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MR. & MRS. FREEZE Readers may recall when Warren Beatty and Annette Bening were hawking their bomb Love Affair on Oprah, who was wetting her panties with false enthusiasm. When she wasn’t soliciting her in-studio audience for undeserving favorable reaction to the movie, she was kissing the stars’ asses. Actually, their stony asses, because Beatty and Bening were so guarded about themselves, so tight and controlled and cool, they came off as snobs. They brought this kind of aloof self-protectiveness to Bugsy and won over some noodle-brained East Coast critics, but to bring it to a supposed four hankie tribute to An Affair to Remember is suicide. What makes it all the more offensive is no one had the guts to tell Mr. Hollywood and his Ice Princess to shove their acts where the moon don’t shine. As Love Affair begins, with Bobby Short as Uncle Tom singing “Changes,” Beatty’s a retired quarterback about to be married to a television personality (Kate Capshaw) who got him a sports anchor position he isn’t qualified for; like Grant, he’s a gigolo. Bening’s a sometimes singer who tricks as a decorator for her betrothed wheeler-dealer Pierce Brosnan; in other words, like Kerr, she’s a gigolette. Beatty and Bening end up together in the first class section of a 747 headed for Sydney but engine trouble forces the plane down on a tiny atoll! (By this time you’re already regretting there will be two too many survivors.) Rescued by a Russian cruise ship and while on it, they fall in love. You can’t quite figure out what they find attractive about each other: Beatty looks, acts and talks like he’s suffering from the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s; and Bening, with a model’s thinness and haughty sarcasm, could be this or any season’s polar vortex—she could immobilize Mr. Freeze. Lovable? No, intolerable! Who but a masochist would want her? As the ship docks in Tahiti (another !), it just so happens Beatty’s aunt doesn’t live far away and he asks Bening if she’d like to go along while he pays the required courtesy call. Dubious, but hey, she’s got time to kill while in paradise. Old auntie is Katharine Hepburn of the Tremors, who promptly updates Cathleen Nesbitt with one line: “fuck like a duck.” Though based on the Leo McCarey-Delmer Daves screenplays from the two previous versions, writers Beatty and Robert Towne slice away the relationships Mr. & Ms. Beautiful have with their intended. Beatty has only a few scenes with Capshaw, who’s never allowed to be anything but a distance presence. (At least with Neva Patterson in Affair to Remember, we could watch her die of public embarrassment over Grant’s plans to paint for a living.) And Capshaw’s been horribly attired and photographed: in a flat shag reminiscent of Fonda’s in Klute, and wearing a god-awful beaded beret, she’s more prostie than celeb. (TV newsers are whores, but not Kate.) Bening has a bit more time with Brosnan, who doesn’t steal the movie—he’s not allowed the chance—but he’s the only one with any blood circulating. Unintended in its real meaning, he’s given the single true line of dialogue to utter: to Bening he says, “Boy, you’re a tough nut to crack.” Rumor has it director Glenn Gordon Caron wasn’t really in charge, and it’s entirely possible to see he wasn’t as soon as the movie opens. This is another of Beatty’s vanity productions, and his insecurity is all over the place; while Caron acted as traffic cop, Beatty drenched Conrad L. Hall’s camera lens with anti-aging effects. Hepburn’s tremors most likely became Beatty’s when he saw what he ended up with. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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