GREAT BALLS OF FIRE
With Dennis Quaid, Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, John Doe, Lisa Blount, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Trey Wilson.
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Unfortunately, this absence of innocence gives most of the movie a note of condescension that interferes with our belief in the characters–not only Jerry Lee Lewis himself, as played by Dennis Quaid, but also his 13-year-old bride Myra (Winona Ryder), his cousin Jimmy Swaggart (Alec Baldwin), and all the other principals. To his credit, McBride makes no bones about his focus being on the legend of Jerry Lee Lewis rather than his life, though it can be argued that (probably thanks to the pressures of test marketing and the ratings board) the movie isn’t faithful to the legend, either. While the movie can certainly be enjoyed as both a showcase for Lewis’s music (performed by Lewis and lip-synched by Quaid) and a limited stylistic exercise, its distance from its subject still takes an enormous toll.
The films of McBride’s first period, all of which might be said to be part of an American offshoot of the French New Wave, are David Holzman’s Diary, My Girlfriend’s Wedding, Glen and Randa (1971), and Pictures From Life’s Other Side (1971). After a transitional film–a very funny soft-core sexploitation comedy called Hot Times (1974), with characters based on the leading figures in Archie comics–12 years passed during which McBride worked on unfilmed projects and wrote the uncredited narration for the release version (i.e., the studio re-edit) of Samuel Fuller’s 1980 feature The Big Red One. Then, after this long stretch in the wilderness, McBride directed the three features for which he is best known today–Breathless (1983), The Big Easy (1987), and now Great Balls of Fire–as well as “The Once and Future King” (1986), a first-rate half-hour episode for The Twilight Zone made shortly before that TV series expired, about an Elvis impersonator magically meeting and eventually supplanting his idol back in 1954, the last McBride work that I’ve really liked.
It could be argued that this cheerful contempt for the world (if not the music) of Jerry Lee Lewis, which regards every character as a geek, is more honest in some ways than the bogus “sincerity” of a biopic like Lady Sings the Blues, which undoubtedly wreaks as much havoc on the facts about Billie Holiday. No one seems to find the real-life Lewis very likable apart from his music, and in order to give him some charisma in the movie, McBride and his collaborators may have had to lessen the stature of the people he was associated with.
