The Nutty Professor (1996)

This cruder, more sexualized update of the Jerry Lewis classic is also more consistently funny and imaginative. Eddie Murphy, in a terrific comeback performance, is Sherman Klump, a 400-pound professor who falls in love with Jada Pinkett and decides to try his weight-loss serum on himself. The result is the fast-talking, womanizing slickster Buddy Love, who is physically attractive but a rotten human being — Jerry Lewis’ Buddy as a stand-up comic instead of a singer. This new Buddy Love is, of course, Eddie Murphy as we’ve known him throughout his career, monstrously exaggerated; Murphy seems to be saying that he’s outgrown his old cocky persona, and his performance as the sad, humble Sherman is moving and engaging. There are the expected fat jokes (and a sprinkling of fart jokes — this is a Tom Shadyac film, after all), but by the end, nobody in the audience would prefer the slim Buddy to the huge but kind Sherman. Murphy also plays five other roles: Sherman’s mom, dad, grandma, and brother, and a Richard Simmons-like diet guru. Lewis was one of the executive producers (that was part of the deal when Jerry grudgingly sold the rights), though I doubt he had much creative input. Amazing make-up by Rick Baker. Also with Dave Chappelle, Larry Miller, and James Coburn.

Lone Star

Lone Star begins with a skeleton in the sand. Some people in the Texas border town of Frontera wish it had stayed buried; others, like the decent Sheriff Sam Deeds, wonder what secrets the bones can tell the living. Deeds, a man of intelligence and compassion, recognizes the remains as a metaphor for the skeleton in Frontera’s closet — evidence of past racism and violence bleeding into the present. It may also be a skeleton in his father’s closet.

Leave it to John Sayles to elevate this mystery to an essay on the larger American mysteries. Sayles, a novelist turned screenwriter turned director, spent the first half of his filmmaking career using the camera as an extension of his typewriter. His work was sharply written but technically rough and awkward. Somewhere around City of Hope (1991), Sayles became a born-again director; his subsequent efforts, Passion Fish and The Secret of Roan Inish, were near-perfection. Lone Star is the latest chapter in Sayles’ ongoing great American novel.

Sheriff Deeds (Chris Cooper, the star of Sayles’ ambitious but wearying Matewan) is a second-generation lawman, and the Frontera natives never let him forget it. His father, the legendary Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), was the town’s previous sheriff; Buddy got off to a good start — so goes the story — by expelling his own predecessor, the corrupt, racist, and brutal Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson). Sheriff Deeds suspects that the sun-bleached bones may be Charley’s, and that Buddy was the one who gave the corpse its dry funeral.

That would be enough for one reasonably compelling movie. But Sayles digs deeper. Lone Star, it turns out, is only marginally “about” Charley and Buddy and the skeleton, in terms of the screen time they get (Sayles’ miserly distribution of the Charley/Buddy scenes, masterfully played by Kristofferson and McConaughey, is his only slight misstep). On another level, the movie is very much about those men — what they represent, the impact their lives and actions had on the people of Frontera.

Settling into the dust of the town, Sayles gives us Frontera as a web of emotions and memories. Every character — the cheerful Mayor Hollis (Clifton James), the black bar owner Otis (Ron Canada), Sheriff Deeds’ high school love Pilar (Elizabeth Pe�a) — has roots that point back to Charley or Buddy, like vines seeking blood instead of water. Sayles doesn’t pin name-tags on these people, and you do have to pay attention. But the movie repays your effort with interest.

Having said all that, I don’t feel that Lone Star is a masterpiece (though it is one of the year’s best) or Sayles’ best work; I lean towards his Lianna, Eight Men Out, and Passion Fish. This movie, subtle and enthralling as it is, ultimately saddens me: Hollywood should be releasing a Lone Star (or a Fargo) every month. That’s not John Sayles’ fault; he’s doing his part. Lone Star shows him at his most reflective. And he has a powerful image in that skeleton: the ugly past grinning up at the present, haunting the future.

Heavy

Victor (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a sluggish, overweight man, works as a short-order cook in a moth-eaten tavern owned by his mother (Shelley Winters). When a beautiful new waitress, Callie (Liv Tyler), is hired, Victor falls in love with her but knows she can never love him. Aptly named in all respects, Heavy moves at a lumbering pace and is very big on quietly repressed fury and despair. One can give it credit for never introducing the cheesy melodramatic touches one expects, but that’s really all it has going for it as a movie — rookie writer-director James Mangold avoids the clichés but forgets to put anything in their place except murmuring, endless tableaux of stoic rural suffering. (It’s like The Spitfire Grill as an austere art-house film.) Neither a striking writer nor director, Mangold should probably be filed under the heading Works Well With Actors — he gets touching performances from Vince and even Liv Tyler and Deborah Harry (as an acid-tongued barmaid), though he can’t do much with Evan Dando as Callie’s unpleasant musician boyfriend. The movie has a kind of elegance, but it’s a very long sit.