thompson-14

Even the director of this film seemed rather uncertain and apologetic about it when he popped up after an open-air screening on Rome's Tiber Island, saying parts of it worked better than others, which is true enough.

Four young neapolitans travel to Hamburg to carry out a burglary which nets them nothing, but they have tickets to Oslo and so press on. Most of the film recounts their grim experience living underground in that city.

Shot in just four weeks in three countries, with a very mixed cast, it has some really fine performances and a gritty take on stateless lives. But the tone is all over the place, with bits of finely observed comedy from its hopeless protagonists veering through surreal nastiness to rather hackneyed violence before settling for depression as a principal note. The characters are too many and not well enough differentiated, the logic of the story is often weak (the boys speak neapolitan dialect, which is rather a challenge) and, like most films, it is at least half-an-hour too long.

I'm not sure why so many independent (ie: state-financed) Italian films go for suicidal gloom as a marker for seriousness. With a more focused script, and a lighter touch, this could have been the film its actors deserve.

Despite his enthusiasm for this project, and the time and money

he spent on it, this seems an odd choice for Benigni. Collodi's

harsh, very ‘Victorian' tale is, after all, about the suppression of that

same anarchic naughtiness which has always been Benigni's

stock in trade. That the result is rather formless and flat may be

more down to Collodi than Benigni; the story is very much just one

thing after another, as Pinocchio is systematically punished by the

world (read ‘by God'?) for his innocence and disobedience. The

performances are monochrome: Benigni yells everything, poor

Nicoletta Braschi is given nothing to do and there is a curious

veering away from many scenes. Why do we not see the puppet

being carved, for example? The blue fairy comes and goes in the

most arbitrary fashion – the story is unable to make up its mind at

times whether characters are alive or dead – and the question of

Pinnochio's transformation into a real boy is almost forgotten; the

scene in the whale does not need in any way to take place in a

whale ... it is as if the screenwriters were not really paying

attention. Children may like it – there is an exhilarating opening

scene, and some wonderful mice – and may have enough sense

to ignore its crabbed moralism. After all, Disney ended the last

century with a tale about the divine right of kings, and nobody

thought anything of it

This movie is the work of people with serious short-term memory problems: they cannot remember from one scene to the next what kind of film they are trying to make. The result is wildly incoherent, redeemed only by some good performances and one unintentionally hilarious one from Costner as the world's baddest Bad Guy. His clothes are particularly Bad, as is his hair. He is the kind of man who can't get gas without blowing up the gas station, killing the owner and taking off with his teenage daughter (whom the screenwriters then forget all about - or perhaps my attention wandered). And the Baddest thing of all is his acting. The movie begins with the most ill-conceived robbery in the history of crime (OK, guys, listen up: so we steal the money and then shoot our way out, killing everybody in the place - that ought to work). There are lots of explosions and a good deal of gun porn. There is no plausibility at all (Costner is arrested driving a stolen car full of guns with a kidnaped woman in the trunk and he gets out on bail - maybe they do things that way in Utah?) There are some curious bits of dialogue clearly made up on set as they tried to plug the holes in the plot. Kurt Russell is as solid as ever, and Courtney Cox looks cute, though Monica keeps breaking through. Her part is so loosely written you can hardly blame her (except for taking the job). What all these people think they're doing spending good money on this nonsense is anybody's guess. What does it have to do with Elvis? Not much, in the end - don't worry about it. Only for audiences with severe attention deficit syndrome.