Antonia And Jane
Sometimes uproarious British comedy about two friends recounting different versions of their relationship in separate sessions with the same psychiatrist. Antonia and Jane are about to meet for an annual dinner and the occasion brings up insecurities in both of them. Each woman compares herself to her mistaken idea of the other.

The befuddled shrink struggles gamely, especially with Jane (Imelda Staunton). A hilariously obsessive Nine, Jane talks in rambling sagas and confused, dizzying circles. Here is a sample exchange:

Jane: "This week I asked myself, 'What do I really think about the poet Wordsworth?' But the question presupposes that I know who I really am - which I don't think I do."

Shrink (frowning): "There's no need to overcomplicate things, Jane."

Jane: "Okay, then assuming I do know who I am - which is a really big assumption - part of me thinks that anything I think about Wordsworth is completely beside the point!"

Shrink (lost): "What point?"

Jane (triumphant): "Ah! but is there a point?!"

Jane would be an extroverted Nine with both wings. She's very actively frustrated and has loud bursts of Eightish temper. Her antiauthoritarian attitude goes with the 8 wing, but her anger leads to absurd Niney courses of action and then more muddled thinking. At one point, Jane gets angry at her parents. In revolt, she marries an imprisoned drug dealer she barely knows and labels this act a political statement. Her 1 wing is evident in her receptive eagerness to please in relationships, plus a certain sweetness and idealism. Nines with both wings tend to flip back and forth between Bad Child/Good Child behavior.

The first half of the film takes Jane's point of view, and her image of Antonia is that of a Three. Antonia is beautiful, blond, waspish, and Jane's nightmare image of orderly, privileged success. Overcomplicating Nines sometimes see Threes as everything they are not.

The irony is that Antonia (Saskia Reeves) is actually a Six. Her life is just as confused as Jane's and she envies Jane's passionate disorder compared to her own bourgeois compromises. Antonia's life is coming apart anyway. She suspects her husband is having an affair and then counterphobically starts one herself. Her lover has pathetic, goofy sadomasochistic scenarios he wants her to play out; she tries hard to go along, but it's just too ridiculous. She has antiauthoritarian outbursts too and says at one point, "I've decided that everybody I know is part of a great conspiracy to make my life insupportable."

The Shrink is likely a not-so-bright Seven. She practices spin control and generally counsels with cheery platitudes like, "Try to regard everything as a delightful adventure" or, "Time's up for today. Just remember that whatever happens is a fresh challenge!" When Antonia's marriage really does bust up, the psychiatrist reasons with her, "Howard has left you; that is an existential fact. How you choose to react to that fact is up to you ..." To which Antonia replies, "I'd like to kill him!!!"

Back To The Beach
Adroit, good-natured spoof of those 1960s beach movies. Even if you never saw the originals, this movie is surprisingly funny and almost surreal. Annette Funicello plays a Nine with a 1 wing. She's a naïve, oblivious Goody Two Shoes, both endearing and simplistic. Described as "a woman who's been in a good mood for the last 22 years," she sweetly replies: "I just believe everything will turn out for the best."

While Annette is comic, it's quite true that some Nines are very cheerful. The ability to blank out trouble and difficulty and focus on the good is sometimes well developed. Think of Ronald Reagan, for instance.

Frankie Avalon plays Annette's husband, a nervous, excitable Seven (6 wing). Annette's a Nine in real life and I'm pretty sure Avalon's a Seven.

Carnal Knowledge
This bleak, excellent film plays like a pathology sheet, a rundown of diseases possible in relations between men and women. Story follows two college chums through decades of knotty, heartless love affairs. Their first involvement is with each other; they are forever talking in disassociated ways about women. What they say is generally rooted in contempt, so they wind up sounding like talking tumors.

Jack Nicholson plays his usual persona (Seven with an 8 wing), while Art Garfunkel is generally Niney. Garfunkel's character plays along with the more dynamic Nicholson, but has a streak of Oneish decency that emerges slowly. The story pretty much indicts both of them, though.

The middle third of the picture details Nicholson's live-in involvement with sweet, passive Nine, Ann-Margret. She's a nice person, but unmotivated by her own needs. She would be an intimate subtype for the way she longs for union with and commitment from Nicholson. She wants marriage and children but soon discovers that Nicholson is an unlikely prospect. Instead of dumping him, she goes inert and angry; she quits work, turns slovenly and pines away.

"You're more tired now than when you were working," he observes.

"The reason I sleep all day is because I can't stand my life."

"What life?" he asks.

"I sleep all day! Two years ago I slept 8 hours a day, a year ago it was 12, now it's up to 15, pretty soon it will be 24!"

It does seem as if she's sliding into death, although she has episodes of stubborn overt anger. Nicholson, the Seven, rails against her desire for commitment and especially feels trapped by her dependency ("For God's sake, I'd almost marry you if you'd leave me!"). Entranced Sevens frequently resent anyone acting dependent towards them; their anger is related to their own guilt over being undependable.

Ann-Margret's lazy sink into oblivion is very accurate to the style and subtype. Her character is very similar to Shirley MacLaine's in The Apartment, another intimate subtype.

Cynthia O'Neal has a small role as one of Garfunkel's paramours and she's a bossy, competitive Three.

Diary Of A Mad Housewife
stars Carrie Snodgress as a Nine (1 wing) housewife going quietly mad while coping with the demands of her spoiled children and her vain, social-climbing Three husband (Richard Benjamin). She has an affair with an abusive Eight writer (Frank Langella) and though he's pushy and obnoxious, he's also sexy and vital.

There are several nice scenes where she quietly confronts his defenses and meets with ballistic denial and ridicule. He too has a "weakness" he's hiding and he runs Snodgress around, trying to keep her dizzy and unsuspecting. She figures him out anyway and tries to reassure, but he's too insecure to let her. The film shows accurately how a Nine would be unafraid of an unhealthy Eight but might get tired out by all the bad behavior. She wants peace, but he only knows war.


The Last Picture Show, Texasville
"Ain't nothin' here, it's just flat and empty." That's a resident of Archer City, Texas, describing the setting for these two films, a tiny, dust-stripped town stuck to the earth a mile from the middle of nowhere. The Last Picture Show is a doleful, somber portrait of lives without futures. Most of the characters appear haunted or doomed and the film is partly about how to stay in or leave a place as optionless as Archer City. This 1971 effort is considered a minor classic and it's still quite good, if overlong.

Texasville (1991) is a comedy, a kind of mirror image that revisits the same characters decades later and affectionately finds them mired in confusion. It turns out the characters did have futures that weren't quite so bleak, but no one in the town knows quite yet what they're doing. This latter film flopped but it's well-acted and literate if a little talky.

Leads Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms are both Nines, though Bridges is more extroverted within the style while Bottoms is pulled into himself. In the first film, Bridges is cheerful and forward-looking and it's he who gets out of town by joining the military. Bottoms, by contrast, sinks into the deep sleep of his environment, looking increasingly dreamy and forlorn as the film continues. It's like he's slowly freezing to death.

Ben Johnson is on hand as the town's moral force and father figure to the boys. He's intriguing because he sounds like a One, seems like an Eight, yet he's most likely a Nine with strong wings. He has a basically receptive nature with moments of instinctual, almost mythic strength. Cybill Shepherd plays the town's flirtatious beauty, a Three with a 2 wing (intimate subtype). Her mother Ellen Burstyn is a Two with a 3 wing and it's interesting to see how outwardly similar they are yet essentially different. Shepherd's a status-seeking actress while her Mom's a fool for love.

In the sequel, Bridges has returned, gone into the oil business and is now $12,000,000 in debt. This takes the edge off his cheeriness and he tumbles through the film depressed and befuddled ("I don't understand anything any more. Everyone's gone crazy"). Described by newcomer wife Annie Potts (probable Eight) as having a "dour personality that's real reluctant to take a chance," Bridges washes around town in a stream of chaos. He's basically a passive witness to events, allowing situations to develop around him while remaining non-committal ("It's hard to stay exciting for a whole lifetime.")

Bottoms has sunk further into Niney deep freeze, to the point where people now worry about him. There's some indication that he might have brain damage but it's more intrinsic than that. He sees movies in the sky, forgets where he is and talks of suing the town for ruining his life. His sleep has turned into a kind of senility, complete with memory lapses, and he acts like an old man though he's only about forty.

Ben Johnson and Ellen Burstyn are both gone but two minor characters from the first film have acquired Enneagram styles. Randy Quaid plays Bridges's banker, a climbing-the-walls anxious Six. Cloris Leachman has become Bridges's secretary and she's an opinionated One.

Cybill Shepherd's character has actually gone through an interesting transition. She left town too, became a movie actress and has returned to Archer City to grieve the loss of her parents and the death of a young son. She's a Three gone to 9 (see "Threes").

She's still a bit of a role-player - she toys with Bridges and maintains a capricious, mocking air - but she's in the process of acquiring some emotional substance. Her lost child haunts her and she's fascinated with community and family. She's aware of her roles: "I flirt a little, but that's my nature. Actually it's the ghost of my nature" - but in the end she breaks through to some deeper emotional connectedness via her grief. It's almost as though she's moving from her 2 wing to the high side of her 4 wing, getting in touch with sadness and a deeper dimension of feeling.

Little Murders
Dark, sometimes amazing satire of deracinated urban life. This 1971 story features alienated characters living distorted lives in a city where basic services are in breakdown. Gangs roam the streets and random shootings and power outages punctuate everyone's days.

Sound familiar? This film was so prescient that it doesn't seem dated now. The characters are exaggerated, even grotesque, but nearly all have vivid Enneagram styles. The script was written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and has the depressive, comic Niney flavor of his drawings.

Elliott Gould plays Alfred, a Nine photographer whose chief defense against urban chaos is a stance of indifferent numbness. A self-described "apathist," we first see him passively resisting a gang beating. When future wife Marcia Rodd rescues him, he scolds her: "You shouldn't have done that. They were getting tired and about to let me go!" Rodd is a nice Two with a 3 wing ("Alfred, you've got to let me mold you"), though for much of the film she seems like a busy, administrative Three. She tries to inspire and motivate the slothful Gould:

She: Name something you enjoy.

He: Sleeping.

She: What about sex?

He: It makes me sleep better ...

Over the course of the story Rodd succeeds at bringing Gould partially to life ("I trust you. I really nearly trust you," he says). Nines will sometimes wake up for love, although this film illustrates their worst fear about what might happen should they start to care.

Gould's so nihilistic that he insists their marriage take place at the First Existentialist Church, presided over by hippie minister Donald Sutherland. Latter's ad-libbed marriage ceremony is an ideal specimen of rationalizing Seven logic: " You all know why we are here. Let me state that of the hundreds of marriages I've performed, all but seven have failed. The odds are not good. But nothing can destroy you if you don't see it as destructive. Any step that one takes is useful, is positive. Even the negation of the previous step. If you stay married, fine! If you don't stay married, fine! It's all right. Everything is an answer for someone. For Alfred, today's answer is Patricia. For Patricia, today's answer is Alfred!"

Gould is also welcomed by Rodd's loony family. Father (Vincent Gardenia) is a flaming paranoid Six and mother (Elizabeth Wilson) is a weirdly normal Nine. Lou Jacobi plays a ranting One Judge that Gould and Rodd consult. Director Alan Arkin does a turn as a paranoid Six police detective, convinced that the city's random killings are part of a larger conspiracy to embarrass the police. This film is sometimes brilliant, generally interesting and very unusual.

Mr. And Mrs. Bridge
"I want a divorce and we can discuss it as soon as you've finished enjoying your beer." That's Mrs. Bridge (Joanne Woodward) talking to Mr. Bridge in a rare moment of open, if passive, discontent.

Mrs. Bridge is a ditsy, off-center Nine and Mr. Bridge (Paul Newman) is a thin-lipped, repressive One. The story of their life together is composed of small moments in which they mainly demonstrate their Enneagram styles. Nothing much happens, neither of them changes or grows. If anything, they get worse; that is, more entrenched and trapped within their limits.

Most of the time, Mrs. Bridge is lost to and passive to others. When Mr. Bridge proposes a trip to Paris, she says, "Just tell me what to read first. What do I know? I've never done anything, never been anywhere." Never been anyone, is what she's saying. Throughout the movie she displays a quality of busy, distracted sleep - the sleep of a self forgotten.

Mrs. Bridge's emotions surface in odd uprushes and the Nine style of minimizing conflict is obvious many times. At one point a suicidal Fourish friend (Blythe Danner) pours out her pain and Mrs. Bridge then changes the subject: "When you think about it, we really are awfully lucky ... would you like some tea?" Nines can be alternately sympathetic to others and then callously indifferent. Mrs. Bridge demonstrates how a Nine can do harm with neglectxample of the g.

Late in the film, there's a telling scene. Mrs. Bridge backs her car out of the garage and it stalls in the narrow garage doorway. She can't get it started and realizes that the car doors won't open because they are blocked by the outer door frames on either side. So she sits. All day. She's neither determined nor resourceful - she just waits. This quality of passively tolerating an absurd situation can be very characteristic of sleeping Nines, as we saw in Antonia And Jane.

One other aspect to notice is how Mrs. Bridge is younger than her years; her passivity is a little childlike and even at sixty she seems like someone's younger sister. All her friends are younger too, and her counterphobic Six daughter is more astute about the scope of life than Mrs. Bridge is. Mother never does grow up.

Mr. Bridge, the One, is ramrod straight in both posture and behavior. He's from pioneer stock, tough, stubborn and radiating judgment. He speaks in clipped, measured cadences and his sense of humor is dry as dust. "I must confess I've never been able to find humor in smut," is his response to a colleague's racy joke. When Mrs. Bridge wistfully reminds him of the poems he once wrote for her (connection to 4), he replies, "For better or worse, I turned out to be an attorney and not a poet." This is partly an explanation for why he shows his wife little affection. He has a 9 wing and tends toward being plain and impersonal.

He is also domineering and has strong conflicts with his rebellious Six daughter. There's a hint of repressed incest in his disapproval of his daughter's sexuality and in her power over him. She's got something on him, though the film doesn't elaborate. Newman's character is also generally opposed to the irrationality of the women in his life.

NATIVE AMERICANS
American Indians endured countless racist portrayals in the early days of American movies. This changed a little in the 1960s when social paradigms shifted sufficiently to allow actual Native actors to play heroic or sympathetic roles. In some of the more recent stories the Indian characters are shown to be smarter and morally superior to the whites. While these portraits seem sincere and more accurate the range of roles remains consistently limited. In terms of the Enneagram, movie Indians are only ever allowed to play Nines and Eights.

Why this happens I don't know. Part of it is likely an unconscious form of stereotyping - most of the films below have Anglo screenwriters or are adapted from novels written by whites. It could also say something about the cultural Enneagram styles of Native Americans, although there are many different tribes and cultures. This is obviously a minefield because judging groups of people on their social aura is the foundation of bigotry.

Cultures do have Enneagram styles in a certain limited way, however. In white America, Threeish ideals of success and wealth are unconsciously celebrated. In German Switzerland, a culture I know well, there is a group aura of Oneness and people often unconsciously strive to live up to orderly, correct One ideals. This doesn't mean that there are more Ones per capita in Switzerland. The culture does, however, teach individual Swiss how to think and act that way.

Not all but many Native American cultures have a Niney aura. The group style of thinking is holistic, nature-based and deep rooted in the notion that the individual is a small part of a natural order of Being. In the movies, sympathetic Nine Indians are often receptive and dignified. They are in touch with their instincts and possess a sensible simplicity that is unworldly but spiritually intelligent. Many of these characters are medicine men, while others are sidekicks to the white protagonist. Most of the portrayals are rouged with romanticism.

Native American Eights in movies are invariably warrior figures. In the westerns, they fiercely fight off the white invaders. In the present-day stories they are political militants. In most of the films the whites are Threes or represent Three forces and values.

The 1970 comedy-epic Little Big Man started the revisionist trend with its then-controversial portrait of General George Custer as a preening egomaniac Three. Dustin Hoffman plays a white boy raised by Sioux Indians who bounces back and forth between white and native cultures. He's essentially a Six, a cowardly survivor who's an unwilling participant in great events.

Chief Dan George is Hoffman's Nine grandfather, Old Lodge Skins. He's a medicine man, something of a seer but also earthy and unpretentious. He's clear-eyed and sarcastic in his appraisal of the invading whites, but ultimately he's accepting rather than bitter. The Dalai Lama, a real-life Nine, displays a similar attitude toward the Chinese who have invaded his native Tibet. Real-life Nine Dan George wrote several sweet, thoughtful books that were testaments of his faith and serenity. In Little Big Man his character is based on the real-life Chief Black Elk, who was also very likely a Nine. The film holds up pretty well although it's sometimes pointedly sexist. Faye Dunaway turns up now and then as a cliché Two.
Return to Video Store

Chief Dan George's other best work was in Clint Eastwood's poetic film, The Outlaw Josey Wales. He has the sidekick role to Eastwood's loner hero, but Dan George steals the movie with offhand Niney comedy. He's clownish but dignified in an uncommonly good western. The late Will Sampson, a Nine in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, makes a brief charismatic appearance as an Eightish warrior chief with whom Eastwood negotiates. Sampson played Nines and Eights exclusively throughout his short career.

The contemporary heir to Dan George and Sampson is Graham Greene, who first came to prominence in 1990's Dances With Wolves. He gives a touching, funny performance as the Nine spiritual leader of the Lakota Sioux, a tribe that adopts another Nine, disenfranchised white soldier Kevin Costner. Greene is receptive, smart, moral (1 wing) and another holistic thinker.

Rodney A. Grant plays the Eightish warrior role in Dances although he could be a counterphobic Six. He's fierce and hotheaded, but gradually grows loyal and protective of blood brother Costner. The Nine/Eight contrast is also evident in the movie's portrayal of different tribes. The Sioux as a whole have a Nine aura while their enemies, the Pawnees, are uniformly Eightish. Actor Wes Studi plays an aggressive Eight Pawnee and we'll see more of him.

Dances is very romantic and has peculiar paradoxes - Costner, for instance, "improves" the Sioux way of life by introducing them to rifles. The Pawnees were none too happy about their savage portrayal, either. The movie is otherwise well-crafted, moving, and extremely honorable.
Return to Video Store

Graham Greene plays a modern version of his Dances role on Northern Exposure, the TV show which is out on video. He is the shaman/mentor to series regular Ed (Darren Burrows), a young Indian Nine. Greene also played a dignified Nine in the movie Ishi, The Last Of His Tribe.

The actor jumps Enneagram styles in a muddled amateur drama called Clearcut. Here he plays a nasty militant Eight who kidnaps a rich Eight lumberman in revenge for a crooked land deal that steals timber from Greene's tribal reservation. Along for the ride is the tribe's ineffectual white lawyer, a nervous-wreck Six. The stupid, buffoonish lumberman is meant to be an Evil White and the screenplay is larded with trumped-up polemics. Film is generally kind of lame.

Greene, however, has charisma galore and the courage to be a solidly unsympathetic warrior. The character is avenging his people, but he's thoroughly narcissistic and clearly enjoys sadism. He may have good politics but he's also a sociopathic and a nasty piece of work. Floyd Red Crow Westerman plays the requisite Nine medicine man, an enigmatic background figure who spiritually supports Greene's militancy.

Far more effective politically and dramatically is the intense, riveting Thunderheart. Story puts Threeish FBI Agent Val Kilmer onto a South Dakota Indian reservation to investigate a murder that looks politically motivated. All signs point toward a militant faction led by an Eight, played by real-life activist John Trudell. Kilmer also investigates a Nine medicine man in the background and clashes with tribal cop Greene. Latter is playing a Niney sidekick role but within that restraint he's a feisty, smart-assed Eight. Throughout the film he's astute, sassy, and bitterly funny.

This movie didn't do that well, which is a genuine mystery as it casts quite a subliminal spell. The FBI agent has a gradual spiritual conversion that undoes his Threeish efficiency and emotional hardness. Kilmer underplays this beautifully and the Nine medicine man is at the heart of the unfolding. Nonactor Chief Ted Thin Elk is another natural actor like Dan George was. His medicine man has a patient, lucid presence and he directs the unwitting Kilmer both spiritually and politically throughout the story.

Thunderheart's true villains have thoroughly Threeish aims. Sam Shepard plays Kilmer's Eight supervisor and Sheila Tousey is an Indian activist and seems a One. This is an engrossing thriller with tight intricate plotting.

Also cinematically intense is 1992's The Last Of The Mohicans featuring real-life activist Russell Means in the title role. Means is an Eight in real life but plays a Nine with an 8 wing in this film. His character is receptive and wise but a man of action when necessary. The film's Eight warrior slot is capably filled by Wes Studi as Magua, a renegade avenger who has declared personal war on the invading whites. He's as rough and ruthless as Graham Greene in Clearcut and for basically the same reasons. Studi went on to play the title role in Geronimo: An American Legend. Studi played him as an Eight and, indeed, the real Geronimo was an Eight with a 9 wing.

The negative white forces in Mohicans are mostly represented by British Ones. At the center of the action is a love story between vague, indefinite Daniel Day-Lewis and vague, indefinite Madeleine Stowe. The performers are both real-life Fives and if you look closely it shows.
Return to Video Store

Finally there's the contemporary road comedy Powwow Highway which puts the two Indian roles together in the same car. A. Martinez plays an enraged militant Eight and Gary Farmer is the mystical, receptive Nine. Their styles are in constant comic contrast as they travel south from a Wyoming reservation to rescue Martinez's jailed, framed-up sister.

Martinez is prone to explosive rhetoric about Indian treatment by the whites but he's so angry that it's self-defeating. He's chronically eruptible and can't get out of his own way. He fights with everyone on real or imagined political grounds. The film endorses his spirit more than his methods.

Farmer's spaced-out, spiritually faithful character is a lovely guy and the road trip is part of a vision quest. He christens his battered Oldsmobile his "pony," and sets out to seek the spirits of his ancestors. Things keep working out well for Farmer, to Martinez's amazement and scorn. Even though Farmer's asleep in his own world, he handles each situation with comic ease and aplomb. By story's end, both characters are together in purpose and, in a way, represent the integration of faith and action.

Many of the friends' exchanges run like this:

Martinez: "Do me a favor. When the heat comes down don't start with the old legends and all that mystical horseshit. It will only make things worse."

Farmer: "Stop worrying. Trust the powers."

Farmer is a self-preservation Nine with a huge appetite for food. Film is offbeat, undemanding and enjoyable. Look for Graham Greene again in a cameo.
Return to Video Store

There are other movies where these same Enneagram dyrios to renamics are played out with white actors. In the absorbing, evocative Emerald Forest, Eightish Powers Boothe finds his long-lost blond son (Charley Boorman), who's been raised in a Brazilian jungle by natives. The boy is a Nine and so is his adopted father, a medicine man. Their enemies are Threeish progress and another tribe called "The Fierce People" who all act like Eights. Boorman's Nine tribe is called "The Invisible People"(!)

Emerald Forest has flaws, but it's as different a movie as you'll ever see and Charley Boorman gives a striking performance. 1985 film was a bit ahead of its time, as its real subject is the destruction of rainforests.
Return to Video Store

Paris, Texas
Harry Dean Stanton plays an amnesiac who wanders out of the Mexican desert after several years missing. Reunited with his brother in Los Angeles, he begins to reconstruct himself and to form a relationship with the young son he barely knows.

He's in what psychologists call a "fugue state" - a sort of shocked inner oblivion where he wanders, lost in a vague symbology. He's also a Nine - tender-hearted, good-natured, passive/dependent, asleep. Over the course of the story, he slowly (mostly) awakens and deals with the long-repressed incident that led him to block out his memory. Amnesia is a defensive tendency for Nines under the best of circumstances, so it's a logical response to Stanton's trauma.

In the end he tries to do the right thing by everyone but only partly succeeds. He finds his missing wife but can't forgive her for her part in what happened. His resolution of the past is both right and wrong at the same time.

Dean Stockwell plays Stanton's brother, an exasperated but compassionate One. Stockwell's wife, French actress Aurore Clement, is a real nice Two.

Paris, Texas seems to be long and slow but I was surprised by its narrative tension. It has subtle, delicate performances and great music by Ry Cooder. A movie for anyone who's ever felt dispossessed.
Return to Video Store

The Tall Guy
Shaggy romantic comedy featuring Jeff Goldblum as a tall, disorganized American actor trying to make a living in London. The only job he can manage is that of an abused second banana to an arrogant comic (Rowan Atkinson). The story has him trying to change his luck by wooing his allergy nurse (Emma Thompson, a probable One) while landing the lead role in a hilariously awful musical about the Elephant Man.

Goldblum plays an overcomplicating Nine. His life's a dishevelled mess; naked men wander through his apartment, while his chronic allergies keep him sneezing and unfocused. He dates a Czech woman (a Two) for reasons even he can't understand. He does get the Elephant Man job but later learns it's because the producers needed an actor who looked crushed by life.

His obsessive roundabout thinking just can't pull things together but he does awaken enough to pursue Thompson. She's blunt and pragmatic ("I see no point in going out for ten expensive dinners when I already know that I like you") and he likes her desperately. But when the relationship starts to go well, he sabotages it and spends the rest of the movie trying to get Thompson back. Going in circles, this is called.

Goldblum makes a pretty good Nine and he gives the character a nervous Sixish edge that's accurate to the style. This comedy is uneven but generally enjoyable. The satirical swipes at the world of theater are wickedly funny. Emma Thompson is a real life One.
Return to Video Store

The Whales Of August
Small-scaled old folks movie with Lillian Gish and Bette Davis as elderly sisters living at a beachfront home in Maine. Film is slow sometimes, but also poignant and Gish is especially good. She's a self-preservation Nine who lives each day in small, cheerful increments. Gish stays busy with projects, paints landscapes and makes toys. She has principles and opinions (1 wing), finds the good in most events, and plays the calming peacemaker to her cranky sister. At this role she is mostly passive but she can get openly annoyed.

Davis is something of a Four, although she also sounds like a One. She finds fault with everything and is suspectible to plunges of melancholy ("I'm alright - just a touch of November in my bones"). She often blocks the forward-looking Gish's plans -"We're too old to be considering new things"- and makes comments like, "Everything dies sooner or later." To which Gish sweetly replies, "So you always say, dear."

Gish knows Davis is exasperating but you can almost see her deciding to cope with it. What the sisters have is reminiscent of a Four/Seven dynamic, where the will to find fault competes with the will to affirm the positive. Gish brings an unforced grace to her role, but adds enough irritation to keep the character believable.

Vincent Price drops in for tea and he seems a sunny Seven. Ann Southern also has a small role and she's a likely Two. Harry Carey Jr. plays the cantankerous plumber and he's a New England Yankee One.

Return to Video Store