Okay, this was officially an insane film. The dysfunctional families in The Royal Tenenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine have got nothing on this lot.
Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster are a teenage brother and sister who harbor blatant incestuous desires for each other. Jodie gets gang-raped (a test run for The Accused, perhaps) and then falls for the guy who spearheaded her rape. Matthew Modine has a double role as the head rapist and the perverted leader of a radical terrorist gang who want to blow up a Viennese opera house. Nastassja Kinski pops up halfway through as an insecure lesbian in a bear suit, and gets it on with both Rob and Jodie. Amanda Plummer plays a virginal Austrian chambermaid/terrorist known only as Miss Miscarriage. Beau Bridges is the patriarch, a teacher who dreams of setting up a hotel and gets blinded by an exploding bomb. There's also a child authoress (Jennie Dundas), a weightlifting grandfather (Wilford Brimley), a real bear and a dog with "terminal flatulence".
Tony Richardson is obviously going for a type of bizarre, surreal, epic black comedy, and he has faithfully adapted John Irving's sprawling, near-unfilmable 1981 novel. Both the tone and the narrative are faithful, but it's certainly not as successful an adaptation as The World According to Garp two years earlier. The cast is game and there are some rich, funny moments along the way, but there is clearly too much going on, too many characters and wild globe-hopping vignettes, and the overdose of quirk becomes wearisome well before the end. It's an utterly chaotic mess, then, but it remains one of those morbidly fascinating films you can't tear your eyes away from, if only to see what the hell happens next.
Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster are a teenage brother and sister who harbor blatant incestuous desires for each other. Jodie gets gang-raped (a test run for The Accused, perhaps) and then falls for the guy who spearheaded her rape. Matthew Modine has a double role as the head rapist and the perverted leader of a radical terrorist gang who want to blow up a Viennese opera house. Nastassja Kinski pops up halfway through as an insecure lesbian in a bear suit, and gets it on with both Rob and Jodie. Amanda Plummer plays a virginal Austrian chambermaid/terrorist known only as Miss Miscarriage. Beau Bridges is the patriarch, a teacher who dreams of setting up a hotel and gets blinded by an exploding bomb. There's also a child authoress (Jennie Dundas), a weightlifting grandfather (Wilford Brimley), a real bear and a dog with "terminal flatulence".
Tony Richardson is obviously going for a type of bizarre, surreal, epic black comedy, and he has faithfully adapted John Irving's sprawling, near-unfilmable 1981 novel. Both the tone and the narrative are faithful, but it's certainly not as successful an adaptation as The World According to Garp two years earlier. The cast is game and there are some rich, funny moments along the way, but there is clearly too much going on, too many characters and wild globe-hopping vignettes, and the overdose of quirk becomes wearisome well before the end. It's an utterly chaotic mess, then, but it remains one of those morbidly fascinating films you can't tear your eyes away from, if only to see what the hell happens next.