Film Reviews on POSTHOC

TIGER TIGER STILL BURNING BRIGHT

By Thomas Burchfield

Diamonds: comedy-drama. Starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Dan Aykroyd, Corbin Allred and Jenny McCarthy. Music by Joel Goldsmith, Written by Allan Aaron Katz. Directed by John Asher. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

POSTHOC RATING:

It was more sentiment than aesthetics that drew me to Diamonds, a film that might have been the story of one man’s last hurrah in the face of impending death, but instead becomes a trite meandering road film about father-son relationships. Big surprise.

It’s rather a shame because this is the first film that one of Hollywood’s last great stars, Kirk Douglas, has made since his major stroke in 1996. His appearance at the Academy Awards later that year moved me to tears, with the contrast between the clips of him as a young cocky dynamo and his slow shuffling gait as he limped out to pick up his honorary Oscar. It was Hollywood sentiment at its truest: outrageous to intellectuals and sophisticates, but still honestly felt. No true movie lover could fail to be moved.

In Diamonds, Douglas plays Harry "The Polish Prince" Agrensky, a once-great welter-weight prize fighter, now diminished in old age by his wife’s death and a major stroke. Living with one son Moses (Kurt Fuller), he’s alienated from his other son, middle-aged sportswriter Lance (Dan Aykroyd), who, in turn and not surprisingly, is alienated from his teenage son, Michael (Corbin Allred). Michael (again, of course), loves his grandpa and wholeheartedly believes Harry’s tale of the secret stash of diamonds he long ago left behind with a dead gangster, who promised to give them to Harry in payment for throwing a fight. Harry’s determination to retrieve the diamonds and use them to keep him out of a retirement home provides the lame excuse to get the three men together for not only a treasure-hunt, but also (sigh) to explore their feelings for one another. Again. It’s a "Lifetime" movie for guys.

Not that there’s anything wrong with exploring father-son dynamics, but Allan Aaron Katz’s script is so trite, it sounds like he ransacked every self-help book he could find for his "insights". The scenes between Aykroyd and Allred are especially banal and lacking in any depth or tension. Beyond the stale dysfunctional clichés, there’s no connection to anything larger. I would have liked it better if somehow Harry’s situation had them confronting their own possible future. Except for Harry, everyone’s caught in his own solipsistic ephemeral moment. Here Death is only an afterthought for Harry to worry about (and only a little. Don’t depress the audience now! Everyone hug!)

Even the scene of the three in a fancy brothel run by an old hooker named Sin-dee (Lauren Bacall) lacks erotic tension, energy and most of all real humor. The real sinner here is director John Asher, who shows no touch with comedy or tension anywhere in the film. He clumsily stages the climactic scene where the three adventurers finally dig the treasure out of the wall of a gangster’s house with no dramatic build and excitement. The sleight-of-hand twist is poorly handled. One way I can tell when a director is failing is when I start reshooting the scene in my head. I reshot entire sequences of Diamonds during the screening. Stop this man before he directs again!

That loads this shapeless sack of Diamonds onto the shoulders of Kirk Douglas and he, at least, is game, stroke and all. He’s never been afraid to risk himself (there’s one story he tells of John Wayne dressing him down for playing a "weak" character named Vincent Van Gogh). His body is shrunken, his speech slurred, but here, as a stroke-crippled impulsive and angry old man, he’s still a burning barn full of amazing energy. He knows his legend and plays it for all its worth (scenes from his 1948 breakthrough film, Champion are well woven in throughout). The Cool and the Repressed will likely be embarrassed by his gavotting about like a horny old goat, but I don’t doubt he knows that that is one of the ways we already remember him. He and Lauren Bacall play their brief scenes with restrained and tender poignancy, like they know that the sight of the two of them together for the first time since 1950’s Young Man With a Horn is enough to catch the throat without choking it.

Still, for a comeback Douglas might better have been served with a story, script and attitude as unique, eccentric and lovely as David Lynch’s Straight Story from last year. (With all due respect to Richard Farnsworth, it’s easy to see Douglas determinedly plowing three hundred miles across Iowa on a tractor, as defiant as Spartacus). It might have been the kind of one man against the odds film that he used to do so well. The sense of struggle in the cosmic face of mortality in Lynch’s film was palpable in every frame. But Diamonds is too modest and flat for its great star. The Kirk Douglas of old would never have let the filmmakers get away with that.

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