Customer Reviews

Unstrung Heroes [VHS]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Unstrung Heroes is one of my alltime favorite books, and I was deeply disappointed how the filmmakers homogenized, pasteurized, de-ethnisized and generally watered it down. Granted, paring is a function of filmmaking - but the treacley script fails to capture the memoir's honesty, humor or dark irony. Unlike the book, the film wallows in sentimentality. Gone are 2 of the uncles - most missed is Uncle Leo, whom the young boy visits in the asylum that's been his home for more than 30 years. Instead of being genuinely mad and edgy, the two remaining uncles play out like Oscar and Felix on The Odd Couple. (They've been Disneyfied, like the rest of the major characters). And the boy's profoundly evil best friend - Ash - is reduced to a sort of Eddie Haskell. This film loses a lot - mostly an urban edge - by shifting locales from New York City to Pasadena (!!!) On top of that, the father (John Turturro) is shorn of all humor - the Sidney Lidz portrayed in the book was an extremely witty (though deeply flawed) man. Turturro does a fantastic job with a badly scripted, unplayable part. He transcends this disappointing adaptation and warrants 5 stars. And Disney has added all kinds of dopey capers (like the boy "saving" his uncles from eviction) to "move the action along." Really dumb and insulting to the viewer! My advice: Buy the book! It's richly rewarding, still in paperback and dirt-cheap.

It's interesting to watch the jagged leaps and bounds by which this hilarious, unsentimental Lower East Side memoir became a sentimental tearjerker about a beautiful mother dying of cancer in L.A. That Hollywood gets Jewishness wrong again and again should come as a surprise to no one (Remember Melanie Griffith in "A Stranger Among Us"?) But the story of "Unstrung Heroes" is a rather spectacular example of Disney not getting anything about New York at all. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this sanitized ode to motherhood is that it is practically impossible to watch without crying. Billed as a Jewish "Terms of Endearment", it's really just another Light-Hearted Weepie that plucks at the heartstrings pretty darn hard.

This sappy, syrupy reworking of a splendid memoir is only affecting because it manipilates audiences by focus group-tested Hollywood formula. Sadly, the filmmakers were too callow to take even minimal risks and follow the book, which is exciting and volatile and genuinely affecting. The memoir survives on its honesty -- the film is hollow from its first false frame to its last. Only John Turturro's brilliant performance redeems this cheap, commercial project. But then, what else would you expect from Disney?

I believe, having never read the book, that I can offer an unbiased opinion of this silly movie. Unstrung Heroes is packed with the kind of creepy-cozy sentiment that always spurs me to tune in to ESPN in fervent hopes of finding a good soccer brawl from Wales. An overbaked '60s memory movie about death and rampant crackpotism, infused with a subsidiary line of sugary pathos designed to squeeze from susceptible viewers a bucketful of crocodile tears. I can be as readily manipulated as the next person, but only in directions I want to go - and Light-Hearted Weepie has never been my favorite destination. Is there an honest moment in this film? I think not, which is why I intend to buy the book. I hear it's truly wonderful.

I liked this movie a lot, until I read the following by Franz Lidz, the book's author (now I like it a lot less) (The book is great!):At the other end of this decade I wrote a childhood memoir ("Unstrung Heroes") that recounted my mother's six-year struggle with breast cancer. From my ninth birthday, in Year Two, almost every step she took was a step going down. "Her hospital stays were becoming longer and longer," I recalled. "I measured them by the nights that she was away. And I didn't like it now when she was home. She had become unpredictable. She wasn't dying like some movie heroine. She could be sullen and bad-tempered. I resented her." And yet when Disney adapted the book for the screen in 1995, my mother, Selma, was shown dying EXACTLY like a movie heroine. No anguished outbursts. No unkind thoughts. No endless days lying mute and tubed and suctioned in grim hospital rooms. My mother's celluloid counterpart (Andie McDowell) was a secular saint whose main cancer symptom was that she tripped over furniture. What I had described as a long, painful, ugly death was made quick, painless, almost pretty. On film, the more the cancer spread, the more luminous my mother became, as if she were pregnant, not ill. The way Disney spun cotton candy around my mother's suffering reminded me of Ali MacGraw's blissful description of her six-minute struggle with cancer in "Love Story" (1970). "It doesn't hurt, Ollie, really it doesn't," Ms. MacGraw, as Jenny, told her husband (Ryan O'Neal). "It's like falling off a cliff in slow motion. Only after a while you wish you hit the ground already." The way Disney killed off my mother -- after fixing pancakes, she praises her kids, plants a perversely passionate kiss on her husband's lips and, to soulful strains of "You Are My Sunshine," drifts off to die in a comfy armchair -- reminded me of Mad magazine's send-up of "Love Story." Instead of cancer, the diagnosis for Ms. MacGraw's character was Old Movie Disease. "In the old days, they used to die beautiful glamorous deaths!" a cartoon oncologist tells O'Neal. "Your wife is going to die such a beautiful death, it'll take your breath away before it takes her breath away." The Big C has always been a fruitful subgenre of Old Movie Diseases. Actresses from Bette Davis ("Dark Victory," brain tumor, 1939) to Debra Winger ("Terms of Endearment," lymphoma, 1983) to Diane Keaton ("Marvin's Room," leukemia, 1997) have received Oscar nominations for playing cancer victims. The latest Hollywood divas to brave cancer on the screen are Meryl Streep ("One True Thing") and Susan Sarandon ("Stepmom"). Both play well-off, middle-aged domestic goddesses, but only Ms. Streep is made to look ravaged by the disease. Her skin pale gray, her eyes rimmed red like a Kabuki's, she becomes so gaunt and frail that in the film's most affecting scene, she has to be lifted out of the bathtub by her daughter. Reduced to a miserable shell, she weeps, rages, endures Bette Midler songs and yet -- inevitably -- maintains her nobility. "Terminal illnesses can inspire voyeurism," Jackson Peyton, a public health consultant in Washington, said in a telephone interview. "Unable to find meaning in their own lives, some people seek it through the drama of the fatal sicknesses of others. But the hard reality of dying is brutally disappointing. For the most part, the deaths of cancer victims don't play out like characters in 19th-century novels or 20th-century films. The truth is that most suffer terribly, and many unload their bitterness on their loved ones." Old Movie Disease-driven films support their romantic agendas by evading and overlooking hard realities. The chaos and horror of cancer are papered over with sentiment and sanctimony, then packaged as a higher state of being. Hollywood cancer mutates ordinary people into angelic beings who straighten out the lives of all the mixed-up souls around them. In "Marvin's Room," the selfless Ms. Keaton draws on an inexhaustible fund of goodness to teach her selfish sister (Ms. Streep) to be more humane. In "One True Thing," the upright Ms. Streep is sacrificed so that her icily ambitious daughter (Renee Zellweger) can learn "life lessons" and turn compassionate caregiver. In "Stepmom," cancer works curative wonders on Ms. Sarandon's prickly perfect homemaker. She remains hostile toward her ex-husband's trophy wife-to-be (Julia Roberts) until, succumbing to the dynamics of the honeyed plot and repeated dosings of her own cancer theme song ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough"), she wearily slouches toward canonization. The more advanced the cancer, the more potent its redemptive powers. Terminal cancer trumps a relatively benign strain in "The Doctor," a 1991 tearjerker in which William Hurt sinks from lordly physician to lowly patient. Stricken with a treatable form of throat cancer, the chilly, insensitive heart surgeon befriends a fellow patient (Elizabeth Perkins) with an inoperable brain tumor. This doomed (and, of course, radiant) young woman guides him on one of those journeys of self-discovery that can begin and end only in Hollywood. Along the way, he learns to appreciate sunsets, desert dancing and rooftop pigeons. Watching this once heartless cardiologist transform into a benevolent St. Francis, replete with birds, I was reminded of another exchange in Mad's spoof. The oncologist tells a shaken Ryan O'Neal: "I'm afraid it's out of our hands." "You mean medical science is powerless?" O'Neal asks. "What medical science!? I'm talking about CINEMA science! Think back! What have we got so far? A corny soap-opera plot! Unbelievable dialogue! A schmaltzy piano music background! Can't you see? If the producer doesn't have a tragic, sobbing ending to make all this garbage seem meaningful, he's got absolutely nothing!" Someday somebody may find a cure for cancer, but the terminal sappiness of cancer movies is probably beyond remedy.

In its quaint, neutered cuteness, the word "quirky" has become an oxymoronic cliche - a way of making unconventionality seem blandly conventional. Quirky is the perfect word for the characters in this cinematic bastardization of a great, moving book. The four mad uncles have been reduced to a couple of only-in-the-movies harmless eccentrics. Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, director Diane Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence of the Harold and Maude crazy-people-are-more-in-touch-with-life-than-the-rest-of-us genre. But the black hole of the film is Michael (Kramer) Richards, who's opaque when trying to play a character with hidden depth. His "demetia" is weightless, and so, finally, is Unstrung Heroes.

This is what happens when a genuinely funny, and touching memoir is eviscerated by Hollywood hacks. The unflinching book was full of whimsy and gentle irony; the film trades on sentiment and New Age wisdom. The book brings to life a whole gallery of strange and wonderful people. The film softens all their edges (or eliminates them entirely) and becomes a golden-hued dying-mother tearjerker that's undone by its shaky premise that crazy people are more in touch with life than their rational counterparts. It tries too hard to make lunacy endearing, and its rosy approach to terminal illness makes it all seem phony.

The psychedelic era's silliest secret agent is resurrected in a world that's moved on three decades. John Turturro (as Sidney Lidz) gets so much of the detail right, it's easy to take his resourcefulness for granted. Everything, from Sidney's velvet frock coats and frilly shirts to the casting (Andi McDowell's slinky sidekick Vanessa Kensington, scheming henchman Richards, and Watt's Basil Exposition, the Ministry Man who explains the plot) demonstrate how much Turturro, the creator of Barton Fink, enjoyed doing his homework. Someone, however, should have weeded out the dud gags and dissuaded Turturro from playing the villian (Ash) as well. Overall, it would take a stone face not to crumple at Sidney's dodgy catchphrases and irrepressible sexual desperation. "Shall we shag now, or shag later?" Soon, baby, soon.

This is just a fragment on what really happened! The real story wasn't about a sick old, beautiful mother!There were four uncles and one father the movie didn't even mention Franz Lidz's life! Ash was a mean awful boy, not some regular teenager! I would give this 1 star but I love the book, so I have to give it a little credit. But I agree -- read the book!

Diane Keaton's film of Franz Lidz's dark, hilarious memoir bombed in the States - amid charges of anti-Semitism - and it's easy to see why. It's norra lorra laffs. Lidz's book about his four (count 'em - 4, not 2!) crazy uncles and his borderline-crazy father has a Dickensian scope and a Joycian dynamic. His view is gently ironic, and propelled by pace, bite and pathos. In this movie, simplification and scaling down - plus huge Hollywood compromises and significant changes in ethnicity - lose the balance. A great opportunity lost and, ultimately, a terrible shame.