Verhoven A Blast
I have a confession to make. Earlier today, I was talking to a friend on the phone. She asked me my plans and I told her I was going to nurse my head cold, curl up on the couch and watch DR. STRANGELOVE, which I had incredibly picked up at the grocery store last week for fifteen bucks. O brave new world of entertainment! However, by the time I settled in with my chicken soup and wasa bread, it wasn’t Strangelove but strange love - more specifically, Paul Verhoven’s trashy masterpiece BASIC INSTINCT.
Verhoven is (wait, I sat through HOLLOW MAN - was) one of the most precise and brilliant directors of our time. With BI he cemented his claim to the title, the Hitchcock of sleaze. Like Hitchcock, and Spielberg and Zemekis, he has a knack for telling the story with composition, with carefully orchestrated camera movement, with actors whose every facial expression advances the plot. Unlike those other directors, he’s not the least bit bothered by problems of taste.
Hence, you can see Hitchcock tackling this story of a risk-addicted detective trailing a manipulative evil-genius novelist, but you absolutely cannot imagine Hitch’s movie opening with a graphic cowgirl-bondage sex scene which climaxes (in all senses of the word) with a gory, detailed ice-pick murder. There is a lot of Hitchcock in BASIC INSTINCT; the beautiful San Francisco vistas scream VERTIGO, as does the use of lookalikes for the main characters, a frequent Hitch trick. In some ways it seems to be a strategy - you’re coasting along enjoying an old-fashioned Hitchcock thriller, suddenly Jimmy Stewart is ripping the clothes off his shrink and date-raping her. And sure there were lesbians in Hitchcock’s work, but you never saw them snorting coke off each other in the stall of a club men’s room.
I think it’s another sly strategy of Verhoven casting Michael Douglas as the lead. Just 20 years earlier he had gotten his start on TV, playing a straight arrow rookie detective in THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO. (A Quinn Martin Production!) Now he’s still on the force with at different name, struggling with booze, drugs and anger management issues. How you long for a cameo by Karl Malden in this movie - he would have made a great internal affairs guy.
All the casting is fabulous in this movie. It’s a catalog of early nineties character actors, from George Dzunda to Mitch “Inspector Skinner” Pileggi to Wayne “Newman” Knight, who reacts so perfectly to that famous beaver shot. These reliable, familar faces give the whole production a high gloss, which it needs to keep from being mired in its seedy story. And talking of the story - while I’m confessing, I might as well tell you that this is the first time I ever saw the movie from start to finish. I worked at the Coronet theatre in Westwood where it premiered, and I would sneak in and catch five or ten minutes of it at a time, but never did I see the whole thing until an hour ago. Although I certainly saw PARTS of it a lot. And after about a week, I knew exactly where those parts were. Me and all the ushers.
I have a feeling though that if I watch it twenty more times AND take notes, the story still won’t make complete sense. Nothing wrong with that. Try figuring out THE BIG SLEEP some time.
BASIC INSTINCT was a commercial success when it came out, in part because of the publicity-generating protests by gay rights activists who hadn’t actually seen it. I like to think that, like Catherine Trammel, Verhoven and company played those kids like a harp and in the end got just what they needed out of them. The unfortunate side effect of this success though, was that it made Verhoven cocky enough to bring Joe Eszterhas along for an even seedier ride, SHOWGIRLS; and that was the beginning of the end for everyone involved.
Still, I come here to praise Basic Instinct, not to bury it. It its way, it’s good old-fashioned movie making.
-daniel k
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:28 am
Ah, BASIC INSTICT. If possible, watch it with Paul Verhoeven’s commentary track on. Better than the original soundtrack.
Hitchcock and Lesbianism: Alright, they had a 3-fer fest last night on TCM, and this observation struck me. In THE BIRDS, there’s a scene where Tippi Hedren, looking for a place to stay in Bodega Bay, ends up at the house of Suzanne Pleshette, the old flame of Rod Taylor.
The tension between the two characters works on three levels: Plot-wise, it’s Old Flame versus Rich New Hussy. Hitchcock ouvre-wise, it’s the perpetually overlooked brunette resenting the Hitchcock Blond Heroine/Victim. And yeah– a few scenes later Pleshette, drinking brandy in her jammies, is definately looking Tippi over approvingly.
–S