A recent feature at The Onion A. V. Club highlights a list of great films with bad scenes, and vice-versa (and more revelatory), a list of bad films with great scenes. After having read the article, this notion of duality is now applicable to most every film I watch—it’s equivalent to obsessing over a favorite track on an album full of duds, or skipping over your least favorite song in an otherwise faultless record. The notion of perfection is so rare and subjective that this argument becomes eminently useful in short-hand descriptions of what I watch and listen to.
Jerry Maguire – which classifies as a bad film in order to support this case – presents a subtle example, one uncommonly cynical for a film so set on bestowing fortunate underdogs with happy endings. The primary underdog, Maguire, has just walked his new assistant (and sole employee) Dorothy, a widowed mother, to her doorstep after their first date. He is invited inside. After a quick glimpse of the two eschewing their clothing, we see her sister, Laurel (presumably a divorcee, and with whom Dorothy lives), sitting on the kitchen countertop with the lights off, a cigarette in one hand, her sister’s leftovers in the other.
This is a film in which all of the main characters experience a happy ending: Jerry and Dorothy get married, her son gets a new dad, Jerry’s sole client, Rod, scores a multi-million dollar contract with the Phoenix Cardinals, and his wife has another baby; everyone except Laurel. Throughout the film she is suspicious of her sister’s instant romance and hasty wedding, and perhaps rightly so, as her concern seems to have been sharpened by a series of unsatisfactory relationships. This brief shot is the closest she comes to happiness in the film; although her sister – her closest companion in life – is being taken from her, she allows herself with complacent despair a taste of her sister’s success.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Cable Television
16 Jun 2005 1:09 PM | Submit Comment