“Autumn in New York” Makes One Wish for Spring
© 2000 by Cynthia W. Gentry, published on Dailygossip.com, August 2000.
Kids, I’m doing this new thing where I try to be honest. So let me say right off that the only way you’d get me to see another showing of “Autumn in New York” is if you allowed me to hurl rotting vegetation at the screen. But that’s just my opinion. The sharp-as-a-tack-yet-ever-winsome CarrieS, who accompanied me to “Autumn in New York,” liked the film, and she has fine taste. To each her own, as they say.
Essentially, whether you buy the premise of this movie depends on whether you believe that aging playboys can find true love with dying fairy sprites. In other words, if you’ve been waiting for “Peter Pan” to be updated for the baby boomer set, “Autumn in New York” might be for you.
Let’s look at the good points first, since there are relatively few. Chinese actress Joan Chen, who also helmed the critically acclaimed “Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl,” directed “Autumn in New York.” She does some interesting work; the pace is formal and languid. Her talented cinematographer, Chang Wei Gu, creates a beautiful, fairy-tale Manhattan seemingly devoid of crime, grit or poverty. Rudy Guiliani must love this film.
In the starring role of restaurateur-playboy Will Keane, Richard Gere does some fine work, especially in scenes that don’t include his leading lady, Winona Ryder. (I’ll get to her in a second.) There are also some strong, capable performances by a supporting cast that includes Anthony Paglia, Elaine Stritch, Sherry Stringfield (of “ER” fame) and Vera Farmiga, who almost steals the movie.
Unfortunately, to like “Autumn in New York,” you have to like Winona Ryder’s performance, and I give up shopping at J.Crew for an entire year before sitting through it again. I have nothing against Winona. I just wonder what happened to the actress who gave such edgy performances in movies like “Beetlejuice,” “Heathers” and even “The Age of Innocence,” in which she did a magnificent job of portraying a woman whose seemingly sweet exterior masked nerves of steel.
Here, as Gere’s love interest Charlotte Fielding, she’s asked to play not only sweet but saintly, and she works her pixie-ish beauty so hard it makes your teeth ache. I had to steel myself every time she simpered her way across the screen. It truly has to be one of the most narcissistic performances I’ve seen in a very long time.
The problem could be the script by Allison Burnett. Here’s where I found something interesting, which, dear friends, I will share with you. There’s been a lot made of the fact that “Autumn in New York” was written and directed by women, as if that fact alone would have us gals flocking to the multiplex, tissues in hand.
Well, imagine my surprise when I found this bit of trivia on Imdb.com: according to biographical information in the “Autumn in New York” press kit, Allison Burnett is a MAN, whose other writing credits are “Red Meat,” “Bleeding Hearts,” and “Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight.” Now, I don’t know if we can trust the Imdb.com, but I can trust that no matter what his or her gender, the author of “Bloodfist III” doesn’t know how to write a love story.
Most love stories, for example, don’t make your skin crawl. We’ve had a lot of talk lately about Hollywood’s penchant for pairing Medicare-bound men with nubile young women. I’m waiting anxiously for the day when we don’t have to read subtitles to see older women enjoying younger men, but it’s going to be a while before my story hits the big screen.
In “Autumn in New York,” we get a 50-year-old Gere playing a 48-year-old playboy who falls for a 22-year-old played by the 29-year-old Ryder, who looks and acts like she’s 13. This gives their scenes together a definitely creepy air, made worse by the fact that try as they might (and they try hard) the two have almost no chemistry. It got so uncomfortable watching them that I began to entertain myself by re-casting the movie, which is always a bad sign. Imagine Charlotte being played by Cate Blanchett or Hilary Swank, and you’ll get an idea of what I mean.
First off, I couldn’t imagine what in a million years would make Will (Gere) fall for a wimp like Charlotte, whose reaction to him in their early scenes together consists of giggling like a nitwit. Perhaps realizing that she would eventually drive him nuts, Will tells Charlotte after their first night together that while he likes her, they have no future together. (A true womanizer would have spouted lines like “I want to know what makes you tick” and started naming their babies; Will must be the nicest playboy in America.) Charlotte, however, throws his words back in his face and trumps him. “I know,” she says. “I’m sick.” She’s not just sick of course; she’s dying. In the finest Hollywood tradition, Charlotte has one of those invisible terminal diseases—something involving her heart, in case we need yet another cheesy metaphor—that only makes her more beautiful as it kills her off.
For commitment-phobe Will, this should be the perfect situation, and at least the script has the good grace to have Charlotte tease him about him being able to use her death as a sob story with which to “bag chicks.” But underlying these jokes is something more sinister. The movie makes much of the fact that Will’s love for Charlotte changes him. But one can’t help thinking that Will loves Charlotte because she will never be a real woman. Instead, she will be frozen in time as a passive, sweet girl who designs silly hats, helps old ladies, tells fairly tales to children and is always, unfailingly good.
Charlotte may refer to her anger and fear about her sickness, but we almost never see it. In fact, we only see her get angry once, and it’s not because she’s dying, but because Will betrays her in the most predictable and vile way. His excuse is that he’s scared, and in one of its few moments of wisdom, the script has Charlotte tell him, “No, you’re a coward.”
(When I’m Empress, men who trot out that old “scared” excuse will immediately have hot pokers jammed under their fingernails. Want to be scared? Try being a woman and jogging at night. Try childbirth. Try getting insurance for birth control pills from insurance companies that have no problem covering Viagra. That’s scary.)
The movie doesn’t even seem to see the irony in having Charlotte dress as Emily Dickinson for a Halloween party and jokingly “ruin” Will for other women by getting him to quote poetry. If there’s one thing the Belle of Amherst work is not, it’s passive and dreamy. Dickinson’s poetry is passionate, dark, and angry. It ain’t about butterflies, folks. It’s about Death. And how much more interesting “Autumn in New York” would have been if it had mirrored those qualities. Charlotte seems to accept her death passively, only agreeing to potentially lifesaving surgery when she realizes she doesn’t want to “leave” Will, as if the only reason a terminally ill woman would want to live is for a man. How vile.
Will gets off easy. He’s never required to face the real work of loving someone who’s sick. Charlotte’s never cranky, never sweaty, never nauseous, never anything but luminous. One minute she’s flitting around the room or the ice rink; the next she’s collapsed on the ground, and all Will has to do is hold her and page surgeons who are more than happy to hop on helicopters to come save the day. (Apparently the freelance hat-designing business offers very good insurance.)
There is one reason to see “Autumn in New York,” and that’s for the subplot involving Lisa (Farmiga), playing the abandoned daughter who finally tracks Will down. (Yes, I know it’s played as a mystery, but you can see this “revelation” coming a mile away, so I’m not ruining anything.) This storyline offers more authentic moments than we ever experience in the Will-Charlotte romance. In his scenes with the talented Farmiga, movingly and quietly filmed by Chen, Gere conveys the regret and self-loathing that are the true punishment of the playboy, of the man who is “scared.” Let’s hope Gere gets a chance to play roles that explore this side of his acting talents, rather than simply allowing him to cash in on his considerable charm.
I couldn’t help but compare “Autumn in New York” to another current film, “The Tao of Steve.” The latter had the smarts to have its womanizing hero Dex fall for a real woman: the smart, feisty and unfailingly clear-eyed Syd. Here was a gal we could admire, a true heroine who is the leading man’s equal. If Syd had a terminal illness, God knows she would have gone out fighting, riding a motorcycle across the hills of New Mexico and cranking out as many killer opera sets as she could—not playing in her room with beads. Syd would have been calling the doctors herself, and her leading man would have loved her for it.
Love between equals is always the kind of love story we want to see. Hollywood, stop giving us sentimental slop and telling us you’re trying to revive the love stories of the past. We might actually stay home in droves and watch the love stories of the past, and compare them to what you’re giving us. And then where would you be?