the quartet will hold a reception and record-signing at SKR Classical on East Liberty right after the concert. Pleased with their success, the members are willing to share their See EMERSON, Page 9 Stranger Than Paradise dir. Jim Jarmusch Jim Jarmusch's first movie, Stranger Than Par- adise, is a comedy about being bored and lonely in America. As an immigrant from Eastern Europe, Jar- musch (Down By Law, Mystery Train) has an off-beat view of American life that is simultaneously hysteri- cal and depressing. Peppering his debut with his own curious foreign perceptions, he has made Stranger Than Paradise extremely strange. The film's central character, Willie (John Lurie), was born in Hungary, but has been living a seedy life in New York for over 10 years. Willie is so intent on blending into urban under-culture that he wants noth- ing to do with his native language, his native land and his Hungarian relatives. When his cousin Eva arrives from Budapest, Willie at first resents her for her old world ways: he seethes whenever she asks him to ex- plain TV dinners and football. Soon, however, he grows to like her in a sardonically understated way. After Eva moves on to Cleveland, Willie realizes just how alone he is, and he and his endearingly goofy friend Eddie (Richard Edson) drive off to find her. The humor in Stranger Than Paradise is incredibly subtle. The script and the actors are so deadpan that, if you want to laugh, you have to think hard about how preposterous their situations are. Most of the jokes in the film come when characters say and do embarrass- ingly inappropriate things, such as when Eva is escorted: on a date and Eddie sits between her and her beau, reach-', ing uninvited into their popcorn. The movie itself seems inappropriate at times, too. Scenes go on well af- ter most movies would have ended them; some of them last so long after the characters have run out of things to say that their awkwardness becomes a joke in and of itself. Stranger Than Paradise is as visually quirky as its humor. Almost every camera angle is eccentric and oblique. In every shot, Jarmusch fixes the camera on a tripod and doesn't move it again. Since there are no cuts in the middle of scenes, you end up being stuck with the first view the director gives you - you're trapped watching people who are themselves trapped with nothing to do. That kind of clever device recurs throughout the movie, and the intelligence that in. spired the effects is what makes Stranger Than Par-V adise so strange; you have to feel a little weird enjoy- ing the ingenuity and humor behind a movie about someone else's existential emptiness. Stranger Than Paradise is playing tomorrow night at 7 p.m., 8:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. in Angell Hall Aud A. -Gabriel Feldberg ' *1 r mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmq g KEVIN COSTNER g I Y I I FrdI IG 1 I X v PPs I I 91 , rn~os!ta~ o PUSC~oap l ~SRSre AFtboFt 761- 3.00 DAILY SHOWS BEFORE 6 PM ALL DAY TUESDAY* -exception STUDENT WITH I.D. $3.30 GOODRICH QUALITY THEATERS * * *1* '............T CITY OF HOPE , Combo Coupon! Present this coupon for a free large drink when you purchase a Iarna nnnrnrrn ****l Exceptional, so delightfully different and daring that it ranawxnn faith ( 1Ii .. . - v- . A woPf.w 4m A-"