Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I did go through a period—I think it was early in the days when I started getting DVDs from Netflix (kids, ask your parents)—where I watched all of the movies Keaton made instead of Batman Forever (1995). Essentially this and Speechless (1994)*. It felt like it might be therapeutic, but it really wasn’t.
Did I Like It: This does a great job of doing that very simple thing which films aren’t all that interested in anymore: allowing a film to live or die by showing as authentically as possible people at work. Aaron Sorkin trucks in this and almost exclusively this. Mid-budget dramas and comedies used to make this sort of thing an art. Historical implications aside, All The President’s Men (1976) is an absolute symphony of this quality. There may be something to setting the film in a Newspaper that really makes the whole thing come together.
It’s a quietly thrilling thing to see in this day and age, when the most frequent job I get to imagine myself having (I do greatly enjoy imagining myself in some other job) while watching modern films is to be a superhero. It’s not so much that the Marvel movies are ruining cinema, it’s that there is something to be said for inspiring people to do things actual human beings do.
That said, the film might be just a bit too slight for its own good. Is Ron Howard ultimately the most breezy of his contemporaries that—aside from a stray Apollo 13 (1995) or A Beautiful Mind (2001)—any film is going to feel thinner than it might from another director? Is it the fact that a Randy Newman score just makes things so light that I can’t help but think we should be looking at something computer animated? Is it the fact that Randy Quaid is here at all? Probably a mixture of both.
*The true film for which Keaton abandoned Gotham City. Keaton and Geena Davis play political speechwriters who fall in love only to have Christopher Reeve cause them problems? Why isn’t that my favorite film of all time. Probably because its more than a little hard to find. But this review isn’t about Speechless.