Tag: Robert Zemeckis

‘Here’ Review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright Get Boxed in by Banal Story in Robert Zemeckis’ Fixed-Camera Experiment

There’s something quintessentially American and straight out of Norman Rockwell about centering a survey of multiple generations around the living room, with idealized themes of home and family reinforced by scenes around the Christmas tree or the dining table, fully extended to accommodate the ever-expanding clan at Thanksgiving. But relatable doesn’t always mean interesting, even if the moments of joy don’t hide the vein of sadness and disappointment that runs through Here.

The same goes for the idea of shooting everything — reaching back to prehistory and right on up through contemporary times — from the same fixed point and using the same wide angle. In terms of technical craft, it’s a daring experiment, but one perhaps less geared to a dynamic narrative than an art installation. Narrowing the frame constricts the storytelling, no matter how many times a Significant Life Moment is shoved up close to the lens for emphasis.

Here

The Bottom Line

Bristling with centuries of life, and yet mostly inert.

Venue: AFI Fest (Centerpiece Screening)
Release date: Friday, Nov. 1
Cast: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, David Fynn, Ophelia Lovibond, Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Screenwriters: Eric Roth, Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire

Rated PG-13,
1 hour 44 minutes

Reuniting with his Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis takes his visual cues from the source material, Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, expanded from a six-page comic strip published in the late ‘80s.

The interdisciplinary artist pushed the boundaries of the comic format by sticking to the exact same location in every panel. Framed through the living room of a house constructed in 1902, his story spans millennia but is focused predominantly on the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of those panels include one or more smaller panes that show the same space at different, non-chronological points in time.

By replicating the graphic novel’s approach three-dimensionally, Zemeckis’ film becomes like a living diorama with insets providing windows into the past and future. Purely from a craft standpoint, it’s mesmerizing, even beautiful, for a while. Until it’s not.

Zemeckis for years now has been fixated on technology and its visual capabilities, to the point where he neglects the rudiments of story and character development. The vignettes here return frequently to the same families at different moments in their lives, but rarely settle in for long enough to sustain narrative momentum or give the characters much depth.

In addition to the self-imposed rigidity of the visual scheme, Here will draw attention — probably in divisive ways — to another technological element that’s even more of a distraction. The director uses a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysic to de-age Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, the characters whose arc, traced from high school through old age, dominates the film. Using archival images of the actors, the program spits out digital makeup that can be face-swapped onto the cast as they perform.

It’s more advanced and convincing than the de-aging in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman five years ago, allowing for greater elasticity and facial expressivity — even if the physicality of the actors’ bodies isn’t always a perfect match, notably with Hanks in the teenage years. But there’s also something inherently creepy about the process, particularly at a time when many of us are apprehensive about screen acting going down an ever more dehumanizing digital road.

The movie begins with the house under construction. This introduces the concept of panes depicting various elements as they come together, with furnishings from different periods and the first glimpses of people representing various threads that will be elaborated on throughout, some more substantially than others. The opening scenes also plant the central idea in Roth and Zemeckis’ screenplay of houses as receptacles for memory, both lived experience and history.

The frame then jumps way back in time to when the area was a primordial swamp, replete with dinosaurs — until that landscape is razed in a fiery mass-extinction event, forming first into rock and gradually into a verdant clearing bursting with flora and (CG) fauna. A pair of young Indigenous Americans (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) share a kiss there, before another time leap reveals enslaved people building a colonial mansion.

We get fragments of life in the house over different periods: Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is an anxious wife and mother in the very early 20th century, fearful that the obsession of her husband John (Gwilym Lee) with aviation will end in tragedy. Leo (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) occupy the house for two decades starting in the mid-1920s. Unencumbered by children, they are a pair of fun, frisky quasi-bohemians who get lucky with Leo’s invention of the recliner. More of their levity would have been welcome in a film often weighed down by its earnestness.

The least developed strand covers a Black family, parents Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teenage son Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), who purchase the house in 2015, when the asking price of $1 million is considered “a steal.”

Their presence serves to show how neighborhoods evolve and become more inclusive. But there’s a nagging feeling that the Harris family’s function is largely representational, especially when their most fleshed out scene shows Devon and Helen sitting Justin down for a serious talk about the rules he must observe to stay safe if he’s pulled over by a cop while driving. Their scenes also touch on the frightening first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic through the fate of their longtime Latina housekeeper (Anya Marco-Harris).

But the bulk of the story centers on Richard’s family, starting with his parents, Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who buy the house in 1945. Al is fresh out of the Army and suffering from what appears to be undiagnosed PTSD, which causes him to drink. A child of the Depression, he dwells on money worries, concerned that his salesman job won’t cover the bills.

The first-born of their four children, Richard (played by younger actors until Hanks steps in), brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret, to meet the family. When she reveals her intention to go first to college and then law school, Al asks, “What’s wrong with being a housewife?” He’s even more blunt when Richard, a keen painter, reveals that he wants a career as a graphic artist: “Don’t be an idiot. Get a job where you wear a suit.”

Richard and Margaret marry at 18, after she becomes pregnant. In a heavy-handed nod to sons dolefully following their fathers’ paths, Richard packs up his paints and canvases. He takes a job selling insurance to support his family, though they continue to live with his parents. Margaret never gets comfortable in a house that doesn’t feel like hers, creating festering problems in the marriage. But Richard has also inherited his dad’s financial fears, which prevents them from taking a risk on a place of their own.

I wish I could say I got emotionally invested in the changes this family goes through, but everything feels lifted from the most routine playbook of aging, declining health, death, divorce and, most insistently, deferred dreams, sometimes to be taken up by the next generation. At Margaret’s surprise 50th birthday party, Wright gets stuck with a melancholy speech about all the things she had hoped to achieve by that age. It feels like a pale shadow of Patricia Arquette’s analogous — and far more economically articulated — scene in Boyhood.

Of the many moments in which characters step right up to the camera to say Something Important, the most embarrassing might be Richard on foreshadowing duty, noting “a moment we’ll always remember” while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” plays on the soundtrack. This feels straight out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

It’s possible that people with an enduring fondness for Forrest Gump will be sufficiently captivated by seeing Hanks and Wright back together, making their characters’ outcomes affecting. But others are likely to remain stubbornly dry-eyed, despite Alan Silvestri’s syrupy score troweling on the sentiment.

For a movie covering such an expansive passage of American life, Here feels curiously weightless. It’s no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are scarcely more than outlines. No one fully manages to get out from under the movie’s preoccupation with visual technology at the expense of heart.

Historical detours zip back to colonial times when English Loyalist William Franklin (Daniel Betts), conveniently parked in a horse-drawn cart, grumbles to his wife about the radical politics of his father Benjamin (Keith Bartlett). (The less said about the cut to Richard and his younger brother at a costume party as dueling Benjamin Franklins, the better.) There are brief scenes from the Revolutionary War. And there’s a sketchy account of the Indigenous couple’s pre-settlement life, raising their own family and suffering their own losses.

But it’s characteristic of an episodic screenplay that finds no opportunity to belabor its themes too trite, no clichéd line of dialogue too platitudinous, that even the Native American thread gets tied up in a neat bow. That happens when archeological society members stop by and ask to poke around the garden a bit, suspecting the house might be built on an important site. Lo and behold …

Only at the very end does DP Don Burgess’ camera move from its fixed point in the living room, venturing outside the house to take in the tidy suburbia that surrounds it. But a glaringly fake CG hummingbird is the final reminder that almost everything about Here is synthetic.

David Rooney

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October 25, 2024
Death Becomes Her: The Ultimate Female Aging Commentary

In the early 90s, Hollywood was becoming more self-aware of its own ageism. Perhaps in a manner not seen since Billy Wilder’s groundbreaking 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. The first movie of its kind to truly lambast “the biz” in a manner that had never been done before. So damning, in fact, that the luminaries of Hollywood were not ready for it, with Louis B. Mayer reportedly yelling at Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!” In the wake of its release, other “anti-Hollywood” movies would follow, including 1952’s The Star, with Bette Davis in the lead role that smacked of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in terms of the whole “aging, irrelevant star clings to former glory that can never be recaptured” angle. Tellingly, the movie came out eight months after Singin’ in the Rain the same year (as did The Bad and the Beautiful, the story of an insufferable producer named Jonathan Shields [Kirk Douglas]). This, too, being a condemning tale of how fickle and merciless the industry is when it comes to tossing out “irrelevant women” without a second thought. After all, movies aren’t about making “art” (contrary to the MGM saying, “Ars gratia artis” a.k.a. “Art for art’s sake”)—they’re about the bottom line.

Perhaps the industry didn’t want to allow an entire genre to be carved out about itself right away, because it wasn’t really until the 90s that self-referential movies of a meta, satirical nature started coming out again. 1992 being the year of both The Player and Death Becomes Her. Then there was Swimming With Sharks in 1994, the tale of a dastardly movie mogul named Buddy Ackerman (the then socially acceptable Kevin Spacey) and the new assistant he abuses daily. Barton Fink and Bowfinger would provide bookends to the decade as well, each coming out in 1991 and 1999, respectively. Additionally, Hollywood provided the mid-90s “romp” Get Shorty and, two years later, another pièce de résistance of the genre via 1997’s L.A. Confidential. But out of all of them, Death Becomes Her was the most tailored release vis-à-vis addressing the lengths a woman feels she must go to in order to stay looking “forever young.”

Of course, a resurgence in self-mockery didn’t mean Hollywood was actually going to do anything about its ageist proclivities in terms of making a significant change—a.k.a. rendering the industry as more friendly to the “aged.” To be clear, in Hollywood, “aged” means pretty much any number over thirty. Even to this day. The only thing women, actresses or otherwise, have on their side at the moment is the advancement of various anti-aging “remedies” (i.e., expensive creams and/or plastic surgery). But even those “tactics” tend to end up doing her a disservice as she can be equally as ribbed for her attempts at looking younger (see: the malignment of Madonna after her 2023 Grammys appearance). As Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) is by the time we reach the midpoint of Death Becomes Her. On her last legs as a “viable” (read: fuckable) actress, her long-time frenemy (but really just enemy), Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), comes to see her at the beginning of the film, written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp, and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Because perhaps no one understands better than men just how much women are valued for their youth and looks above all else.

Commencing in 1978, Death Becomes Her wastes no time in introducing its audience to the rampant ageism not only against women in general, but women in the entertainment industry in particular. Zemeckis sets the scene on Madeline’s opening night performance of Songbird!, a Broadway adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth (in truth, one wonders if Williams didn’t get his own inspiration from Sunset Boulevard). The irony here being that the part of Alexandra del Lago a.k.a. Princess Kosmonopolis was written for Tallulah Bankhead, who would have been fifty-four years old when the play first came out in 1956. Not exactly the “age group” Madeline would want to be associated with, and yet, a job is a job.

After the audience lambasts her as they walk out, with such commentary as, “Madeline Ashton! Talk about waking the dead,” we’re given a glimpse of her supposedly cringeworthy (no more than usual for something meant to be set in the 70s) performance before Zemeckis cuts to her in her dressing room, staring at herself in the mirror as she reworks a famed lullaby into: “Wrinkled, wrinkled little star…hope they never see the scars.” Her lament over watching her youth fade is augmented tenfold as a result of being damned to see that youthful version of herself forever immortalized onscreen. Constantly making her yearn to be that girl again, as opposed to appreciating what she had when she had it. The same parallel can be found in Norma Desmond, with her boy toy/hired personal screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), observing the way she watches herself so lovingly onscreen. This prompts Joe to remark in a voiceover, “…she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career—plain crazy when it came to that one subject: her celluloid self.” The only “real” self, as far as Norma (and her delusions) is concerned.

But Madeline isn’t so naïve. The Hollywood of the 70s and beyond would hardly allow her to be. Which is why she knows that when Helen reemerges after a seven-year disappearance from the public eye to throw a book party (taking place in then-present 1992) that Madeline’s been invited to—very deliberately—she’s fully aware she needs to look her best. Knows that it’s an opportunity to prove, once again, that she’s “superior” to Helen, if for no other reason than because she’s still “the hot one.” What she can’t fathom is that the entire motive for Helen to put on the fête is because she wants to parade just how amazing she looks and how well she’s doing to an ever-dwindling-in-importance Madeline (reminding the latter of as much when she tells her condescendingly at the party, “Gosh, I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you would. I spoke to my PR woman and she said, ‘Madeline Ashton goes to the opening of an envelope’”).

Even before arriving and realizing that she’s been outdone aesthetically by Helen, she senses the urgency of needing to go to her med spa and seek another treatment. But when her “specialist” refuses to give her the procedure she wants again so soon and instead offers a collagen buff, Madeline retorts, “Collagen buff? You might as well tell me to wash my face with soap and water.” Trying her best to keep her customer calm, the aesthetician then offers to do her makeup. Madeline balks, “Makeup is pointless! It does nothing anymore!” Not for “mature skin,” as it’s “politely” called in the world of foundation and concealer. She then verbally lashes the youthful aesthetician with, “You stand there with your twenty-two-year-old skin and your tits like rocks!” In other words, this bitch couldn’t possibly understand what Madeline is going through (but oh, how she’s going to). The scent of Madeline’s desperation is evidently potent enough for Roy Franklin (William Frankfather), the owner of the spa, to materialize out of nowhere in the same room and slip her a business card that contains only an address in elegant script: 1091 Rue la Fleur. Never mind the fact that L.A. doesn’t have French street names, the decision to name it after a flower is entirely pointed. After all, flowers are frequently used as metaphors (especially in poetry) to represent the “budding” of a girl’s youth (a gross phrase, to be sure) followed by the eventual decaying of that bloom. The one that makes her ultimately repugnant to men (and women) of all ages.

Even so, Madeline persists in doggedly ignoring this reality—able to do so with the perk of having enough cash to pay a boy toy…à la Norma Desmond. Dakota (Adam Storke), however, is growing weary of Madeline’s cloying nature. This much is apparent when she shows up at his door unannounced looking for false comfort in the wake of Helen’s book party. Unfortunately for her self-esteem level, she finds that he’s with another (younger) woman. When she acts upset about it, he finally snaps, “I’m sick of this shit, you know that? I am doing you a favor here.” She asks incredulously, “Doing me a favor? I gave you—” “Yeah, you gave, I gave. Big deal! Somebody told me we look ridiculous together. How do you think that makes me feel? You never think about my feelings. Go find someone your own age, Madeline!” If Joe Gillis had been a colder sort, he might have said the same thing to Norma…except he knew all too well of her suicidal inclinations at the drop of a hat.

With Dakota’s scathing rejection being the last straw, Madeline gives in to going to the address she was slipped at her med spa. A house that belongs to one, Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini). To Madeline’s surprise, Lisle is already expecting her, having her muscular lackeys invite her in and then diving into her philosophical ruminations on aging, such as, “We are creatures of the spring, you and I… You’re scared as hell—of yourself, of the body you thought you once knew.” The one that’s changing and mutating like some kind of cruel science experiment. As Iona (Annie Potts) in Pretty in Pink laments, “Oh, why can’t we start old and get younger?” (otherwise known as: Benjamin Button’s disease).

Lisle continues to make strange overtures as she caresses Madeline’s hand and muses, “So warm, so full of life. And already it ebbs away from you. This is life’s ultimate cruelty. It offers us the taste of youth and vitality…and then makes us witness our own decay.” With no amount of money ever being able to truly stave off that degeneration.

Even our early forebears couldn’t help but be concerned with aesthetics amid basic survival concerns, considering the first plastic surgery procedures have been documented all the way back to ancient Egypt. And that’s really saying something when taking into account the lifespan for most people at that juncture. A majority was prone to dying young, with the average life expectancy in ancient Egypt being nineteen years old (which certainly meets the “die young” criterion presented in the book and movie version of Logan’s Run). Richies, like the pharaohs, however, could typically count on a longer lifespan (quelle surprise), usually between thirty-five and forty years old. And obviously, they would want to look their best while outliving the hoi polloi. There is something to be said for that same desire in the celebrity set, our modern version of the pharaohs, one supposes. They, too, are youth-obsessed for the same two-pronged reason: 1) being in the public eye means perpetual scrutiny/people seeking out flaws as a means to belittle the work itself and 2) they want the commoner to understand that they are not the same. Even if, as some would like to speculate, “I don’t think people want perfection out of celebrities anymore. I think they want celebrities that they can see themselves in.”

But truthfully, the fact that Death Becomes Her remains as pertinent now as it ever was is a testament to that theory being another lie some prefer to tell themselves. That the film has also become a cult classic in the queer community additionally speaks to the gerascophobia of the gays. Per Peaches Christ, who has remade Death Becomes Her as Drag Becomes Her, “Let’s face it, gay men especially have this issue. It’s actually a real issue. It’s a real darkness in our community where we don’t talk a lot about the ageism that exists among us. And it’s a real thing.” But let’s not get it twisted: no one has it worse than women when it comes to aging and being cast out by (male-dominated) society as a result. So obviously, Madeline and Helen would take the potion offered by Lisle, regardless of what the potential ramifications might be—which is that they effectively turn themselves into non-bloodsucking vampires.

While Helen’s motives for doing it stem largely from her competitive history with Madeline and wanting to prove that the only thing Madeline ever had as an advantage is her looks (now fading), Madeline’s drive to take the potion is emblematic of what spurs most actresses (and pop stars). They’re all clamoring to remain seen (as they were) amid fresher, newer “talent” entering the fray. And “being seen” has only become even more of a challenge in the attention span-decimated present. As for Ernest (Bruce Willis), who the duo tries to convince to take the potion as well so that he can patch them up for eternity (he’s a plastic surgeon-turned-reconstructive mortician), he doesn’t want anything to do with immortality. Thus, he tells Lisle, “I don’t wanna live forever. It sounds good, but what am I gonna do? What if I get bored? What if I get lonely? Who am I gonna hang around with, Madeline and Helen?” Lisle sticks to the crux of the sales pitch by reminding, “But you never grow old.” Ernest bemoans, “But everybody else will. I’ll have to watch everyone around me die. I don’t think this is right. This is not a dream. This is a nightmare.” Or, as the first verse of Thomas Moore’s “The Last Rose of Summer” goes, “‘Tis the last rose of summer,/Left blooming alone;/All her lovely companions/Are faded and gone;/No flower of her kindred,/No rose-bud is nigh,/To reflect back her blushes/Or give sigh for sigh!”

So sure, staying young and vibrant has its pluses, but, in the end, caving to vanity means you’ll end up stuck with someone as narcissistic and soulless as the Hollywood machine itself. And the way Madeline and Helen end up in the final scene, it doesn’t appear as though the price they’ve paid for “youth” has been worth the fine-print consequences.

Genna Rivieccio

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February 23, 2024
Death Becomes Her and Beef: On Being Attracted to the Energy of a Person You Despise

In 1992’s Death Becomes Her, the long-standing “friendship” between Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) and Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) quickly reveals itself to be a frenemyship fueled by jealousies and residual beef stemming from their many years of knowing one another, all the way back to being teens in New Jersey. With the film opening on Madeline’s ill-advised performance in a Broadway adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth called Songbird!, it gives Helen the chance to see if her fiancé, Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis), can “pass the Madeline Ashton test.” In other words, is he immune to her charms and seductions the way so many of Helen’s previous boyfriends were not? For it’s clear that Madeline makes a sport of “winning” in an unspoken competition with Helen. Using her looks and wiles to outshine Helen’s “bookishness” and “class.” To this end, the yin and yang qualities in each woman speaks to their inevitable “attraction” to one another. Seeking something in the other person that she herself does not possess.

In Helen’s case, the obvious characteristics she yearns for in Madeline are cliché blonde beauty and the artful wielding of coquettishness. In contrast, Madeline, although less overt about it, secretly resents Helen for being from a more “pedigreed” social class and her intelligence level. Of the variety that leads her to become an author. Though this doesn’t happen until many years after her fateful meeting with Madeline backstage in 1978.

And it is in ’78 when Madeline is informed by her lackey, Rose (Nancy Fish), that Helen has arrived with her fiancé to greet her. She immediately asks, “How’s she look?” The intense desire to hear her underling respond with something like, “Terrible” is ruined when she instead says, “I don’t know. Smart, I guess. Sorta classy.” Madeline balks, “Classy? Really? Compared to who?” This bristling over Helen’s characterization as somehow superior because she’s not “cheap” like Madeline is something that comes up over and over again throughout Death Becomes Her. And yet, because all Madeline’s got are her trashy, smarmy tactics, she sticks to them—augmenting her sleaze tenfold by deciding to steal Ernest when she realizes he’s a renowned plastic surgeon she’s read about.

But before that, when Helen does eventually come into the dressing room with Ernest, Madeline is all “pre-posed” for her (cleavage strategically exposed), under the guise of “acting naturally.” After the encounter, it doesn’t take long before she’s “stopping by” Ernest’s operating room and inviting him out for dinner. Upon hearing about this back at home, Helen proceeds to pull viciously at the tissue she’s holding (an ongoing anger tic that she uses to cope). She then tells Ernest, “You don’t know Madeline the way I do. She wants you. She wants you because you’re mine. I’ve lost men to her before… That’s why I wanted you to meet her before we got married, because I just had to see if you could pass the Madeline Ashton test.”

Ernest insists, “Darling, I have absolutely no interest in Madeline Ashton.” Cut to Ernest and Madeline getting married instead of Ernest and Helen. Seven years later, in 1985, we see Helen holed up alone in her apartment, having gained ample weight and residing with a number of cats—as though she’s decided to surrender fully to her enemy by admitting that she’s no match for her, and she might as well just lean into all of her weaknesses…eating included. As the door is broken down to her apartment due to not paying rent, she could care less if the walls are crumbling around her, because there’s a scene of Madeline being strangled on TV that she is practically orgasming over as it happens.

Six months later, at the psych ward, her therapist urges, “For you to have a life—for any of us to have a life—you have got to forget about her. You have to erase her from your mind. You need to eliminate—” That’s where Helen cuts her off and decides to take the “eliminate” advice only. Someone would likely tell Beef’s Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) the same thing and they, too, would abide by the selective advice Helen opted to heed instead. For Amy and Danny, their beef begins later in life than the one between Madeline and Helen. Namely, after they proceed to engage in an ongoing feud sparked by a road rage incident started in the parking lot of Forster’s, a Home Depot-type store owned by Jordan Forster (Maria Bello). Jordan also happens to be the billionaire dangling the promise of buying Amy’s successful plant “boutique,” Kōyōhaus, and absorbing it under the “Forster’s umbrella.” Toying with her psychologically in such a way as to make Amy particularly irritable.

Danny just so happens to back out of his parking spot unthinkingly (/in a glazed-over state of depression) right at the instant when Amy’s looking for someone to take her misplaced rage out on. But, unluckily for her, she has no idea that Danny, too, is filled with rage he’s looking to unleash on an unsuspecting victim—having unintentionally tapped into “unlocking” her nemesis. As for that word, which comes from the Greek goddess of the same name, it bears noting that said goddess was in control of vengeance, “distributing” (the loose translation of “nemesis”) retribution and justice. Except her modus operandi was not to do so right away, perhaps being the inspiration for the old chestnut, “Revenge is a dish best served cold” (the riffing tagline for Beef is, “Revenge is a dish best served raw”). A.k.a. when the person deserving of it (or who one believes is deserving of it) least expects it because so much time has gone by and, surely, somebody couldn’t possibly hold on to a grudge for that long…right? Dead wrong.

Both sets of characters, Madeline and Helen/Amy and Danny, are testaments to that notion. That “letting go” is not an option. Not just because it serves as fuel/a raison d’être, but because there’s an underlying attraction beneath the all-out contempt. Dare one say “love”—thus, the oft-recited phrase, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.” And clearly each character pair sees something of themselves reflected back in the other. Some similar wound that calls to them. In Amy and Danny’s case that wound is feeling totally placeless in a world that prizes people who “belong.” Despite Amy’s financial success, her personal life is constantly strained, as she admits to Danny in the final episode, “Figures of Light,” that she can never really tell her husband, George (Joseph Lee), much of anything. When Danny asks, “Why not?” she replies thoughtfully, “I think when nowhere feels like home, you just retreat into yourself.” Or you make a home in your nemesis, oddly enough. Being that Danny and Amy are the only ones who can really understand one another because they can speak freely without judgment or the fear of “conditions,” their attraction in “Figures of Light” transitions from one of hate to pure love, with both admitting that they’ve never been able to talk to anyone the way they can talk to each other.

The same ultimately goes for Madeline and Helen. Even after another seven years go by in Death Becomes Her, bringing us to then-present day 1992. This time, the shoe has shifted to the other foot in terms of Madeline reposing in bed as she struggles with her own weight gain state, all Norma Desmond-ed out in various facial bandages designed to help make her look young(er). When Rose hands her an invitation to Helen’s book party, she learns that, ironically enough, the title of Helen’s novel is Forever Young. Feeling personally attacked, she goes to her med spa to get some touch-ups. But they won’t give her what she wants, forcing her to attend the party looking like herself. A big mistake, she realizes, when she sees how good and thin Helen looks at the same age as her: fifty.

Hot with envy after the party, Madeline decides to go to Lisle von Rhuman’s (Isabella Rossellini), whose address was given to her by the spa owner, Mr. Franklin (William Frankfather), mysteriously appearing out of nowhere at the spa when Madeline declared money was no object with regard to getting her youth and beauty back. Not yet aware that Helen is already a beneficiary of what Lisle has to offer—eternal youth via a potion—she doesn’t understand that her unwitting “power play” is another form of competition as well. One that will undo Helen’s plans to “eliminate” (per the word her therapist used) Madeline for good. Because the thing about the potion that Lisle fails to mention is that it not only supplies one with eternal youth, but also eternal life. Which means that Madeline and Helen will now be adversaries forever. Just a pair of Beverly Hills ghouls haunting the streets with their immortality.

Nonetheless, the appeal of being hated by a committed enemy is that there is no fear of losing “unconditional” love. For the conditions of burning hate dictate that you must always hate that person no matter what. So any “outrageous” or “immoral” thing they might tell you is actually a boon to that cause. In this regard, Amy has effectively found what she’s looking for in Danny, because one of the running themes in Beef is that she knows no one can love her unconditionally—not even her daughter, June (Remy Holt)—for who she truly is. Not without her plastering on that smiling veneer and providing a sugar-coated “lite” edition of her personality. Danny feels the same, though it comes across to a lesser degree. Granted, his form of securing “unconditional” love is extracted through the master manipulation of his brother, Paul (Young Mazino).

The one-upping lengths that Amy and Danny go to in order to make the other’s life hell is similar to what Madeline and Helen do, expending all their energy on keeping the other down, and plotting her destruction. “You should learn not to compete with me, I always win!” Madeline screams after they both get over the reality that each of them is dead and forever young, equalizing the playing field a little too much for both women’s taste. Helen is the one who starts the fight (featuring that illustrious hole in her stomach) with the shovels as they proceed to go at it in yet another fierce competition, this time more literally. Helen ripostes to Madeline’s claim, “You may have always won, but you never played fair!” This is something Danny could easily say to Amy, who has the financial means and security to get at Danny with far more ease.

Finally fathoming it’s mostly pointless to keep fighting, Madeline reminds Helen, “We can’t even inflict pain.” Helen snaps back, “I’ll tell ya about pain! Bobby O’Brien! Scott Hunter! Ernest Menville! That’s pain! I loved every one of them and they loved me… They were all I had and you took them away from me. Not because you loved them, not because you cared. But just to hurt me on purpose.” As the two delve deeper into their long-marinating beef, Madeline counters to Helen playing the sole victim, “Do you think I was blind, deaf? I couldn’t hear what you and your snotty friends were saying about me? You thought I was cheap.” Helen rebuffs, “Oh, please. You’re insane.” Madeline demands, “Then how come you never invited me to one of those parties at your parents’?” Helen shrugs, “Because we didn’t think you’d feel comfortable. It wasn’t usual for… It wasn’t usual for us to have…” “Trash in the house!” Madeline cuts in. Helen redirects, “You’re avoiding the issue. You stole my boyfriends to hurt me on purpose!” “I did not!” “Admit it!” Madeline insists, “No, you admit it. You look me in the eye and you admit you thought I was cheap.” Helen gives in, ceding, “Okay, I thought you were cheap.” As a reward for her honesty, Madeline confirms, “Well, I hurt you on purpose.” And so, like Danny with Amy, Madeline kept using the one thing she had—her “trashy wiles”—to get back at someone “classier” such as Helen.

Having buried the hatchet with one another after an ultimate fight (which is what happens in Beef when Amy and Danny run each other off a cliff in their cars), the two now join forces to get Ernest to do their bidding and ensure that their youthful corpse bodies are kept looking fresh (Ernest is an expert in this after being forced to become a reconstructive mortician)—generally by spray-painting their skin in a flesh-colored tone. Unfortunately, their shared enthusiasm for making Ernest “one of them” so that he can be around forever to deliver the needed “maintenance” on their bodies backfires when Ernest comes to understand that living forever sounds like a nightmare. Managing to escape from their clutches after they knock him out and take him to Lisle’s house, Madeline and Helen are forced to reconcile the fact that despite being sworn enemies for all these decades, they’re the only two people on the planet who can truly understand one another. But that’s as horrifying as it is comforting, with Helen noting, “Who could have imagined? You and me…together.” Madeline returns, “Yeah, I know.” Helen continues, “Depending on each other. Painting each other’s asses. Day and night.” Madeline laughs along nervously, “Oh, yeah. Forever.” Helen repeats, “Forever” as their forced jovial laughter turns to near tears.

Cut to thirty-seven years later in 2029, and the duo’s skin is peeling at Ernest’s funeral. Regardless of their misery, they still obviously get off on their bickering—it’s like a life-force they can use to funnel into remaining “sharp” and “with purpose.” That much can also be said for Amy and Danny as they let their feud steer both their lives completely off course…but at least they can tell they’re still alive as a result (unlike Madeline and Helen).

In the poster for Beef, Amy and Danny are shown staring at each other with an intensity that looks as much like hate as it does love. Ergo, the aforementioned aphorism: “There’s a fine line between love and hate.” And there is something to being attracted to the energy of a person you seemingly despise, seeing a quality in them that you can relate to…or a quality you perhaps despise in yourself. No matter how outwardly “different” your nemesis might come across in relation to your own persona.

Genna Rivieccio

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April 23, 2023