Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 11, 2009
I Swear...
“All About Steve”: Wryly comical morality play
Vic Fleming
C’mon, you movie reviewers out there in LaLa Land! You know who you are. Yeah, you who wrote that “All About Steve” is the worst movie of the year and of the career of Sandra Bullock!
It ain’t so! Not even close—unless you take the film literally. Which, I submit, you cannot do. Let me go further than that: It simply can’t be done. And if you did it, you botched your review.
The premise of “All About Steve” is that one Mary Magdalene Horowitz, crossword constructor for a small newspaper, falls for a cameraman Steve, who works for a national news network. She loses her job and takes Steve’s polite statement that “I wish you could be there with me” literally and follows him from news job to news job on the road.
Bullock’s Mary is so quirky that I found it impossible not to see her early as a caricature, an archetype made up, ironically, of someone’s idea of a stereotypical crossword nerd.
Director Phil Traill may have sensed that folks might not pick up on this, so he added quirky circumstances: She’s living with her parents while her apartment is being fumigated.
Anyhow, protagonist Mary proceeds to have adventure after adventure, meeting others who are themselves weird archetypes, personifications of qualities that are not part of her experience. Can you spell “morality play”? How about “allegory”?
The consensus at Rotten Tomatoes is that “All About Steve” is “oddly creepy,” that Mary is “desperate and peculiar” and that “audiences may be more likely to pity than root for her.”
Again I say, “Only if taken literally.” And, “Don’t take this film literally.”
The theater in which I saw it on Friday night of its first weekend was full. A large chunk of the crowd were teens and 20-somethings. But I was far from alone in the over-50 ranks. There was laughter, and the crowd rooted for Mary.
As people left the theater, I heard more than a few exclaim, “That was better than a 71,” the rating accorded it in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A lot happens in this film that cannot be reconciled with reality.
E.g., a ‘76 Gremlin is sucked into a tornado, while our heroine and her two traveling companions hide in an underground culvert. Although the car is smashed to bits, the travelers piece it back together and manage to drive it hundreds of miles to the scene of the next newscast.
E.g. #2, news outlets are competing in their national coverage of an estranged couple’s lawsuit over whether or not to amputate the third leg on their infant child (is it or is it not an abnormality?).
In the “exciting” final scenes, the symbolism is inescapable and, at times, spot on. I won’t spoil it too much for you, but think along these lines: Where in life does it seem as though, despite your best efforts, you’ve plunged into an underground pit and cannot decide whether you need to be rescued or need to rescue someone else?
Reviews that call Mary a stalker miss the mark, egregiously so. The characters themselves discuss and debate whether what she is doing amounts to stalking. (It doesn’t. And did I say that the film is not to be taken literally?)
Suspend reality and disbelief as well. See this film. Enjoy it for what it is: A fun exercise in extended metaphor.
Life is a puzzle. I’ve said that for years. Traill, Bullock, Bradley Cooper as Steve, Thomas Haden Church as reporter Hartman Hughes, plus an eclectic cast of others, have found a way to demonstrate it. I give this film an 88.
© 2009 Vic Fleming, Little Rock AR
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