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The capitalist machine is presented in a swift overture, a dormant stockroom coming to life as the dollar fluctuates, followed by a joke from Vidor's The Fountainhead (the diminutive magnate poses in his office with Empire State verticals in the background). Alan J. Pakula trains the x-ray gaze on the financial system, the "illusion of safety" is demolished under the guise of a romantic thriller. Blinking digits lit up like an electronic beehive are revealed as windows on the side of the World Trade Center, the camera tracks into one of them in time to catch the killing of the chairman and the disappearance of the MacGuffin. The Hollywood diva-cum-corporate widow (Jane Fonda) receives the news at a marine-themed soiree, with couples dancing under the beady eye of a suspended whale. Money is a horrid thing to follow and a charming thing to meet, says Henry James, thus courtship with the wizard (Kris Kristofferson) hired to take the company out of fiscal quicksand. Screwball repartee in the New World Order: "I'm still not sure I trust you." "That's a perfect basis for a partnership." A cautionary dissection of the dawn of the Eighties, plus a subtle satire in which the hero's blockiness turns to heated abandon following a particularly arduous monetary session. Gold, deceit, murder, oil, the "regular cycles of anxiety" that are Pakula's forte, elucidated by the villain (Hume Cronyn) as a "routine banking operation." (Avildsen's The Formula the previous year is even more succinct: "You are missing the point. We are the Arabs.") Capra's bank-storming is writ global in the end, Roosevelt is quoted during circular pans that locate a pair of superstars facing each other on the brink of an ambiguous new beginning (cp. Tout va Bien). With Josef Sommer, Bob Gunton, and Macon McCalman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |