Odd Jobs (10 page)

First, Goldie Hawn. I used to love her on
Laugh-In
, which was one of the Vietnam era’s few light-hearted spots. She and Judy Carne would revolve their bikini-bared bodies, painted with slogans in that heyday of angry graffiti, and it would seem that anger wasn’t everything, and that thanks to laughter and bimbos we might survive. Her face, on the verge of pop eyes and buck teeth, was a semi-comic valentine, surrounded by tumble-dried blond hair. We go to movies to see a star, just as they did in the Thirties—a dependably familiar presence mounted in some new, but not disturbingly novel, vehicle.

Next, the theatre. The Cabot Theatre in Beverly is a consciously preserved and considerably restored old-fashioned small-city movie palace, with a stage, a balcony, a uniformed doorman, and a player piano in the lobby; it puts anybody over fifty in a nostalgic, tolerant frame of mind. Admission costs three dollars and the smallest size of popcorn only a dollar, as opposed to twice that at the malls. The floor doesn’t stick to your shoes, an usher will lead you to your seat with a flashlight, and you sit there with the simple heart of a child.

Then the movie. Goldie Hawn, an impossibly spoiled rich bitch, falls off her yacht and, when rescued, is suffering from amnesia so total that
a lowly beer-swilling carpenter (played by Kurt Russell) whom she has recently offended persuades her that she is his wife and must come keep his house and raise his four sons by (in fact) a wife three years dead. The joke and miracle of it is that, though equipped with an incongruously tony accent and a total innocence of housekeeping skills, she gradually submits to the assigned role, falls in love with her false husband, and finds happiness.

Sound familiar? The story touches timeless themes—the taming of the shrew, and the war of the sexes. It concerns, like the classic romantic comedies of the Thirties, education—the thawing, through a man’s rough care, of a Hepburnesque ice princess. Hawn, cuddly and woozy, is no Hepburn, which makes the transformation rather more affecting: it is her real self she is restored to. When we see her on the yacht, swaggering about with her hair pulled in a tight chignon and her lips twisted in an upper-class sneer, we do not recognize her as Hawn—at least I didn’t, though I knew I had paid three dollars to see her in a movie. As soon as she falls overboard, and is found with scraggly hair half-hiding her face, we know who she is, even if she does not.

Considerable cruelty attends her initiation into being the carpenter’s house-slave. He and his four sons, who all seem to be crowding adolescence, spatter her with food and fire-extinguisher foam, dunk her in a rain barrel, dress her in grotesquely ill-fitting clothes, and wear her to a delirious frazzle. The abuse is drastic, but, then, her sins, as a rich bitch, have been shown as extreme; when still in her right mind she refused to pay Russell for a cunning shoe-closet he has built for her on the yacht, pushed him overboard, and, worst of all, threw his tools after him into the ruinous saltwater. His revenge has limits, however: he shows his basic decency by not forcing the sexual side of her wifely services, and thereby the film keeps its own honor; a rape, however finagled, would put the moral onus on the poor rather than the rich. Also, Hawn has a legitimate husband (played by Edward Hermann, fresh from his husbandly stint in
Mrs. Soffel
), who, though a callow snob, must be figured into the final moral accounting.

Her
basic decency comes into play when, against all her pre-amnesia conditioning, she takes hold in the house and becomes a mother to the motherless boys, defending them from a shrewish schoolteacher, rubbing calomine lotion on their poison-oak rash, and teaching the illiterate youngest to read. The slovenly widower’s shack yields to the ordering, cleansing female touch; her own costumes move from grotesque misfit
to K-Mart
chic
. Russell, too, suffers some changes: he is surprised into a decent embarrassment as she makes his lies come true, and then into real affection as she settles at his side. His attempts to confess the truth are frustrated by his sons, who have come to need the mock mother, and by a buddy, who tells him the mock marriage is a good one. Her real husband belatedly appears, and her amnesia simultaneously falls away, but we have no doubt that nature, now that it is aroused, will triumph over nurture and come to true love’s rescue.

Hollywood has always voted for nature over nurture, for love over social position. In this it confirms us in our wishes, and assures us of the soundness of our instincts.
Overboard
is about bad nurture: Russell, in being wifeless and permissive, is a bad father, and Hawn’s mother a bad mother in raising a little rich bitch. This mother—a New Yorker shown in her outrageously posh apartment surrounded by pillows and dog manicurists—figures not so much in the plot as in the moral equation. For raising her daughter poorly, she must be punished, albeit lightly; twice she is shown being thrown out of bed by the swervings of the yacht as the plot zigzags toward resolution. The husband, on the other hand, has his punishment foreordained, in the loss of his star of a wife; therefore he must be established as deserving punishment. So we see him decline to rescue her on the day after she fell overboard, and instead embark on months of floating orgy with some Los Angeles tarts. He deserves to be left, the mother deserves her lumps, the boys deserve a mother, the lovers deserve each other, and we the audience deserve to congratulate ourselves for feeling so pleased about it all.

All this moral rigor would be merely mechanical, of course, if Hawn and, to a lesser extent, Russell, who in
real
life lives with her, did not bring warmth to the acting, and give their educations—their transformation into loving adults—a rounded-out, on-screen reality. In
Broadcast News
, by contrast, the educations of the romantic principals feel incomplete, and we are frustrated by the heroine’s inability to find happiness with either man. In
My Life as a Dog
, the boy’s education or maturation is anticipated but never arrives through the odd muddle of a dying, receding mother and repeated sexual assaults by too many pubescent girls. Instead of becoming human, he becomes a dog, barking crazily.

Moonstruck
balances its accounts and gives us our way, but with its tongue in its cheek; it is a consciously old-fashioned—charmingly so—movie.
Overboard
, for all of its slapstick, takes itself more seriously, and moves us without a wink, especially at the moment when the heroine,
suddenly faced with two husbands and two lives, tries to puzzle her way to the truth of who she is. We allow confusion-of-identity plots their implausibilities because they bring to life, in a world that tends to lock us in, the possibilities of reversal and renewal. Like
The Last Emperor, Overboard
deals with the poignant mystery of being oneself: a puzzled tot thrust into the condition of emperor and buffeted by post-imperial history, and a young woman born into blood-curdling privilege and then dumped for her salvation into the lower middle class. We are so persuaded, in
Overboard
, of the moral and sexual superiority of beer over champagne that it comes as a shock, at the end, to learn that the money belongs to Goldie Hawn’s Cinderella, and that she will bestow it upon her carpenter-prince. How will he avoid, then, becoming as fatuous and effete as the former husband? Already, one of his sons is heard demanding a Porsche. This final fillip, perhaps intended as a casual sop to our notorious Eighties greed, disturbs the fable so nicely constructed. How can she, now knowing herself to be rich, slip back into the healthy rigors of wifely servitude? Money is the root of all evil in
Overboard
, and its final overthrow needs a Nineties sequel, in which the money goes overboard.

ENVIRONS

N
OT ONLY
do fictional characters have to be supplied with faces and life histories, speech rhythms and psychologies; they must have houses to live in:

Hardy had been trained as an architect, and in
Far from the Madding Crowd
has no trouble embowering his heroine with a solidity subtly proportionate to her worth as a mate, and in agreeably animating her inherited home’s interior: “Lively voices were heard this morning in the upper rooms, the main staircase to which was of hard oak, the balusters, heavy as bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint fashion of their century, the handrail as stout as a parapet-top, and the stairs themselves continually twisting round like a person trying to look over his shoulder.” Our story takes place, we are made certainly to feel, in enduring settings that long predate and will long outlast these momentary actors; Hardy’s most ardent evocation is of the stone barn, four centuries old:

History of a more hurried, borrowed sort shapes the home of Mrs. Manson Mingott, so daringly located (in the 1870s) above New York’s 34th Street: “The house in itself was already a historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fireplaces with black marble mantels, and immense glazed bookcases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire.” Edith Wharton’s splendid eye for decor was not blind to the potential oppression of the correct and the expected; Mrs. Mingott, though immobilized by obesity, is one of the few free spirits in
The Age of Innocence
. The novel’s hero, Newland Archer, nearly swoons at the Countess Olenska’s unconventional room appointments, her “small slender tables of dark wood” and stretch of red damask: “The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.” His mind casts ahead to the house his prospective father-in-law has lined up for him:

Nor does his betrothed, the too-perfect May, promise rescue from the ordained environment; a dutiful daughter of privilege, she has “submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing room, to its sham buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe.”