The ruptured marriage that gives Le Divorce its name is only one thing among many around which the movie spins. There are so many characters with so many stories here that it often seems as if the movie's about everything but the divorce in question.
Still, Le Divorce has a lot going for it. For starters, it's witty, it's charming and it's filled with appealing performances by some fine actors. It's also a rare example of art-house icons Merchant-Ivory in a playful mood — and in contemporary mode.
Le Divorce is set in present-day Paris, although you might sometimes wonder. The movie's main character is such an overt updating of a Henry James heroine — an American abroad who finds herself transformed by Old World ways — that it's hard to shake the feeling that you're watching a slightly peppier version of one of Merchant-Ivory's famously classy period pieces.
The American in Paris in Le Divorce even shares the same first name as Isabel Archer, James' Portrait of a Lady heroine and the subject of more than a few English lit classes. The 21st century Isabel, considerably less innocent than her 19th century counterpart (though no less curious), is a free-spirited California girl played with considerable charm, but not a whole lot of depth, by Kate Hudson, who probably delivers just the performance required of her. Hudson's Isabel arrives in Paris to visit her pregnant sister Roxeanne (Naomi Watts) at the precise moment Roxy's French husband is walking out on her (et voila: the titular divorce), resulting in both young Yanks finding themselves swimming against the current in the City of Light.
Le Divorce is one of those bright and breezy movies where pretty much everybody is attractive, sophisticated (in their own way), clever and capable, so we know that neither Isabel nor Roxeanne will remain in dire straits for too terribly long. In due course, Isabel becomes the mistress of a powerful and debonair French politician who's an old hand at seducing pretty young girls. He's also old enough to be her father (not to mention that he's the uncle of her sister's soon-to-be-ex), but Isabel maintains just a bit of distance by keeping a scruffy young lover on the side. Meanwhile, sister Rox's divorce proceeds apace, a process complicated by the discovery of a potentially valuable French painting that everyone wants to claim as their own.
Director James Ivory and longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala don't allow any of these story lines to dominate the film. The route they choose to take us on is a friskier one that constantly diverts our attention to any number of other narrative balls being simultaneously juggled in the air. More to the point, the movie's various plot strands often appear to be little more than platforms from which to offer a steady stream of wry observations on the more or less friendly culture clash between the French and the Americans.
These observations frequently seem to be the movie's real focus, its raison d'être. The filmmakers don't always appear too interested in developing individual characters or narrative threads, but they obviously take considerable pleasure in dissecting the cultural assumptions the French and Americans make about one another. Much attention is paid to conversation at a dinner party at the home of an upper class French family, which begins with a smattering of politics but is ultimately consumed with endless chatter on the fine points of gossip, fornication and adultery. A foreign guest's big, soul-baring speech is summarily interrupted when the hostess comes to the realization that one of the cheeses on the table isn't up to snuff.
As for the Americans, for the most part, they're assumed to be amusing enough, but basically unformed blobs with an endless appetite for red meat, cartoons and Coca-Cola. "There are no crimes of passion in America," says a French cop, nuzzling the perfumed neck of his female partner. "They shoot each for drugs or money."
Some of these observations come off as a bit naive and even cloddish, but even comments of these kinds generally reveal something worth noting about the one doing the observing. However, most of what the film has to say about how the French and Americans see one another is handled with insight and delicacy (an interlude detailing la femme Francais' endless affinity for scarves is particularly wonderful). A small army of remarkable players flits through the film (Leslie Caron, Stockard Channing, Stephen Fry and Bebe Neuwirth among them), and the movie places some of its choicest lines in their mouths.
None of it's meant to be taken that seriously, of course, and even Le Divorce referred to by the title ultimately seems one more tongue-in-cheek aside. As if you hadn't already guessed, the film's title might actually better apply to the love-hate affair between us Americans and the French than it does to Roxeanne and her estranged husband.
When we finally do get back to that troubled marriage, it's only by way of some last-minute melodrama, an 11th hour attempt at resolution that seems to have been magically pulled from the filmmakers' hats. Enjoyable as it is watching the bits and pieces of Le Divorce unfold, things get considerably less delightful once those pieces tumble into place. Le Divorce is much better when it simply allows its fabulous ensemble cast to skitter about like refugees from an old Robert Altman movie. No, make that an old Alan Rudolph movie — the ones like Welcome to L.A., that seem like virtual clones of an Altman movie, except that they're more frivolous, less concerned with form, and much less demanding of our undivided attention.
This seems as good a time as any to segue into what the real Alan Rudolph's been up to these days. Rudolph's still making films, in case you were wondering, and his latest, The Secret Lives of Dentists — which is yet another movie about marriage — opens locally this week. For what it's worth, Rudolph no longer seems to be under the spell of Robert Altman. Rudolph was Altman's longtime assistant on such groundbreaking classics as The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and it took him a long time to struggle out from under the long shadow of his mentor. Frankly, it wasn't until I saw Afterglow, some five years ago, that it became clear to me that the director had finally come into his own. At the very least, he's finally got the Altman bug out of his system.
In any event, Rudolph's films have become simpler and more direct, and are now apt to rely on the sustained power of a tight script and a couple of solid performances rather than on a sprawling ensemble of actors and ideas. In The Secret Lives of Dentists, the director benefits from the focused talents of independent film fave Hope Davis and Campbell Scott, who's developed into one of our finest actors.
Scott and Davis play Dave and Dana Hurst, a pair of practicing dentists married to each other. If you're unsure whether that kind of marriage might mean double the absurdity or double the pain, here's a hint: Consider that well-known statistic that dentists rank among the most suicide-prone groups in America.
"Open," are dentist Dave's first and last words in the film, ironic bookends for a movie about a relationship that's anything but open. The Hursts are a nice, normal family, perfectly happy on the surface, but — after 10 years of marriage and three kids — Dave's afraid that his wife's passion has turned to regret. And when he thinks he spies Dana sharing an intimate moment with a male admirer, everything really starts going to hell.
Charitably speaking, Rudolph's movie seems to want to be some sort of savage critique of life lived according to the status quo. The film spends an extraordinary amount of time detailing the quotidian, married-with-children routines of the Hursts, and then obsesses on Dave's determination to keep mum about his wife's supposed infidelity, an effort he makes, thinking it's the only way to salvage their status quo existence.
The irony, of course, is that the more Dave keeps quiet, the more things go unspoken, the more he's eaten up with anxiety and paranoia, and the worse things get. The film begins dissolving into Dave's fantasies, titillating projections of Dana engaging in heated sex with numerous, interchangeable partners.
Around the movie's mid-point, the fantasies seem to completely take over when an increasingly unhinged Dave begins imagining that a particularly unpleasant patient (a scenery-chewing Denis Leary) has become his constant companion and confidant. Leary eventually assumes the role of misogynistic mentor, guide and alter ego, offering all sorts of ugly advice designed to get Dave in touch with his inner asshole.
The fantasies flourish, getting more and more extreme, and, even as it skirts the edges of incoherence, The Secret Lives of Dentists does manage to become a bit more interesting for a while (although not, say, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind interesting). Ultimately, though, the film seems to run out of steam and even becomes a little annoying in its refusal (or inability) to illuminate any of those hidden spaces suggested by its title. The movie plays it safe, content to hint at everything while revealing next to nothing.
Rudolph lets the whole thing de-evolve into the excess of the ordinary — a massive bout of collective puking that's ostensibly the result of the entire Hurst clan contracting a nasty stomach virus. The vomiting sequences just seem to go on and on, making it hard to ignore the feeling that the filmmaker is trying to tell us something important. In the director's mind, this all undoubtedly has something to do with a none too subtle metaphor for the condition of the modern American family.
Be that as it may, I'm far from sold. Metaphorical purges of the poisons are all well and good, but, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a steaming puddle of puke is just a puddle of puke.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 4, 2003.