Blandarella

Monster-in-Law

Directed by Robert Luketic

Jane Fonda comes from an era when Hollywood movies were about people. It's discomforting to watch her comeback, after 15 years, in Monster-in-Law, a gimmick movie in today's popular Meet the Parents vein. Anya Kochoff's screenplay about Charlie (Jennifer Lopez), a young temp employee and dog-walker, combating her fiance's rich, imperious mother is an awkward fit for Fonda. She tips the balance of the story away from the insipid, mild-mannered bride-to-be. As veteran tv talk-show host Viola Williams, who suddenly finds herself retired, redundant, panicky and lonely, Fonda plays out the comic-tragic catastrophes of an aggrieved middle-aged woman. Whenever Fonda's on screen, Robert Luketic's limp direction almost grows taut and the slack comedy seems to have power.

The catfight premise of Monster-in-Law doesn't merely pit women against each other. It also dramatizes the current battle between movies of thoughtful substance and movies that crank up knee-jerk audience reactions. This problem is epitomized in the upcoming Star Wars finale when George Lucas coins the term "younglings" as a euphemism for children (his target demographic). Monster-in-Law is aimed at younglings who readily identify with Lopez as a pop star and so might enjoy seeing old lady Fonda get splattered with spaghetti sauce. But will they simply hiss the crow's-feet villain? Or will they, in their culturally trained, Nicole Kidman?fooled ignorance, overlook the trenchant undercurrents of Fonda's characterization?

Here's why they might: None of the advance publicity for Monster-in-Law emphasized Fonda's artistry. Fact is, she was the sexiest comedienne of the 60s and grew into the strongest American dramatic actress of the 70s. Her performance as the prostitute in Klute was a watershed; every actress in the world responded to Fonda's sexual candor and emotional vulnerability and tried to match it. And moviegoers were alert to her vividly portrayed psychological confusion-the essence of that film's suspense plot and a genuine social influence. Fonda's comedies Cat Ballou, Barbarella, Period of Adjustment or Fun with Dick and Jane were more intelligent than Monster-in-Law's farce. For instance, Michael Vartan as the son/lover whom Viola and Charlie fight over remains a weak presence; Luketic's only good direction has Vartan observe a wordless montage of the two women's first wary, convivial meeting. But after implying the boy loves both women for their similar traits, Luketic quickly erases all Oedipal suggestion. Thus Monster-in-Law is issue-free, whereas Fonda in her prime made entertainments that explored the issues people lived through. She wasn't just a glamorous star, but a pertinent one.

It's good news that Fonda still possesses the womanly intensity that rivets you to her character's dilemma. She gives Viola, a careerist used to having her way, a complicated, poignant urgency (such as Annette Bening couldn't summon in the hideous Being Julia). It makes her more than a "fabulous monster" but an immensely complex and pathetic woman. This characterization recalls the astutely observed middle-class type that Diane Keaton beautifully maneuvered between hauteur and loving pathos in The Other Sister. Monster-in-Law's box-office success may rest on Jennifer Lopez's avoirdupois, but Fonda carries it on her straight shoulders and strong neck. When she speaks, her low, direct voice reduces Lopez's girlish pleas to mewling.

Lopez's screen career has taken back-steps since the unfair media lynching she received for Gigli (her finest, most original film performance), so she's not fabulous here. She hasn't yet brought her music-video vivacity to the big screen. It might have been stunning to see her more willfully challenge Fonda (Charlie exchanging feminine instincts with Viola). Lopez has nothing on Fonda's curvaceous figure in Walk on the Wild, but Kochoff and Luketic deprive us of a battle of the sexpots that could have been as audacious as the striptease in Francois Ozon's 8 Women that Emmanuelle Beart does to intimidate Catherine Deneuve (who looks right back-unfazed). Instead, Lopez blands herself out, making Charlie some kind of ethnically vague ingénue. During a challenge where Charlie serves Viola a dish of tripe, she calls it "a delicacy" without pointing out its cultural origin. Only when Elaine Stritch shows up in the film's trumped-up climax as a truth-telling WASP dowager is there any mention of Charlie's ethnicity. Stritch looks at Lopez and cheers, "My grandson has found himself an exotic Latina!" She earns thanks for saying out loud what the movie has been suppressing.

Fonda's emotional largesse keeps Viola's objections to Charlie from seeming racist (no doubt a requisite of Fonda's principled participation), but the film also neglects exploring that these women clash because of their differences in experience, temper and class. The movie's p.c. stance avoids dealing with racism and squeamishly skirts feminism, too. Viola and Charlie are no deeper than Punch-and-Judy clowns-a sign of the colorless, inane, slapsticky film culture that now greets Fonda. In Criterion's dvd of Godard and Gorin's 1970 Tout Va Bien, you can see Fonda at her temperamental peak, tuned in to the zeitgeist and her own personal exploration-and revving the screen. But Monster-in-Law shies away from a movie star whose talent matches her integrity. Fonda's too good for it. The richness of her performance says to the younglings, "I am dinosaur, hear me roar!"

Porgy and Bess

Directed by Otto Preminger

Museum of the Moving Image, May 14-15

Uncommon star power is the first reason to see Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess. This 1959 film version of the George Gershwin-Dubose Heyward musical stars Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge-each one virile and sensual even in roles they disdained. The force of their personalities makes up for the play's discomforting artifice. A fantasy of how southern black Americans express their joys and troubles in song-created by crazily well-meaning liberal whites-this may be the epitome of cultural condescension. Poitier and Dandridge's presence contest it while also providing weird validation. They are real and wonderful, but then so is the score-and that's the second good reason to see it. Porgy and Bess is not authentic-just gorgeous, high estheticism. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald did an album version in 1961 that transformed this faux Americana into fine jazz, but it doesn't have Poitier and Dandridge's physical dynamism. The film is a richly ironic, rarely screened oddity.