Their Hearts Belong to Daddy

In case you haven't noticed, August is the month for the “serious” children films. And I do mean serious – movies backed by big names and loaded with big, ambitious themes. Heck, some of these films are actually too serious for kids. Drop'em off at Tom and Jerry, instead.

This month, Hollywood is apparently trying to reconcile with dear, old – and absent – Dad. The central themes of The Man Without a Face, The Secret Garden and Searching for Bobby Fischer revolve around this issue. As these films conclude, absence (whether physical or psychological) doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It simply makes the kid more bitter and confused.

Get with the program, pop. Hollywood is telling you to get in touch with your kids' feelings. And it's telling you this via some of the more intelligent films of the summer.

Gibson Comes of Age

Intelligence is one of the surprise ingredients of each of these films. Even Mel Gibson – the man of a thousand bun shots – has taken on a weighty subject and role in The Man Without a Face. In many ways, it's the most difficult of the three films. It's also the most flawed.

The Man Without a Face is Gibson's directorial debut, and the raw sincerity of his intentions is surprising. With a few exceptions, Gibson has rarely stretched himself as an actor. After two too many Lethal Weapon films, he seemed content to coast on his good looks and stunt man's prowess.

But The Man Without a Face is Mel striving hard to be both lyrical and psychologically insightful. To top it off, he tackles a role in the movie that is part Elephant Man and part Phantom of the Opera.

The film's main character, however, is 12-year-old Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl). Surrounded by two half-sisters and a mother who is perpetually between marriages, Chuck is a troubled boy lacking male guidance. He has turned his dead father into a dreamy hero figure and is desperate to attend the military school his father graduated from. But bad grades, hyperactivity and an anti-social attitude stand in his way.

Enter McLeod (Gibson), a horribly scarred recluse who has shut himself off from the world. McLeod also happens to be a gifted artist and an ex-teacher. Chuck soon finds that McLeod is a more manly mentor than his mother's latest beau.

But Chuck receives bad news: his daddy was no hero, and his mentor was convicted of something that nightmares are made of.

In The Man Without a Face, Gibson demonstrates that he has guts – but that he's not a good director. He has a weak grasp of editing continuity, and his obsessive use of close-ups nearly butchers some great cinematography by Donald M. McAlpine.


It's All in How You Look

Great images are virtually the point of The Secret Garden. Executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and directed by Agnieszka Holland, the film opts for a largely visual translation of the classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Beginning like a fairy tale, with a gaudy prologue in India, The Secret Garden turns into a bleak and monochromatic vision of 19th-century England. You can't wait for the garden to start sprouting color.

The lives of the movie's child characters are equally bleak. Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly) is ignored by her parents – so much so that she hardly misses them when they're killed in India by an earthquake. She is sent back to England to live with her uncle, a widower who spends most of his time moping around his estate.

Not that Mary is a joy to be around. She's snotty, repressed and doesn't know how to dress herself. But the situation begins to transform when she meets her sickly cousin and a wise farm boy. What starts as simple gardening with the boys becomes a process of amazing healing for each child. The only challenge that remains for one boy is getting Dad's attention.

The Secret Garden skirts with Hallmark card-like predictability. But it works, largely due to Holland's shrewd and sensitive direction. The nearly inevitable reconciliation of father and son is touching primarily because it's so well photographed. (Hey, they don't have to like each other. They just have to look good together.)


Hard Life Lessons

The crowned price of this summer's “where's poppa?” competition is Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Based on a true story (whatever that means these days), Searching for Bobby Fischer follows the quest of seven-year-old Josh Waitzkin to become a chess prodigy like his elusive idol, his dad. Josh is driven, in part, by a need for his father's approval. But the august parent, of course, is slow on the uptake.

With dad initially out of the picture, Josh receives most of his life lessons from his two mentors. One is an aggressive chess hustler (Laurence Fishburne), who can wipe a board clean in a dozen moves. The other is an embittered grand master (Ben Kingsley), who is more enamored with the art of the game.

What Josh learns is that the approach of each man is right – and wrong. Ultimately, it's his father who helps him learn to accept the best in each method, while sidestepping the worst.

Most importantly, he learns how to be a kid.

Serial Mom

“I haven’t gone mainstream,” insisted John Waters. “Critics have been saying that about every movie I’ve made since Pink Flamingos. But the shock value is still there in Serial Mom. I just tried to make it funny, that’s all.”

Waters is the Baltimore-based bad boy of schlock and shock who has directed such outrageous underground movies as Pink Flamingos, Mondo Trasho and Female Trouble. With his slight build, pencil-thin mustache and slicked-down hair, Waters resembles Gomez Addams’ twin brother. His dapper, but demented, appearance fits his movies, which are infamous for their black humor and scatological content. The doggie-do ending of Pink Flamingos still registers as one of the grossest images ever filmed. It was a barf-fest gesture that succinctly sums up his early work.

“I’m not going to do suicidal things to my career,” said Waters during a recent telephone interview. And he hasn’t. His work still plays like Beaver Cleaver’s nightmare, but Waters has successfully moved from the midnight movie circuit to the mall theaters with a surprising amount of his over-the-top material intact. Serial Mom is Waters’ third so-called Hollywood film – after Cry Baby and Hairspray – and it may be his wittiest movie. He’s made the major move to full-blown satire, and is once again proving to be the finest – and most caustic – social critic around.

Faster and funnier than many of Waters’ previous movies, Serial Mom offers a warped tale about a suburbanite mother who slaughters half of her neighborhood. It’s a hysterically funny and accurate send-up of the modern fascination with family-style blood-shed, the dark underlining to the “family values” propaganda that’s taken the airwaves hostage.

“The other night, they were broadcasting the first of the TV movies being made about the Menendez brothers,” noted Waters. “Right in the middle of the program was an ad for Serial Mom. Which in a way is fine. It makes it easier for people to appreciate my movie.”

This blurry no-man’s land between fantasy and reality is the exact spot where Serial Mom cuts loose. Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston play the heads of a family that has achieved the domestic bliss of sit-coms and TV ads. Their marriage is happy and sexually fulfilling, and their kids (Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard) are generally well-adjusted. It’s the petty rudeness of the rest of the world that Turner’s character has trouble dealing with.

“Every single person she killed deserved it,” said Waters with a twinkle. “And besides, with the exception of her bad habit of murdering people, she’s actually a very loving and supportive mother.”

And that’s one of the best jokes in Serial Mom. Turner plays a maternal monster, but she’s so good with her own family that you almost wish she were your mother. So what if she’s capable of cracking a person’s head open with a leg of lamb? She’s also genuinely nice.

Serial Mom greatly benefits from Turner’s best performance in years. She has a manic quality that operates on the same crazy wave-length as the movie, despite Time magazine’s recent assertion that she originally turned the part down because it was too disgusting. But Waters insists the story isn’t true: “She just had to sleep on it before she could make up her mind.”

As crucial as Turner’s performance is, it’s Waters own bizarre sensibility that keeps Serial Mom tottering brilliantly on the razor sharp line between comedy and mayhem. He’s a self-confessed fan of famous criminals, and has traveled across the country to attend various infamous trials. It was at her own trial that he met Patty Hearst, who co-stars in Serial Mom and is a friend of Waters.

“What can I say?” he shrugged. “My interest in these things started with the villains in Walt Disney movies, moved onto the writings of Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs, and then progressed to Richard Speck” (the infamous mass murderer of student nurses on Chicago in the 1960s, whose picture appears as a pin-up poster in Serial Mom).

Waters has a shrewd sense of the contradictions that exist between American pop culture and our society’s professed notions of morality. He’s also serious about his stand against capital punishment, though he deftly presses the issue in Serial Mom by taking the opposing side of the argument to its logically absurd extreme.

Despite what his films may suggest, Waters isn’t really crazy. “But I’ve grown fond of my neuroses,” he confessed. “Thank god I have the outlet of my movies.”