MORTAL THOUGHTS
With Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, John Pankow, and Billie Neal.
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Music is almost always a main ingredient in a Rudolph picture; at least three of them–Welcome to L.A., Remember My Name, and Choose Me–essentially began as record albums around which Rudolph shaped narratives and visual styles. Ever since Trouble in Mind, he has worked with a new-age/fusion composer and musician named Mark Isham, and in certain respects the centrality of the role played by Isham’s scores rivals that played by the camera. This becomes especially important in Mortal Thoughts, where the story, characters, and settings are restricted to a working-class milieu–the film was shot in New Jersey, in Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City–and the music clearly belongs to another realm entirely. It creates a voyeuristic distance between ourselves and the characters, establishing a rigid polarity of “us” and “them” that no amount of sympathy can wholly cross.
I have no quarrel per se with the film’s detachment from its characters. Rudolph generally avoids the kind of condescension that has often sabotaged other projects of this kind, and an important part of the movie’s effectiveness in fact depends on its creation of an analytical distance between ourselves and the world that’s being shown. (Similar distancing strategies were used less effectively in True Love [1989]–an independent feature by Nancy Savoca about the preliminaries to a loveless, hopeless marriage of a couple in Brooklyn in which the lack of empathy for any of the characters and the absence of a compelling plot blunted the film’s satirical aspirations.) Cynthia and Joyce’s friendship is treated sympathetically throughout, and this encourages us to analyze all the horrific elements in their environment that ultimately alienate them from each other in spite of their good intentions.
