© Barry Wetcher/New Line Cinema
Artificial attorneys Brosnan and Moore are all fake smiles in Attraction.
© Barry Wetcher/New Line Cinema
Artificial attorneys Brosnan and Moore are all fake smiles in Attraction.
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How to Draw a Bunny
Runs Fri., April 30–Thurs., May 6, at Little Theatre
When making a movie about an artist, there's an almost overwhelming temptation for the filmmakers to emulate that artist's technique. Sometimes the echo effect works: The pianist emerged through biographical impromptus in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. In the case of fringe pop art figure Ray Johnson (1928–1995), however, the man was as elusive as his technique—doubly hard to follow. Most famed as a collagist and inventor of "mail art" (elaborate postcards and serial jokes binding together many correspondents in a chain), he never broke out like his more acclaimed peers. Moving to New York in the '50s after attending the famously experimental Black Mountain College, he toiled in obscurity while Johns, Rauschenberg, and Rosenquist broke out. He and Andy Warhol both illustrated paperbacks in the '60s to pay the bills; again, gallery owners and museum curators flocked in the other direction. Meanwhile, he continued as a one-man small-f factory of obsessive productivity—and continued to be overlooked. An insider and an outsider in the art world, he made insider-outsider art with little attempt to get it shown. ("He hated galleries, he hated museums," says one observer of the diffident Johnson.) Finally, he decamped for Long Island in 1968, further guaranteeing his obscurity until his Friday the 13th suicide made headlines.
With Bunny's use of old bits of home movies, vintage snapshots, contemporary interviews, a few '80s videos, and his letters read aloud (by a woman, oddly), Johnson's self-willed, self-created persona as the enigmatic artist is only compounded, not clarified. The movie makes a collage out of a collage, and that's a cop-out. Though pan-and-scan examples of his work are fascinating, they beg for the gallery walls. At the cinema, you can be clear about the mysterious or arty about the mundane, and Bunny badly misjudges its position vis-à-vis its subject—who is entitled to be aloof and who is supposed to explain. The movie initially apes the form of a murder- mystery investigation, proceeding from the corpse to the cradle and back again in a Kane-like fashion. And, like Kane, here is a man variously described as "a mystery," "a collage," "an enigma," and so forth. But there is no Rosebud.
It's a pity, because Bunny gives you a tantalizing taste of his miniaturist work, like Joseph Cornell boxes flattened out into two dimensions, then stamped with postage. In one of the few instances where Johnson actually speaks on his method (in a letter), he says of all his compulsive envelope stuffing, "I spent my entire life condensing, in a conceptual art fashion." And what of his nonworking life? Apparently there was very little of it; Johnson seems to have died gay, loveless, and alone. Johnson appears to have had many correspondents and acquaintances, but no friends. Someone calls him "indifferent" as a kind of praise. Bunny would have you believe his plunge from a bridge in Sag Harbor was some sort of conceptual art gesture. I think people kill themselves for other reasons than that—despair, perhaps, but not indifference. (NR) BRIAN MILLER
Laws of Attraction
Opens Fri., April 30, at Pacific Place and others
Julianne Moore is brilliant at playing tragic heroines and nihilist divas in prestige films, but icy hauteur can only get you so far in Hollywood. "Jules! Jules!" her agent must have said, "You gotta be a Breck girl! You gotta do bad romantic comedy in 2,000 theaters! Get off that cold throne and kiss the masses' asses!" She puckers up for all she's worth as Audrey Woods, a lovelorn divorce attorney facing raffish opposing counsel Daniel Rafferty (Pierce Brosnan) in court and between the sheets. If you're like the warmhearted romantics in the preview audience I saw the flick with, Warm 106.5 listeners all (the most forgiving audience this side of Ashland), you may find the film cute. But if you have any brains at all, you'll call it mush.
Except for some excellent actors slumming, Attraction doesn't have much going for it. Audrey is professionally brilliant, self-doubting, emotionally defensive, and erotically AWOL, like a younger Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give. But the dialogue is only faux-sassy, and Brosnan's no Jack Nicholson. His character is a cardboard pushover, not an elusive scamp. As the two duel over the estate of a divorcing rock star (Underworld's Michael Sheen) and his fashion-designer wife (indie princess Parker Posey), he is steadfastly pro-marriage. All Moore has to do is thaw—a boring dramatic process.
Not as boring, however, as their courtroom antics. The screenwriters are so incompetent that instead of presenting scenes, they resort to alleging them: You get a bit of testimony, then a fade to the end of testimony, implying that smarter people capable of grasping legal logic wrote an unseen scene in between. The scenes get sketchier still when the cast decamps to the rock star's castle in Ireland, the only asset both parties demand in his divorce. He's a ninth-rate Austin Powers, and the wife is a waste of Posey's gifts. In fact, everyone here is wasted. Moore is more like face-scrunching weirdo Sandy Dennis than heart-melting eccentric Keaton. Brosnan is treated like granite—unfair, when one remembers his anti-Bondian comic verve in The Tailor of Panama. At least Frances Fisher is funny as Moore's age-defying, plastic-surgery-enhanced mother. Asked if she's really 56, she says, "Parts of me are." Every single part of this movie is artificial. (PG-13) TIM APPELO
