A stern gaze, bordering on fear, as the realisation of some impending doom sinks in. And he’s been in this predicament for years! It begins with a single facial expression that appears on almost every film poster he appears on. "The Mosquito Coast," unfortunately, is all about that kind of father.Harrison Ford is in peril. He fell in love with a young woman whose father was rigid and uncompromising, so utterly sure of his own infallibility that he was heedless of the unhappiness he caused others. Ford played the cop who came to live with and understand an Amish farm community. Weir's most recent movie was " Witness," also with Ford, and also about a contrast between modern and utopian sensibilities. But Schrader's characters always have some measure of humanity that is lacking here. The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful? The screenplay is by Paul Schrader, whose own movies (" Hardcore" and " Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters") and screenplays (" Taxi Driver") often are about men obsessed with their own narrow range of vision. In that film and throughout his career, Weir has been able to capture the majesty of nature, and the production values in "The Mosquito Coast" are impressive, especially in a scene where a typhoon threatens to sweep away Ford's fragile settlement on a threatened beach. The movie provided no answer to its mystery except for an awesome silence. In " Picnic at Hanging Rock," he showed us a group of giggling schoolgirls on a day's outing, who are mysteriously lost somewhere within a vast prehistoric rock formation. "The Mosquito Coast" was directed by Peter Weir, an Australian who has made great films about the silences and mysteries of nature. Well, that's probably the only strategy that would have worked, but it leaves enormous questions about Mother's thoughts and fears - questions this movie is not prepared to answer. Mirren has said that the character was opposite to everything in her own nature, and that she played Mother by trying to become completely passive. What does she feel? What does she really think? Apart from one welcome outburst, we never know. Charlie recedes into the family and becomes just one more hapless victim to be dragged through the jungle by his father.Īnother mysterious character in the movie is Mother ( Helen Mirren), the wife, who stands by mutely and uncomplainingly while Fox subjects her family to dangerous and pointless experiences. In the movie, Charlie ( River Phoenix) is still the narrator, but what he tells us on the soundtrack isn't reinforced by what we see on the screen. Through Charlie's eyes, we gradually see the father turning from an idealist into an obsessive, and we also see Charlie becoming a man in the process of dealing with that change. The movie is based on a novel by Paul Theroux, in which the narrator is Fox's teenage son, Charlie. It is painful to watch him not because he is mad, but because he is boring - one of those nuts who will talk all night long without even checking to see if you're listening. Allie Fox's madness is more of a drone, an unending complaint against the way things are. Those movies were so much more watchable than "The Mosquito Coast" because they created characters (both played by Klaus Kinski) who were mad with a flamboyant, burning intensity. I think immediately of " Aguirre, the Wrath of God," and " Fitzcarraldo," two movies by Werner Herzog about crazed eccentrics who pressed on into the jungle, driven by their obsessions. There have been other madmen in other movies who tried to find their vision in these same rain forests. It is a brilliant performance - so effective, indeed, that we can hardly stand to spend two hours in the company of this consummate jerk. Ford gives us a character who has tunnel vision, who is uncaring toward his family or anyone else, who is totally lacking in a sense of humor, who is egocentric to the point of madness. Fox is played in "The Mosquito Coast" by Harrison Ford, and it is one of the ironies of the movie that he does very good work.
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