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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 01/09/1997,

Living Room

Marvin embraces all of life

by Peter Keough

Directed by Jerry Zaks. Written by Scott McPherson based on his play. With Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Hume Cronyn, Gwen Verdon, Hal Scardino, and Dan Hedaya. A Miramax Films release. At the Kendall Square and the West Newton and in the suburbs.

The one thing out of place in Marvin's Room, Jerry Zaks's adaptation of the late Scott McPherson's play, is Marvin himself. The ancient, stroke-ridden, ga-ga patriarch of a family for whom the word dysfunctional would be a compliment, he's present in the play itself only as off-stage bleats and moans. Here he's served up like the centerpiece in a banquet of human misery and folly, allowing Hume Cronyn to turn in one of the most embarrassing performances since Anthony Hopkins's drooling geek in Legends of the Fall.

That error of judgment aside, Marvin's Room is a bracing, hilarious balancing act of melodrama and black comedy played by one of the most potent ensemble casts in recent memory. The material is such that with weak direction or off-key performances it could lapse into mawkishness, camp, or cheap laughs. Zaks and company are almost note-perfect in making it in an elegant, exuberant chamber piece of absurd pathos and delight. As dreadful as the concept sounds, Marvin's Room is a feel-good Ethan Frome whose laughs and tears are kept chilled by the breath of tragedy.

Peter Keough talks with Streep and Keaton.

 

Poor Marvin's existence is made manifest enough with the opening credit sequence, a long close-up tracking shot along ranks of prescription bottles chronicling his long, relentless decline. Attending him is his mousy, long-suffering daughter Bessie (Diane Keaton in a performance so fine it might dim the memory of her dismal turn in The First Wives Club). Bessie has forgone love, career, and identity in a martyrish effort to keep together her marginal family -- which in addition to dad includes her dotty Aunt Ruth (a heartbreakingly loopy Gwen Verdon). Not part of that family is sister Lee (Meryl Streep at her blue-collar Silkwood best), who bailed out many years before, when Marvin first took a turn for the worst. The two have been out of contact ever since.

Not that Lee has escaped the familial ties that bind. A youthful fling with a loser has left her saddled with Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio, clearly feeling liberated after entangling himself in the iambic pentameter of Romeo and Juliet). Now a brooding teen who despises his mother, idealizes his absent father, and savors every moment of his misery and malice, Hank first appears on the screen setting fire to a pile of family photos in his bedroom. He then flees with his brother Charlie (Hal Scardino, a wonderfully offbeat child performer), leaving the house, and much of the neighborhood, in flames.

This is not a work of subtle, Chekhovian dramatic moments. As Hank is put away in the booby hatch. Bessie pays a visit to bumbling Dr. Wally (Robert De Niro, proving that his future in cinema might be comedy), a former pathologist who has trouble relating to the needs and fears of living patients. After an examination and blood tests that border on slapstick, Bessie learns the bad news: she has cancer. Only a marrow transplant from a blood relation can save her.

So much for the old holiday-reunion device for getting estranged family members together. Ruth and Marvin are unacceptable as donors because of their age and infirmity. That leaves Lee and her brood, and so Bessie represses a decade's worth of resentment and gives her sister a call.

Thus begins a thorny and gag-filled reconciliation -- despite the familiar pattern, it's enacted with the breathtaking spontaneity and quirkiness of real experience. Bessie bonds with Hank, Lee comes to terms with the wheezing reality of Marvin, Charlie watches soaps with Aunt Ruth, and the two sisters somehow work out an acceptance of each other and their antithetical life styles -- anarchic, self-destructive independence and total, self-destructive submission.

It helps that the cast melds together into the most believable and outrageous cinema clan since The Addams Family. But McPherson's writing is superb as well. Whenever the film threatens to sink into the pat or the platitudinous, Room recovers with low-key, self-deflating irony or a barbed one-liner. The quality of the acting and the writing shines through in such moments as Lee and Bessie's first meeting. A pause filled with terror, love, and uncertainty passes before Bessie gushes, "My God, are you that old?"

Such toying with bathos and comic relief is a guilty pleasure that comes from a deep knowledge of pain (McPherson died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 32). The filmmaker and cast embrace both pleasure and pain, and despite the redundant, almost farcical memento mori of Marvin himself, they fill this Room with triumphant life.

From Hair to eternity

It won't be a big surprise if Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton get another shot at the golden man with their work in Marvin's Room. As the diametrically opposite sisters Lee and Bessie, they give authentic performances that embody extreme notions of the role of women in society.

Although she originally considered the part of the docile, self-sacrificing Bessie, Streep finally opted for the rebellious spitfire Lee. "Bessie's character is the heart of the film," she says. "But then it was territory in my heart that I understood and had worked on in other things. And Lee wasn't something that I ever tried. She's mad all the time. I just let another side of myself emerge that's always lurking there."

Off screen, though, Streep feels more the Bessie type. "Yes, the caretaker, the oldest daughter. I have four children and a life that pulls me toward the mundane and the real very easily. Although I hate PTA. I tend to get too emotional at the PTA. I'm a wild card. My friends go, `Shh, shh, shh.' Am I a soccer mom? Yes, I am. I don't understand soccer, do you? They all run up, they all run down. I don't know who is playing what. And what is `offside'? Nobody knows."

As for the commercial viability of a film that features a doormat, Streep is optimistic. "It's not usually what you see as the driving force in the cinema. But I thought it was wonderful to celebrate that kind of simple heroics taking place in houses all over the country by women all the time."

Diane Keaton, who plays Bessie, agrees. "I admire the piece because Scott McPherson brought to life something that's always overlooked. I mean, who cares about Bessie? If you saw her on the street you wouldn't look twice. It's testimony to the fact that people can have beautiful lives inside and yet be completely unnoticeable on the outside."

Does Keaton think the character might present an anti-feminist role model for women? "I don't see stories as role models in general. It's not saying that all women should take care of their daddies and forgo the pleasure of being married or a lover or fulfilling yourself. I could never do what Bessie does; obviously, that's not possible for me. I don't think this is a political film; I think it's a film about family."

As for herself, Keaton tends more to the Lee side. An unmarried mother with an adopted child, and a woman who's had love affairs with icons ranging from Warren Beatty to Woody Allen, she began her career in the original production of Hair.

"That was weird," she recalls. "I was just out of acting school and my first job was Hair. I felt so weird because, there I was, and there were all these kids from the street -- they basically hired kids with great voices. I was in the chorus and all this stuff happened. And I didn't get it. We were suddenly embraced by the Women's Wear Daily crowd. The whole tribe was being photographed by Richard Avedon. I was suddenly in this tribe and I was supposed to be hip but I wasn't. When it first opened, the producer gave everybody these free vitamin shots, which were basically speed. And so everybody was getting these shots and being great on stage and out of their minds. And as soon as the show opened, he stopped giving them for free. So everybody paid $50 a shot and got addicted. For a while I took them because I was trying to lose weight. It was crazy. One of the girls had a kid on LSD in the dressing room. I was confused. I didn't like it."

-- Peter Keough