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After the Fitzgerald of The Man Who Fell to Earth, a metaphysical derangement of Sinclair Lewis. The tenacious prospector (Gene Hackman) in the Arctic void, stardust out of a ruptured cranium, the thunderstruck mother lode comprise some of Nicolas Roeg's most astonishing filmmaking. Ecstasy of gold, it "smells stronger than a woman" and claims the life of the bordello witch (Helena Kallianiotes). "You'll find what you're looking for. But after?" Cut to the Forties and the protagonist's own Caribbean island, the richest man in the world in his paradisiacal tomb with a soap-operatic ensemble. Tippling wife (Jane Lapotaire), scheming associate (Ed Lauter), beloved daughter (Theresa Russell) usurped by French playboy (Rutger Hauer). (The magnate serves nuggets at the dinner table and the son-in-law swallows one, "don't worry, like everything else it will pass.") Joe Pesci murmuring in Yiddish and fussy Angel of Death Mickey Rourke are underworld forces in the mainland, the defiant target welcomes their savagery. "Once I had it all. Now I only have everything." A mighty constellation, a new delirium from moment to moment is Roeg's forte. Wagner swells in subterranean whirlpools, monsoons and Voodoo orgies, charred flesh amid scattered feathers. Sometimes fate is the pickaxe you wield and sometimes it's a blowtorch to your face, to dilate "one moment of rapture" is the business of cinema. Tarot cards, Kabbalah symbols, the intangible and the visceral contemplated by the heiress as she sits on her beloved's face: "Leave my mind alone. Stick to my skin." It comes down to marital therapy in the courtroom, with Sirk's Written on the Wind brought to bear on Russell's witness-stand aria. The epilogue quotes Robert W. Service directly, Mallarmé indirectly ("l'onde toi devenue"). With Cavan Kendall, Corin Redgrave, Joe Spinell, James Faulkner, Norman Beaton, Emrys James, and Frank Pesce.
--- Fernando F. Croce |