Film

The Haunting (12)

IF there is one lingering image you take away from The Haunting it is the look of bemused, bovine horror on the face of its star, Catherine Zeta-Jones.

It's an expression that - albeit unintentionally - says all that needs saying about this ghastly $80 million farrago. In theory, of course, this old-dark-house yarn boasts a decent pedigree.

Its source novel - Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House - is a brilliantly structured frightscape, and its 1963 forerunner (by director Robert Wise) a recognised genre classic.

But Speed director Jan De Bont somehow conspires to make a pig's ear out of a silk purse, ferrying an eccentric band of stereotypes to a possessed mansion and then simply turning up the effects-work.

So subtle psychological intricacies get buried under a torrent of fairground stylings (ghostly kids in the bed-sheets, nauseous groanings in the corridor, a jiggly skeleton that leaps at the screen) and the odd cheesy gesture at comedy.

Meantime, Zeta-Jones lollops about in lacy negligee, Bruce Dern crops up as a nutty caretaker and Liam Neeson perfects a permanently pained expression as the psychologist who organised the whole sorry outing.

All are left stranded in the wreckage of a film that looks destined to haunt their dreams for years to come.

Xan Brooks Election (15)

TRACY Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the teenage anti-heroine of Alexander Payne's superb comedy, is the star pupil at George Washington Carver High.

She is both industrious and intelligent. as well as being civic- minded. She sits on school committees. She is the only one in her class who knows the difference between "morality" and "ethics". She seems like a dead cert for Student Government Presidency, if only because she is standing unopposed and knows how to sweeten voters by baking them cupcakes or giving them chewing gum.

However, there is a small problem with Tracy. Beneath her Pippy Longstocking exterior, she's a bit of a monster.

All that stands between Tracy and electoral success is her teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick). Thanks to his intervention, two other candidates are found to take on Tracy at the hustings, high school football hero Paul Metzler, and his sister Tammy, a nihilistic young lesbian whose slogans "Who Cares?" and "What Does It Matter Anyway?" strike an immediate chord with voters.

This may be George Carver High, not the west coast of Scotland, but once the party machines crank into action, we learn just how dirty politics can be.

There is vote rigging, vandalism and even the whiff of a sex scandal. The funniest moments are often the most vicious.

McAllister's many humiliations are milked for comedy. He's a crumpled, slightly seedy figure, a sort of downmarket Humbert Humbert who watches porn films in the basement and cheats on his wife with next-door neighbour Linda Novotny.

Broderick plays him brilliantly, capturing both McAllister's idealism (he loves his job) and the creeping cynicism which leads him to take such extraordinary steps to undermine Tracy's brilliant career.

Witherspoon, too, is a revelation as the foot-stomping, prim little Miss who knows exactly where she is going.

However barbed the humour, Payne never once resorts to crude caricature. By the end, he even manages to make us feel sorry for Tracy, the one character who doesn't realise that being successful and being happy are not necessarily the same thing.

Geoffrey Macnab l See feature, Page 4 The Theory of Flight (15)

KENNETH Branagh takes a break from Shakespeare in a BBC film that receives a belated release after two years on the shelf.

You don't have to be Barry Norman to realise why it's taken so long to reach our screens. For while Helena Bonham Carter is bravely cast as a wheelchair-bound motor neurone sufferer, Paul Greengrass's film is an uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful mix of quirky comedy and mawkish melodrama.

When failed painter Richard (Branagh) loses the plot and tries to fly off a London rooftop, he finds himself lumbered with 120 hours' community service.

Ordered to visit handicapped Jane (Bonham Carter), Richard is initially put off by her sharp tongue and dry wit. Jane, however, takes a fancy to her reluctant companion and asks him to help her lose her virginity.

How Richard assists Jane in this department forms the basis for a discomfiting romance that writer Richard Hawkins attempts to lighten with a silly subplot about a homemade aircraft Richard constructs from his old canvases.

Branagh tries hard, but light comedy just isn't his forte, and his psychological hang-ups are small beer compared with Jane's deteriorating condition.

This is a theory that, unfortunately simply does not work in practice.

Neil Smith

Copyright 1999
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