The movie that
made every married man even contemplating an extramarital affair cringe, Adrian
Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987)
subverts the male fantasy of taking a mistress to bed without reprisals.
Instead we get every man's worst nightmare – discovering the gal on the side is
both insane and pregnant with his child. In retrospect, Fatal Attraction is a far more insidious thriller than critics of
its day gave it credit. Indeed, the premise, that a happily married man could
stray even from the perfect wife and mother, simply to satisfy an itch while
she is away feathering his nest, and then, be forced to face the consequences
of his betrayal with a near death experience, served to ignite a powder keg of
feminist debate in 1987. Militants
picketed the movie wherever it played, charging Lyne and screenwriter James
Dearden had made a public attack on the decade’s power broker female executive.
Why, they inquired, did a highly successful career for women, equate to one
becoming a raving psychotic, driven by her hormones? Fair
enough, the film’s Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), a seemingly normal and
enterprising go-getter, working as legal counsel for a publishing firm, slips
in her lust for attorney at law, Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) into a raving
and obsessed gargoyle; stalking him, taking his daughter hostage, murdering the
family pet and causing Dan’s wife, Beth (Ann Archer) to suffer injuries in a
horrific car wreck. But did either Lynne or Dearden consider Alex Forrest a
representative of the ‘working woman’?
In retrospect,
it is a thoughtless argument, and one basically asking the wrong question - 'what more could Mrs. Gallagher have done to
keep her man?' - when the onus ought to have zeroed in on critiquing just
what in the hell was wrong with her man; a guy who could so easily and
callously shrug off his marital commitments, simply because she was out of town
for the weekend. Ultimately, Lyne and Dearden made no judgment calls or, in
fact, gave us any explanations to suffice and quell all the inhuman noise and
controversy surrounding the picture. Such is life; rarely, what we would hope
it to be or as neatly defined and bookended with reasons, and quite often
sneaking up from behind to assault our senses and good name when we least expect
it. On the flipside, the emotional castration Dan suffers at Alex’s hand seemed
to satisfy at least some, a sort of all-encompassing divine retribution for
every husband’s philandering ways. Yet, the punishment inflicted upon Dan by
his jilted lover turned enemy spills over to terrorize his wife, Beth (Anne
Archer) and their young daughter, Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen); the impact of his actions possessing far-reaching
ramifications that almost tear apart a family, or at least cause them to
reassess their loyalties to one another.
Fatal Attraction is unquestionably a harrowing
thriller; yielding to that moment when intense passion crosses the line into a
dangerous downward spiral of psychotic obsession. In today’s cynical climate,
Lyne’s movie perhaps appears marginally tamer than it did in 1987; its
melodramatic arc and somewhat clichéd ‘villainess’ ending, bordering on pure
camp. There is no denying screenwriter Dearden paints these characters in very
broad brushstrokes: Dan, our wayward cock of the walk, with an egotistical
sense of manly attractiveness being brought into question by his own looming
mid-life crisis. Beth is his doe-eyed, faithful-as-a-bird-dog Suzie Cream
Cheese, desiring to drag her man back to the affluent suburbs. She cannot
fathom her man’s wandering eye has already led them all into a den of iniquity
soon to rupture with all the violent underpinnings of the San Andreas fault. And
Alex is remarkably transparent as the bunny-boiling, 'I am a bad woman, hear me roar' being thrust upon this clan. What
salvages the writing are the performances by Michael Douglas, Ann Archer and
particularly Glenn Close; the latter giving a brilliant interpretation of the
lost - though hardly soulless – creature, who refuses to be dumped like garbage
once the man has had his fun.
It is all
quite good up to the end; Lyne falling back on the traditional ‘hell hath no
fury showdown’ to wrap up the story. The ending to Fatal Attraction was, in fact, forced upon Lyne by the studio after
he had already conceived a much more diabolical last act finale - Alex taking a
butcher knife to her own throat, the same utensil Dan had handled in an earlier
scene; thus, his fingerprints left to be discovered by police, who thereafter assume
the 'obvious' - that he has murdered his lover to shut her up: the ultimate
betrayal come home to roost and inflict one final devastation on the Gallagher
family. Reconsidering Lyne’s finale, one is rather immediately struck by the
fact it too doesn’t quite work. Alex, strong-willed, her mental acuity even
further askew by hormonal imbalances brought on by her pregnancy, taking her
own life and that of her unborn child. Only a few scenes before, she had sent
Dan an audio recording, vowing to make him pay for their mistake for the rest
of his life. Hell hath no fury…remember; and yet, Alex’s suicide get Dan off
the hook in the long run; the police sure to discover, via Beth’s alibi, that
Dan was nowhere near Alex’s apartment when the throat-slashing began; the fingerprints
easily explained away, since Beth already knows about her husband’s affair, and
Dan, now free of both Alex and the bastard child he never wanted in the first
place.
For its day, Fatal Attraction trod some particularly
tawdry ground in an unexpectedly cheap and tawdry way. The film was
ground-breaking in its representation of marital infidelity. Dan’s wife, as
example, is not presented to us as the cause of his marital angst. In fact, she
is sweetly innocent and utterly charming; better still, a most forgiving and
patient spouse. Even more curious, given his ultimate betrayal, Dan thinks so
too. And the impetus for the affair is not some growing infatuation between
colleagues at work, but carnal-based, sweat-soaked passion, invested on a spur
of the moment; a consensual whim, made by two apparently reasonably-minded,
well-rounded and consenting adults – both intelligent and old enough to know
better. Again, the onus of responsibility here is on Dan – the guy with everything
to lose after spending himself on a male ego-driven dare one rainy afternoon.
Instead, the focus gradually shifts from Dan to Alex – manipulative, unstable
and finally – just plain vanilla nuts. It is to Glenn Close’s credit, she never
allows her character to slip completely down this rabbit hole into blow-job/knife-wielding
lunacy without alluding to something far more sinister and demonic behind the
eye. Clearly, Alex is troubled. But she is also enterprising, her revenge
conceived with a systematic determination to inflict maximum anxiety on her
casual lover; baiting him with visits to his apartment on the ruse she is
house-hunting, introducing herself to Beth, and later, befriending Ellen as a
pseudo-maternal influence.
Adrian Lyne’s
approach to this straightforward material is fairly sophisticated; his subtle
introduction of Beth and Dan, seen in their idyllic – if slightly cramped – New
York apartment, preparing to attend a work-related book-signing with their best
friends, Jimmy (Stuart Pankin) and Hildy (Ellen Foley); the perfect segue to
Dan’s first casual introduction to Alex. The contrast between these two couples
cannot be overstated; Beth’s fragile elegance pitted against Hildy’s more
gregarious repartee; Dan’s self-professed peacock, seemingly the straight man
to Pankin’s bulbous sidekick. When first
set up, Beth and Dan are clearly the power-brokering pair, exploiting Hildy and
Jimmy as their appendages; figures of fun for amusing nights on the town. Lyne
gives us glimmers of the unanticipated volatility to follow; Jimmy hitting on
Alex at a business mixer, only to be shot down by her murderous stare. This
look of absolute glacial hatred melts when Dan attempts a subtler approach to
their ‘cute meet’; alas, soon to turn
out neither ‘cute’ nor casual. Here,
Lyne provides insight into each’s motivations and foreshadows the future
crossed paths that will lead a devoted husband and father astray. The genius
remains in the casting of Glenn Close; not only for the obvious reason – that
she is a superior actress, but equally, because in terms of physical appeal
alone, she pales to Anne Archer’s gazelle-like beauty.
Lyne breaks us
of the Hollywoodized misconception that a man’s straying is purely motivated on
‘trading up’ his female companion, solely based on her looks. Archer is not
only clearly the forerunner, but the winner. Alas, she is also ‘wife’ and
‘mother’ – Lyne exploiting the conventions of these signifiers to suggest Dan
could never indulge in the sort of tasteless sexual escapades with a woman he
so obviously respects – at least, enough to have put a ring on her finger. That
was then. And yet, happier times have persisted – the bloom of love not yet
having worn thin when Dan meets Alex. The betrayal is thus all the more
unnatural and shocking, because it is not prompted or preceded by anything Beth
Gallagher does; her biggest ‘transgression’ – kicking Dan out of their marital
bed for one night after he returns from taking the dog for a walk to discover
their daughter, Ellen has crawled into bed and fallen asleep next to his wife.
And there are no stressors at work either; none that would suggest or support
Dan’s need to blow off a little extramarital steam while Beth is away in
Connecticut, house-hunting. In fact, Dan is about to be made partner at his law
firm.
Casting
Michael Douglas as the pivotal maypole around which both women do their dance
is inspiring. Beth’s martyrdom is pitted against Alex’s aggressive passion. Both
bring about a deeper suffrage. But it is a stretch to suggest Alex seduces Dan.
Rather, he willingly allows his virtue to slip, presumably, only for one
‘harmless’ weekend tryst. Dan gets more
than he bargains for as Alex inveigles him in an increasingly well-plotted, if
maniacal and harrowing, game of blackmail; the insidious stealth with which she
suddenly infects and affects all that is good and decent in all their lives,
creeping with all the voracity of an untamed kudzu to entangle this ‘perfect
marriage’. But Douglas makes his portrait of this straying ‘family man’ not
merely palpable, also queerly sympathetic. In the first act, we cannot help but
find Dan Gallagher a reprehensible cad; Douglas conveying an assured
bravado and selfishness that naïvely believes he can have both a dutiful wife
and a mistress at his beckoned call. However, it is in the middle act where
Douglas illustrates a superior interpretation of the oft witnessed ‘cheating
spouse’; avoiding not only the more transparent clichés, but even the subtler
ones. Douglas gradually peels back the façade of Dan’s male ego to reveal a
rather boyish anxiety; being found out escalating into abject fear and then,
even more uncharacteristically, stripped down to an honest and empathizing
remorse-filled regret for his actions.
Lyne’s last
act finale, foisted upon him by the studio, remains something of a minor
betrayal to each character’s driving principles - especially Beth’s. She is,
after all, the grotesquely injured party in this equation, having endured, not
only the indignation in discovering her perfect partner has gone astray; also,
survived the emotional roller coaster of Ellen’s faux kidnapping, a near fatal
car accident, and, in the finale, almost being murdered at knifepoint by Alex
in an upstairs bathroom. Yet, it is Beth who gets Dan off the hook for his
extramarital affair by shooting his psychotic lover dead. Sweet revenge or
self-defense? We are never entirely certain; the calculating look on Beth’s
face as she rescues her husband from being Ginsued by his illicit paramour,
registering subliminal satisfaction at being the one to ‘put down’ this rabid
hellcat. Lyne’s finale completely eschews the fact Alex is pregnant with Dan’s
baby at the time of her murder. Audiences in 1987 did not seem to mind this.
But feminists decried Beth’s actions as an assault on the proverbial
sisterhood, particularly as it is in defense of the male responsible for both
hers and Alex’s emotional misery.
Only in
retrospect does Dan’s wounded chivalry, flying up the stairs at the first sound
of Beth’s frantic screams, and, expending his rage to disarm Alex of her
butcher knife by forcing her head beneath the steaming bath waters, seem, not
only less chivalrous, but even more enterprisingly desperate; a means to
silence Alex once and for all, thereby –literally – washing away his carnal
sins. And, of course, Alex herself is compromised; having begun the story as an
intelligent, sane, even playful and forgiving lover, she gradually unravels
into the cinema’s tradition of the ‘bad woman’ – very bad, indeed – killing
Ellen’s beloved pet rabbit and allowing its boiled remains to be discovered by
Beth in a stock pot on the stove; pouring acid on Dan’s BMW, mailing
threatening audio tapes to his place of business, and finally turning up
uninvited at his apartment, and later, the Gallagher’s newly purchased country
home to exact her penultimate revenge.
It is unclear
what Alex’s motivations are in the finale as it exists in the film today.
Clearly, her plan is to kill Beth. But could she genuinely expect Beth’s murder
to liberate Dan into rekindling their affair? While the argument can be made
Alex is quite obviously not playing with a full deck; her scenarios are
nevertheless flawed and ill-plotted. At least, Lyne’s original ending, Alex
committing suicide with the malignant intent to frame Dan for her ‘murder’, is
in keeping with the character’s vengeful ambitions to never let him go. Even in
death, she would have destroyed his chances for a happy home. As this never occurs
in the final cut, we are left with a somewhat unsatisfactory denouement; the
family Gallagher, disjointed, shell-shocked and unlikely ever to return to its
original state of unity.
Fatal Attraction opens with the Gallaghers at
home; Dan, listening to a deposition in his underwear on the couch as his young
daughter, Ellen quietly watches television at his side. Beth has already begun
to put on her face for a publishing gala they are expected to attend later in
the evening. After leaving Ellen with a babysitter (Jane Krakowski), the couple
is joined by good friends, Jimmy and Hildy. Jimmy is feeling his oats, drawn to
Alex Forrest who is poised in a slinky gown at the bar. But Jimmy’s harmless
flirtation is met with a daggered glare; our first ‘fleeting’ glimpse of the
Medusa lurking just beneath. After Jimmy bows out, Dan casually engages Alex in
conversation. She is more receptive to him, but still thinks him a ‘naughty boy’ for flirting, particularly
as Beth is in another part of the room. The next day, Dan bids Beth and Ellen
goodbye as they drive off to spend a weekend at her parents’ Joan (Meg Mundy)
and Howard Rogerson (Tom Brennan) in Connecticut. Arriving at the publishers a
short while later, to negotiate a contract with a female author whose
scandalous exposé about a real affair she had with a senator is threatening a
lawsuit, Dan is amused when the client’s legal counsel is none other than Alex.
At
negotiations’ end, Dan and Alex agree to share a taxi because it is pouring
rain. Instead, they wind up at a nearby bistro where each reveals bits from
their past; Alex, inquiring about Dan’s wife and child. When Dan suggests his
marriage is ‘good’, Alex comes back
with “If it’s so good what are you doing
here with me?” Ironically, her directness does not set off any red flags
for Dan. He has already decided he won’t be going back to an empty apartment
tonight. And so, Fatal Attraction
begins to slip into the mire of a heated weekend sex-capade; complete with
elevator blow-jobs and some fairly hardcore acrobatics in the bedroom and
kitchen. Afterward, Alex takes Dan dancing to her favorite Latin-American club.
As Alex lives in a walk up near the meat packers’ district, no one pays
attention to their comings and goings at all hours. The next afternoon, Alex
coaxes Dan to play hooky from his work-related responsibilities; the two
engaging in a spirited game of touch football in Central Park. When Dan fakes a
heart attack, he causes Alex to momentarily become panicked. Revealing his sick
little prank, she admonishes him with a fake story of her own, about her father
dying right before her eyes when she was barely five years old. As Dan suddenly
feels guilty about his stupid prank, Alex bursts into laughter, revealing to
him her father is not dead but living in Arizona. Like most things Dan comes to
know about Alex, this too will later be proven as a lie.
But for now,
the two share more intimate stories about their youth; more spaghetti and sex
and opera music (Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, to be exact – a prophetic choice,
given Lyne’s original ending). But by now, it’s Sunday. Beth will be coming
home soon. Dan’s attempt to disentangle himself from their weekend tryst leads
to a disastrous moment; first, of
violent refusal, as Alex claws at the buttons on his shirt, tearing apart the
fabric in a rage; then, in her plunge into suicide, slicing open her wrists and
smearing Dan’s face in the blood from her open wounds. He manages to bind her
cuts and put her to bed before slinking home like a penitent drunkard. When
Beth arrives, Dan feigns a boring weekend at home. She tells him about her
restful weekend – of Ellen’s desire to have a pet rabbit and of the beautiful
cottage, not far from her parents; possibly, the ideal place for them to have a
real ‘fresh start’ at last. Dan resists at first. But then Alex begins to stalk him at home;
mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night, ending in hang-ups when Beth
answers, or thinly veiled threats made when Dan picks up the receiver. To put
an end to the harassment, Dan agrees to meet Alex publicly in the subway,
whereupon she confides she is carrying his child. Dan offers to pay for an
abortion. But Alex insists she will carry the child to term.
Under duress,
Dan agrees to buy Beth her dream cottage in Connecticut. While Dan, Beth, Jimmy
and Hildy celebrate, Alex is seen, huddled on the floor of her apartment,
turning the light in her bedroom on and off as she weeps real tears listening
to Madam Butterfly. More confrontations
ensue. Dan attempts to stand his ground with Alex, when, in reality he knows he
doesn’t have the proverbial ‘leg’ to stand on – except, perhaps, the one that
got him into trouble in the first place. “You're
so sad. You know that, Alex? Lonely and very sad,” he tells her. “Don't you ever pity me, you smug bastard,”
she threatens. “I'll pity you because
you're sick,” he challenges, to which she astutely summarizes “Why? Because I won't allow you treat me
like some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage?”
A short while later, Dan and Beth move into their new home. Alex is anything but out of the picture. In
fact, she deliberately douses Dan’s Beamer in battery acid; then, tails him as
he rents a car to drive himself home. Observing the ‘happy family’ through the
window, Alex becomes disturbed and throws up in the bushes.
The next
afternoon, the family returns home to a gruesome discovery. As Ellen and Dan
race to the backyard to play with Ellen’s pet rabbit, Beth enters the house;
discovering her stock pot boiling on the gas stove. Knowing she has not left
anything cooking on the stove, Beth approaches the pot with trepidation,
discovering the rabbit’s mutilated remains cooking inside. After putting a
distraught Ellen to bed, Beth suggests Dan telephone the police. Instead, he
confesses the truth to her; of his affair with Alex, the possibility she is
carrying his love child and the likelihood she is responsible for the bunny
boiler. Beth is outraged, ordering Dan from the house. He moves out. But Alex
is not about to leave the family alone. Alex befriends Ellen; picking her up
from school and taking her to a nearby amusement park where they ride the
roller coaster. When Beth arrives at the school she is informed by Ellen’s
teachers, the child is gone. Believing the worst, Beth drives like a maniac
through the streets, frantically looking for her daughter, eventually causing a
terrible car wreck that puts her in the hospital. Meanwhile, Alex has dropped
Ellen off at home unharmed.
When Dan
learns of the accident he storms Alex’s apartment, perhaps intent on murdering
her. The two struggle in the various rooms, Dan wrestling a carving knife loose
from Alex’s grip. She seems erotically pleased to have surrendered the knife to
him; again, director, Adrian Lyne’s original scenario (to have Alex slit her
own throat, but with a knife covered in Dan’s fingerprints) would have borne
out this plot twist. Instead, Dan returns to Beth and begs her forgiveness. She
recognizes his remorse as genuine and allows him to move back into the family
home. But on her first night’s return to take a soothing bath, Alex breaks into
the house and confronts Beth at knife point in the upstairs bathroom. Dan is
none the wiser for this intrusion until Beth screams for help. He charges up
the stairs, bursts into the room and attacks Alex. She violently slices the air
in retaliation, the blade superficially wounding Dan in the chest. As he forces
her head below the surface of the bathtub water, Alex fakes drowning. Dan
loosens his grip and reclines on the edge of the tub, presuming the ordeal is
over. However, Alex has one last trick up her sleeve. She leaps from the bath,
knife in hand and ready to stab Dan in the back, only to be fatally shot by
Beth with the gun the family bought for self-defense earlier. As police swarms the house in an aftermath of
sirens and questioning, the camera casually pans to a silver-framed photograph
in the foyer; the Gallaghers, smiling blissfully.
In retrospect,
Fatal Attraction is a watershed in
American cinema; Adrian Lyne’s direction and the performances of these three
principles in the ill-fated lover’s triangle, managed to generate holocausts
and hell fires as no other intimate drama/sex thriller ever had before it.
Viewed today, a lot of the precepts and pacing in Fatal Attraction has become diluted and formulaic from our seeing
too many like-minded adulterous melodramas, leaving contemporary audiences to
wonder what all the fuss was about with Lyne’s movie. It is important to recall
virtually none of these machinations were ‘old hat’ when Fatal Attraction debuted. And today, the movie still holds a
hallowed place as shocking, yet tasteful cinema. Despite the feminist backlash the picture
endured, Fatal Attraction was a huge
hit on both sides of the Atlantic; Lyne resisting immediate offers to do
‘another Fatal Attraction’ – although, subsequent movie projects like Indecent Proposal (1993) and his
lackluster remake of Lolita (1997)
would prove variations on a theme. In 2002, Lyne relented to visiting the same
well twice, and almost verbatim, with Unfaithful;
the roles reversed. This time, it was Diane Lane’s bored housewife who took a
penniless artist and bookseller to bed, leaving her husband apoplectic and eventually
turned secret killer of her lover. But by then, the salacious machinations on
display had been distilled to one-dimensional and mechanical intrigues. Yet
these, quite simply, failed to excite.
Arguably, Fatal Attraction could have been better
had Paramount not balked at Lyne’s more understated conclusion, forcing him to
cobble together the ‘evil villainess’ scenario as it plays today. This ending
is undeniably heart-pounding. But it is also structurally flawed. For example;
how is it that no one in this small community of country houses sees Alex
approaching the property or entering the house? Dan sets the alarm while Beth
retires upstairs to take her bath. How long has Alex been in the house and,
more importantly, given her murderous impulsiveness, what is she waiting for?
Furthermore, once Beth and Alex begin to struggle for the knife in the upstairs
bathroom – with Beth, at first, shrieking several times for help – why does no
one, including Ellen (who is sleeping only a few feet away) immediately rush to
her aid? Lyne uses the shrill piercing sound of a whistling kettle to
presumably ‘drown out’ Beth’s screams. But we are not talking about an
expansive estate with many rooms; rather a cozy cottage-styled home with few nooks
and crannies in which to hide. One gets the sense from earlier scenes played
out inside the home that even the slightest creaking of the stairs would alert
everyone to an intruder. Yet, on this night, ‘a kettle’ stifles cries for help
and voices shouting in an upstairs bath. Finally, although it is Dan who
attempts to drown Alex in their bathtub, it is actually Beth who murders Alex
with a fatal gunshot, leaving Dan – more or less – the emasculated victim of
this penultimate assault.
None of these
glaring oversights mattered to audiences in 1987. When Fatal Attraction hit theaters it became an instant sensation,
either intentionally or unintentionally setting off that powder keg for
outraged feminists, who denounced it as masochistic tripe. Curiously, this only
made the public want to see it more. It has become something of a sport with
movie-goers ever since to defy negative publicity and indulge an even more
disturbing fascination; to see a ‘good picture’ that is supposed to be bad. In
retrospect, Fatal Attraction is an
artful entertainment, Adrian Lyne plucking at the chords of the audience’s
curiosity, contempt and fear to tell a simple story about the darkest
inhibitions to which man and woman can succumb without much effort or
resolution. Howard Atherton’s cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s understated score
conspire to bolster this understated critique of self-destructive nature, unable
to leave well enough alone and driven by the most primal urges, despite
centuries of striving for a more cultured set of moral principles by which to live.
There have been other erotic thrillers before and since Fatal Attraction, arguably, none so skillfully ricocheting between
moments of fitful passion and unadulterated obsession. This is what makes Fatal Attraction much more an artistic
masterpiece than a commercial colossus; although, in the summer of ’87 it
proved to be both.
Paramount’s
Blu-Ray rectifies many sins committed on previous DVD incarnations of Fatal Attraction. For some reason,
previous regimes at the studio never bothered to revisit original camera
negatives, but used imperfect print masters to slap their movies to disc
format. The result: an image ultimately lacking in fine detail, with some
slight variances in color density and balancing and, at least three generations
removed from fine grain sources, sporting a barrage of age-related artifacts. But
now we get the Blu-ray: a true 1080p transfer from original elements and virtually
free of debris and damage. You’ll be hard-pressed to find fault with this disc.
The Blu-Ray sports refined and very vibrant colors, true to life and the period
in which the movie was photographed. Shadow and contrast have been beautifully
rendered for a very sharp – though not artificially enhanced – smooth transfer.
Indigenous grain has been well-preserved. Here is an early contribution by
Paramount to do right by its own catalog in the years before it suddenly
decided to sell-off ‘grazing rights’ to its back catalog to Warner Home Video.
Since that time, we have seen very few quality transfers coming down the
pipeline. The DTS stereo audio will impress. Extras include featurettes
previously a part of Paramount’s Special Collector’s Edition DVD; most
presented in HD herein, including the original trailer. Bottom line: highly
recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
4
VIDEO/AUDIO
4.5
EXTRAS
3
No comments:
Post a Comment