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"Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you," says Whitman. The prologue is pure, suspended grace: Jonathan Demme's camera cranes back to reveal a speck zipping across the Nevada desert, panning left and right to follow the racing motorcycle, the lens bending a ray of sunshine with each movement. Then total darkness, the road at night illuminated by headlights and radio chatter. The drive to Las Vegas with a genial jackass (Paul Le Mat) warbling about a turbo-charged Christmas sleigh and an irritable old hermit (Jason Robards) claiming to be Howard Hughes is an instant of transient sublimity, their interplay positing an egalitarian bond in a void filmed through a proto-Kiarostami windshield. "Nothing like the smell of the desert after the rain." A landscape of flaky appetites and ebullient impermanence: Tract homes and strip clubs, families breaking up and getting back together and breaking up again, thrifty wedding chapels followed by slot-machines. Shooting for "Milkman of the Month," the songwriter muddles through, "broke but not poor." His wife (Mary Steenburgen) tap-dances on a raucous game show for a paycheck that's promptly turned into a fancy boat stranded on the front lawn. A mogul's will dropped on his desk adduces a fine note from Sturges—could the grouch in the truck actually have been Hughes? Shambling yet delicate, Demme's screwball fable gazes at TV contents and novelty ballads and sees not camp but the warm connective tissue of human yearning. The protagonist loses millions but attains the Nirvana of sleeping in perfect trust by a friend's side, a vision of interaction over materialism that's a fragile pipe dream for the land on the cusp of Reagan's decade. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. With Elizabeth Cheshire, Pamela Reed, Michael J. Pollard, Denise Galik, Gloria Grahame, Chip Taylor, Robert Ridgely, Charles Napier, John Glover, and Dabney Coleman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |