director
Mike Nichols
screenwriters
Jim Harrison
Wesley Strick
based on
the novella by
Jim Harrison
producer
Douglas Wick
cinematographer
Giuseppe Rotunno
music
Ennio Morricone
editor
Sam O'Steen
cast
Jack Nicholson (Will Randall)
Michelle Pfeiffer (Laura Alden)
James Spader (Stewart Swinton)
Kate Nelligan (Charlotte Randall)
Richard Jenkins (Detective Bridger)
Eileen Atkins (Mary)
Christopher Plummer (Raymond Alden)
Ron Rifkin (Doctor)
David Hyde Pierce (Roy)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: 6/17/94
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other mike
nichols films
reviewed on this website:
- closer
- primary
colors
- what
planet are you from?
|
Jack
Nicholson is already so diabolical that putting fur and fangs
on him is like sending coals to Newcastle. In Wolf, the
new horror-satire by Mike Nichols (Regarding Henry), Nicholson
is least interesting when he's furry. The casting is a bit too
on-the-nose: Nicholson has spent his career entertaining us by
showing us the wolf inside him. When he's on the prowl, mangling
deer or Central Park muggers, not only have we (essentially)
seen him do it before, we've seen dozens of guys do it before
him. He's funny when he lets the wolf slip into his daylight
persona, but we've seen him do that, too. Yet in the first half
hour, Nicholson gives a performance we haven't seen before: a
tired old schnook clutching at the last vestiges of youth. Wolf
is partly about regaining potency, and Nicholson superbly plays
an impotent man (in all respects), making you forget for a while
that he's Jack, notorious stud, Lakers fan.
The werewolf legend has always dealt with sex. The teenage-wolfman
movies are about horny, hormonal adolescence -- itchy libido
asserting itself with strange new hairs, urges, fluids. The rare
female variations, like The Company of Wolves, examine
the sexual beast in both genders (though that angle most often
comes out in vampire movies). And almost all versions are about
a good man's fear of his id taking over and hurting the woman
he loves. Wolf may be the first werewolf movie to use
the legend as a vehicle for exploring a middle-aged man's sexual
insecurity. (Most wolfmen of the past were youngsters.) It's
also about getting in touch with what Robert Bly called "the
hairy man" -- the movie could be called Iron Jack.
Yet Wolf isn't particularly erotic, unless you're into
handcuffs -- and even that idea was put to rest in Innocent
Blood and the 1982 Cat People, where the predators
(both women) were cuffed prior to sex so as not to mangle their
lovers.
Nicholson is Will Randall, a New York literary agent with "taste
and individuality" -- the wrong qualities for the job, especially
after a conglomerate (headed by icy Christopher Plummer) takes
over Will's publishing house and plans to push bestsellers at
the expense of superior, obscure authors. Soon, Will finds himself
demoted, his job given to his sleazy protegé Stewart (James
Spader) -- who also happens to be boffing Will's wife (Kate Nelligan
in a one-note performance). This double whammy comes during an
already bad week: Will has been bitten by a wolf, and the wound
is becoming inflamed and ... hairy. He scares horses, but he
doesn't scare Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer), the conglomerate head's
daughter, a bitter young woman who responds to Will's vulnerability
and then to the aura of wild-thing danger he exudes. In these
tales, women are always drawn to the wolfman: A little bit of
wolf in a good man is exciting -- just as a lot of wolf in a
bad man is exciting in the worst way.
Nicholson has some of his most gentle, touching moments when
Will backs away from the pursuing Laura, afraid of the monster
in himself -- the very thing that is attracting her -- and Pfeiffer
matches him for a while, playing a smart woman grateful for some
quiet, intelligent talk with a man who actually reads. But then
the script (by Wesley Strick and Jim Harrison, based on Harrison's
odd semi-autobiographical novella) all but abandons her, presumably
having bigger fish to fry. The newly confident Will tells off
his cheating wife and claws his way back into his job.
Many, like me, may wish that Wolf focused more on the
boardroom scrapping in the publishing house, where office politics
are a civilized update of wolf activity: travelling in packs,
marking one's territory, preying on the weak. (Business is red
in tooth and claw.) But the satire is too facile to be interesting,
and besides, a $60 million Hollywood movie has little business
lampooning mainstream literature. As Nicholson gets wolfier,
he gets more predictable, and he forfeits the movie to James
Spader. Playing the gelatinous Stewart, Spader does the smartest
thing anyone playing a villain can do: He behaves as if the movie
were about Stewart, a bright, ambitious, reasonable young
man who has to put up with some troublesome old fart. Spader
hits his stride when he himself starts getting wolfy; we certainly
haven't seen that performance before, and he's rather
frightening. It's as if lycanthropy eliminated the "civilized"
mask hiding one's basest instincts; Stewart is revealed as a
pathetic yet infinitely threatening rapist, a bad man with nothing
but wolf in him.
Wolf isn't a horror movie, though it looks like one. Even
a semi-serious wolfman film like An American Werewolf in London
quickened our heartbeats by placing innocent people in the path
of the temporarily predatory hero. What makes Nicholson's performance
effective in the early scenes, when the noble Will struggles
to keep a lid on his new savagery, also zaps any suspense --
we know he won't hurt Laura or anyone else who doesn't have it
coming. Seeing Wolf on a double bill with Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining, as I did recently, is instructive: Neither
Kubrick nor Mike Nichols has much interest or faith in the horror
genre -- they use horror as a springboard for larger concerns
(inhumanity, fear of impotence, etc.). What mainstream directors
never learn is that horror movies are uniquely equipped to address
these concerns covertly and still be fun and scary. (Look at
David Cronenberg's The Fly, or the Alien series.)
Nichols' direction of the Jack-attack scenes in Wolf is
depressingly half-assed. Perhaps afraid that he can't show werewolf
fans anything they haven't seen already, Nichols undercompensates
by showing nothing. His heart is in this movie only incidentally
-- in the theme of a man coming to grips with an abrupt, shocking
change in his life. But didn't Nichols just do that a few years
ago? Wolf is almost Regarding Hairy.
I doubt that Wolf is meant to stand alongside the classics
of the genre. Like Bram
Stoker's Dracula, it's an upscale gloss on the legend,
done with tact by a major director dabbling in horror. Aside
from James Spader, who gives you the creeps even in his pre-wolfy
stage, Wolf is short on the primal punch werewolf movies
are supposed to deliver. The movie never cuts loose, and neither,
really, does Jack Nicholson; he was more of a werewolf in The
Shining, and far more threatening. It's nice that everyone's
suddenly interested in the old Universal monster catalog, but
oh, for a director who can reproduce the chills of, say, James
Whale or Val Lewton. Wolf needs more full moon in its
soul. What it has, when you come down to it, is Jack Nicholson
as the world's highest-paid Chia Pet. |
