That awkward moment when you and your twin both egregiously farted at the same time, but you've decided not to talk about it.
I think we can all agree that every Nancy Meyers movie is set in the alternate universe of White Nonsense Disneyland. There is no such thing as class warfare in WND, because there is no such thing as class, because every person is ungodly rich and lives in the home of your sex dreams. There is no such thing as racism in WND; in fact Nancy Meyers characters' don't see race because there's literally never a single person of color in anything she does. We can profile the women of WND throughout the next two weeks as I watch the complete Nancy Meyers filmography, but if memory serves correctly, Meyers women rarely even manage to live up to the troubling standards of white feminism, though they're often confronted with what might be considered "white feminist" issues. So the women of WND always live on the precipice of "having it all," if only they could master work/life balance! or better assert themselves in their relationships! or realize they don't need just any relationship, but they absolutely need the right one! As for the men of WND, they're either children, womanizers, or white knights (the good kind-- not the KKK kind); all men in WND are essentially mascots, donning giant costume heads, working the shimmering park where everything brilliantly glows, even the reductive stereotypes.
I always have a mess of issues with Meyers films, and I leave the theater a little angered, a little charged, that the world is so narrowly portrayed and the women who run it are so broadly sketched. But I also leave charmed, tickled even, because Meyers knows what cinematic magic looks like. She makes impossibly-endearing movies where your heart melts while your mind rots. It's the Disneyland part of White Nonsense Disneyland, and if I'm in a forgiving mood, it makes the ride worth the trouble-laden waiting in line.
The Parent Trap is Nancy Meyers first film as a director, and the pairing makes perfect sense. At that time, she was an experienced and accomplished movie maker with writing credits dating back to Private Benjamin. She'd already proven her chops in adapting nostalgic family comedies to box office gold with the Father of the Bride remake and it's sequel. So after turning down a chance to direct some of the funniest females in comedy in The First Wives Club, she signed-on with Disney to direct and co-write with her then-husband and frequent collaborator Charles Shyer.
Meyers' remake makes no attempt to modernize The Parent Trap but instead fights to see it stitched with timelessness. It's apparent in the casting choices of Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, and Elaine Henderson, with their romantic, old-Hollywood features. In the lavish, out-of-time estates where both families live. In the dreamy trans-Atlantic cruise that brings Quaid and Richardson together in the first place. In the film's laughably dated score and musical cues, especially the saxxy femme fatale music that plays any second Henderson's Meredith Blake is on screen. In the pranks the girls pull on each other, which are nearly identical to and no more advanced that what Haley Mills pulled on herself in the 1961 original. In fact, the banter and hijinx leading up to Lindsay Lohan's realization that she is her own twin are full of zippy "ha-cha-cha!" dialogue and Charlie Chaplin/Looney Tunes levels of comic violence. The film's lust for timelessness is perhaps most apparent in the cinematography and lighting; Meyers wanted to out-classic even the original The Parent Trap, infusing it with some 1930s/1940s romantic screwball comedy glamour. If critics and audiences scorned her 1994 love letter to Tracy-Hepburn movies with I Love Trouble, they were going to thank her for this.
Having seen her attempt at recreating or hearkening back to The Philadelphia Story and others of the era, I'm more curious than ever to watch her remaining filmography. Is Meyer's White Nonsense Disneyland actually just her trying to recreate Old Hollywood? Is it more nostalgic than it is mind-numbingly out-of-touch? It'll be fun to see, though no less problematic: 21st century romantic escapism can't look the same as Depression-Era and WWII escapist fare. It's too tone-deaf and too hurtful to suggest that today's rose-tinged utopia would be a world without black people, without day laborers, where people in need have either evaporated or been eviscerated.
But for now, a short list of the good/bad/and DUMB of Nancy Meyer's The Parent Trap:
1) The 90s were a different time for children's movies, you guys. All of the adults have a wicked alcohol dependency. Lindsay Lohan straight-up prison pierces her own ears. Natasha Richardson smokes when she's nervous, and her father smokes whenever the fuck he wants. Lohan knowingly talks to her father's fiancee about how she knows her dad is only marrying her so they can keep-on-fuckin'. We're also led to believe that as an 11-year-old, Lohan's Hallie regularly drinks wine, and in fact, has an advanced palette. Perhaps this movie was the birthplace of Lindsay's troubles and the deathbed of her refinement.
2) You guys, EVERYONE dips Oreos in Peanut Butter. That's not some freaky twin thing. It's called being a human being who isn't terrible.
3) It's hard not to feel bad for Meredith Blake. The kids straight up torture her and "affectionately" joke about pushing her off a cliff. She may be a single-minded gold-digger, but she's also someone who knows what she wants, and she works hard for the money. We're clearly supposed to think of her as some "greedy bitch," but Dennis Quaid was entering the arrangement pretty knowingly, aware that as someone half his age, he was getting sex and she was getting money. People enter these sorts of arrangements all the time; I don't think the answer is to celebrate the wealthy man and humiliate and torture the savvy woman.
4) What type of terrible human being separates twin sisters at birth, ignores and neglects their other daughter, and agrees to never tell their daughters about each other? How do they get their family members, friends, and servants to be complicit in the lie, and why is everyone so cool with it and never lets it slip? Why are the children not brimming with anger and bitterness when they realize this is what happened? And even after the twins are re-united, the parents proposed solution is still to keep the children separate from each other, except for holidays, without consulting their daughters.
5) The movie provides a pretty good primer for how not to talk to your daughter about your decision to remarry. She had literally been home for one day and only met her would-be mother-in-law once. Kind of setting yourself up for failure there, Dennis.
5) Natasha Richardson's character is the beta prototype of the Nancy Meyers woman. She's still a wealthy, driven, fabulously accomplished, confident woman who is effortlessly unraveled when faced by a man, but her unraveling is less dramatic than in later models, and she very quickly regains control and poise. We ultimately see her clever, manipulative hand guiding her daughters in their conspiracy to get her back with her husband.
6) The women in this film are fabulous. Linsday Lohan is impossibly charming. Natasha Richardson is a melt-worthy vision of grace, beauty, confidence, and subtle humor. And Lisa Ann Walter as Chessy steals every scene, even in German.
7) Real missed opportunity for a cute musical number in here; DAMN IT, NANCY!
8) I have never had a maid, butler, chef, or nanny, but in reality, are they treated like part of the family? Are they smiley-and-happy to cater to your every need, including espousing life advice and entertaining your children, while being permanently separated from their own families? And when Natasha Richardson asks her butler to come along to the United States but "not as her Butler," was she actually treating him to an all-expenses paid vacation, or was she just clarifying she wasn't going to be paying him for his time?
9) How does NOBODY notice that these girls are identical looking until they fence each other like a week into camp? Why does nobody say "whoa, it's freaky, you're like twin sisters?" Also, are we supposed to believe that in the dramatic fury in which Natasha Richardson ran out on her marriage, she tore the photo of the night they met, neatly preserved her soon-to-be-ex-husband's face in her scrapbook, and made sure the half with her face was tucked away in some place where it would be well-preserved for her abandoned daughter?
10) Let's all agree to leave the pleather dresses and spaghetti straps in the 90s.
11) Would love to see this re-imagined as a horror film where one daughter is blatantly lying about how good her life is, takes advantage of finding her twin to build a new family and new identity for herself, and essentially throws her newfound sister into the uncertain pits of hell. "The Parent Trap" would literally be the name of cage her parent uses to confine her. Just saying, this could have just as likely been the scenario, so if you meet your twin, don't agree to let her take over your life because you could end up in an abusive household, and the more you screamed about it, the more likely it would be that you were committed.
12) OMIGOD TYPING ALL OF THAT NONSENSE IN THOUGHT 11 JUST MADE ME REALIZE THAT "I KNOW WHO KILLED ME" IS ESSENTIALLY THE THEMATIC SEQUEL TO THE PARENT TRAP.
As for your hot dude of the movie, Dennis Quaid and the butler don't really do it for me. So, I leave you with this smoldering picture of the late, tremendously talented, deeply beautiful, Natasha Richardson who stirs in me something so genuine that I have to wonder if I am, in fact, pansexual.
1) The 90s were a different time for children's movies, you guys. All of the adults have a wicked alcohol dependency. Lindsay Lohan straight-up prison pierces her own ears. Natasha Richardson smokes when she's nervous, and her father smokes whenever the fuck he wants. Lohan knowingly talks to her father's fiancee about how she knows her dad is only marrying her so they can keep-on-fuckin'. We're also led to believe that as an 11-year-old, Lohan's Hallie regularly drinks wine, and in fact, has an advanced palette. Perhaps this movie was the birthplace of Lindsay's troubles and the deathbed of her refinement.
2) You guys, EVERYONE dips Oreos in Peanut Butter. That's not some freaky twin thing. It's called being a human being who isn't terrible.
3) It's hard not to feel bad for Meredith Blake. The kids straight up torture her and "affectionately" joke about pushing her off a cliff. She may be a single-minded gold-digger, but she's also someone who knows what she wants, and she works hard for the money. We're clearly supposed to think of her as some "greedy bitch," but Dennis Quaid was entering the arrangement pretty knowingly, aware that as someone half his age, he was getting sex and she was getting money. People enter these sorts of arrangements all the time; I don't think the answer is to celebrate the wealthy man and humiliate and torture the savvy woman.
4) What type of terrible human being separates twin sisters at birth, ignores and neglects their other daughter, and agrees to never tell their daughters about each other? How do they get their family members, friends, and servants to be complicit in the lie, and why is everyone so cool with it and never lets it slip? Why are the children not brimming with anger and bitterness when they realize this is what happened? And even after the twins are re-united, the parents proposed solution is still to keep the children separate from each other, except for holidays, without consulting their daughters.
5) The movie provides a pretty good primer for how not to talk to your daughter about your decision to remarry. She had literally been home for one day and only met her would-be mother-in-law once. Kind of setting yourself up for failure there, Dennis.
5) Natasha Richardson's character is the beta prototype of the Nancy Meyers woman. She's still a wealthy, driven, fabulously accomplished, confident woman who is effortlessly unraveled when faced by a man, but her unraveling is less dramatic than in later models, and she very quickly regains control and poise. We ultimately see her clever, manipulative hand guiding her daughters in their conspiracy to get her back with her husband.
6) The women in this film are fabulous. Linsday Lohan is impossibly charming. Natasha Richardson is a melt-worthy vision of grace, beauty, confidence, and subtle humor. And Lisa Ann Walter as Chessy steals every scene, even in German.
7) Real missed opportunity for a cute musical number in here; DAMN IT, NANCY!
8) I have never had a maid, butler, chef, or nanny, but in reality, are they treated like part of the family? Are they smiley-and-happy to cater to your every need, including espousing life advice and entertaining your children, while being permanently separated from their own families? And when Natasha Richardson asks her butler to come along to the United States but "not as her Butler," was she actually treating him to an all-expenses paid vacation, or was she just clarifying she wasn't going to be paying him for his time?
9) How does NOBODY notice that these girls are identical looking until they fence each other like a week into camp? Why does nobody say "whoa, it's freaky, you're like twin sisters?" Also, are we supposed to believe that in the dramatic fury in which Natasha Richardson ran out on her marriage, she tore the photo of the night they met, neatly preserved her soon-to-be-ex-husband's face in her scrapbook, and made sure the half with her face was tucked away in some place where it would be well-preserved for her abandoned daughter?
10) Let's all agree to leave the pleather dresses and spaghetti straps in the 90s.
11) Would love to see this re-imagined as a horror film where one daughter is blatantly lying about how good her life is, takes advantage of finding her twin to build a new family and new identity for herself, and essentially throws her newfound sister into the uncertain pits of hell. "The Parent Trap" would literally be the name of cage her parent uses to confine her. Just saying, this could have just as likely been the scenario, so if you meet your twin, don't agree to let her take over your life because you could end up in an abusive household, and the more you screamed about it, the more likely it would be that you were committed.
12) OMIGOD TYPING ALL OF THAT NONSENSE IN THOUGHT 11 JUST MADE ME REALIZE THAT "I KNOW WHO KILLED ME" IS ESSENTIALLY THE THEMATIC SEQUEL TO THE PARENT TRAP.
As for your hot dude of the movie, Dennis Quaid and the butler don't really do it for me. So, I leave you with this smoldering picture of the late, tremendously talented, deeply beautiful, Natasha Richardson who stirs in me something so genuine that I have to wonder if I am, in fact, pansexual.
She doesn't even need a smokey eye to serve you smokey eye.
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