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| JONNY
LEE MILLER IN AFTERGLOW
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| Some
critics have complained that Miller and Boyle aren't in the
same league as the older stars, but Rudolph disagrees. "A
lot of people confuse actors with their characters," said
Rudolph. "They say the younger couple are shallow, but Jonny
Lee Miller's part was actually the hardest to cast. It's so
hard to play a character with certain emotions muted. "This
society is breeding them. They're manipulators who have no
time for their own emotions, then things bubble up and they
don't know what to do with their own natural instincts. They're
very much in control of their professional lives, though.
I understand that guy." Keith Carradine, passing through Seattle,
recommended Miller to Rudolph, who hadn't seen "Trainspotting"
and didn't know him. Carradine had worked with Miller on "Lonesome
Dove."
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| AFTERGLOW
REVIEWS
BY ROGER EBERT
Julie Christie has the kind of face you find on the covers
of romance novels, and surely one of the reasons she was cast
in ``Dr. Zhivago'' was that she would look so good on the
poster. She projects the wounded perfection of a great beauty
who has had the wrong sort of luck. In ``Afterglow,'' only
her third role in the 1990s, Alan Rudolph has given her the
sort of character she knows inside out: bemused, sad, needful,
mysterious.
She plays Phyllis Mann, a former B-movie actress specializing
in horror roles, who now lives in Montreal with her husband,
Lucky (Nick Nolte), a handyman equally at home with wrenches
and wenches. Some great sadness from the past overshadows
their marriage, and although Phyllis and Lucky are held together
by love and understanding, he philanders, with her tacit permission,
among the lonely housewives who phone for his services. (``Plumbing
and a woman's nature are both unpredictable and filled with
hidden mysteries,'' he philosophizes.)
Nolte plays Lucky not as a sex machine, however, but as a
tender, observant man who feels a certain sympathy with the
women he has sex with. The deal with his wife is, he can fool
around, as long as he doesn't get serious. One day seriousness
threatens, when he meets Marianne Byron (Lara Flynn Boyle),
a yuppie wife who yearns for the baby her husband will not,
or cannot, give her. So deep is her need that she has hired
Lucky Mann to convert an extra bedroom into a nursery, even
as her cold, arrogant husband, Jeffrey (Jonny Lee Miller,
Sick Boy in ``Trainspotting''), vows he wants nothing to do
with children.
The plot to this point could be the stuff of soap opera,
but there's always something askew in an Alan Rudolph film,
unexpected notes and touches that maintain a certain ironic
distance while permitting painful flashes of human nature
to burst through. Imagine a soap in which the characters subtly
mock their roles while the actors occasionally break down
in grief about their offscreen lives.
``Afterglow'' has a script that permits coincidence
and contrivance; like many of Rudolph's films (``Choose Me,''
``Trouble in Mind'') it has characters who seem fated to share
common destinies. As Lucky Mann falls into the pit created
by Marianne's great need, Phyllis meets Jeffrey and allows
herself to be drawn toward him in a mixture of curiosity and
revenge.
``Afterglow'' doesn't depend on a visible style as much as
some of Rudolph's films; he seems so interested in the story,
which he wrote himself, that he doesn't need to impose directorial
distance. That may be because the characters are so poignant.
Julie Christie, lounging on a sofa looking at her old horror
films, has speeches in which she looks back on Hollywood with
the fascination of an accident victim. Nolte's character is
not a one-dimensional louse but a man whose sex life may reflect
a deep sympathy for women--the same sympathy he feels for
his wife, so steeped in sadness.
As for Christie, what's the story with her? She is so familiar
a face from her early films (``Darling,'' ``McCabe and Mrs.
Miller,'' ``Far from the Madding Crowd,'' ``Shampoo''), but
then her career drifted into unessential and forgettable films.
Infrequent newspaper interviews reported on her happiness
in solitude. Like the character Phyllis, she has a distance
on her early career; unlike her, she uses it here to create
something fresh and vulnerable. How mysterious and intriguing
some performances can be.
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| Afterglow
"Unclog any tubes today?" asks waspish wife Phyllis (Julie
Christie) of her husband, Lucky Mann (Nick Nolte), a philandering
plumber and handyman in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow.
"Pipes. The word is pipes," he insists, though we have just
been watching him wielding his tool in such a suggestive way
("Turn me on" he says to a lonely woman as he lies on his
back under her sink -- "the hot water, I mean") that we assume
Phyllis knows what she's talking about.
But the relationship between Lucky and Phyllis is not entirely
what it seems. She is a former B movie actress who got pregnant
by a co-star when Lucky was away in the Navy. She waited 15
years to tell him that the child, Cassie, whom he thought
his daughter, had been fathered by another man. He took it
badly. When the girl heard him shouting, "She's not mine,"
she ran away from home. That was eight years before the action
of the film. Lucky and Phyllis had received but one communication
from her in that time -- from Montreal -- telling them that
she never wanted to see them again. So they moved to Montreal
and started looking for her, so far without success. At the
same time they stopped having intimate relations and had come
to an arrangement that Lucky could seek sexual satisfaction
elsewhere. Phyllis now spends her life watching her old movies
on television and imagining that she catches glimpses of the
missing Cassie on street corners.
In another part of the city live Jeffrey Byron III (Jonny
Lee Miller), a pale, baby-faced corporate hot-shot, and his
wife Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle), who is desperate to get
pregnant. Somehow, something is wrong with Jeffrey which makes
him spurn his randy and beautiful young wife's advances. Is
he impotent? Is he gay? Or is it some deeper, existential
malaise? He is given to standing on the rail of his office
balcony, precariously balanced on the edge of a certainly
fatal fall, and saying, "I'm excited about the impossibilities
of things."
It's all too deep for me, I'm afraid.
After a quarrel with Jeff, Marianne engages handyman Lucky
to come over for some repairs. Immediately and rather improbably
she spots him as the potential father of her child -- since
Jeff doesn't seem to want her. In no time at all, they are
romping naked in the indoor pool together. Jeff, though he
is inexplicably uninterested in his wife on his own behalf,
has the businessman's interest in keeping a firm grip on what
is his, and so goes to seek her in a hotel bar where she is
having a tryst. He just misses her there but sits down next
to Phyllis, who has been following Lucky and watching him
and Marianne from a corner table at the bar. Jeff finds himself
attracted to her and strikes up a conversation. "I'm not completely
without charm," he tells her -- quite falsely, in my view.
"In fact, I live up to the edge of my charm" -- as of other
things. And then, as if to prove it he tells her that "You're
the most fascinating woman I have ever met in my entire life."
"I know," she replies.
Soon she has agreed to go away with him for the weekend.
But though Jeff and a business rival are both powerfully attracted
to her, she manages to keep her mystery intact.
At this point neither knows that his or her spouse is seeing
the other's -- nor do their spouses know it. Predictably enough,
they find out and there is an explosion. Will Marianne, now
carrying Lucky's child, make the same mistake as Phyllis in
the same circumstance? Will Phyllis and Lucky, who obviously
still love each other, patch up their marriage again? Will
the missing Cassie ever turn up? The answers to these questions
are of less compelling interest than they would be if the
dramatic tensions had been better managed. Both Jeff and Cassie,
whose contributions to those tensions are so central, are
ciphers -- emotionally missing in action -- so we are always
more or less in the dark as to where all the rest of the film's
emotions are coming from. But Rudolph obviously designed it
as an actors' film, with good meaty parts for all four of
the principals. The lack of dramatic coherence is therefore
not so troublesome as it might otherwise have been. In fact,
the picture is worth seeing if only for the performance of
Julie Christie -- who, like poor Cassie, has been gone too
long.
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