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COUSINS
Date of publication: 02/10/1989
For cast, rating and other information, (click here)
By Roger Ebert
`Cousins" is a celebration of carnal desire, wrapped up in a comedy so that
nobody is too badly hurt. In the real world, this kind of fooling around would turn family
reunions into emotional bloodbaths, but here everybody smiles and the sun always
seems to be shining.
Leaving the film, you start asking yourself what it was really about. But
while it's playing you don't think in those terms because you're having too much fun.
The movie centers on three
weddings, where a big, boisterous American family gets together for dancing,
drinking, gossip and shoving matches. At the first wedding, two distant relatives (William
Petersen and Sean Young) sneak off for a little hanky-panky in the middle of the
afternoon. They return long after the party's over, with some lame excuse about the
car breaking down.
Their disappearance has given
time for their spouses (Isabella Rossellini and Ted Danson) to meet each other, and
to start to like each other. Danson is a job-hopper who teaches ballroom dancing, lives
upstairs over a Chinese restaurant and isn't too concerned about his wife's
possibile infidelity: "Everybody has to do what they feel they have to
do." But Rossellini does take it seriously, and the next day she tracks Danson down
at his work to ask him if he thinks her husband and his wife are having an affair.
This is, of course, the beginning of their own affair, although they're not ready to admit
that for awhile.
The movie is intelligently
directed by Joel Schumacher, who places these two affairs in the center of a lot of
detail. This isn't one of those shallow movies that's about nothing except love. Instead
we get inside the lives of these people: Petersen as the womanizing BMW
salesman, Rossellini as the woman who has stopped loving him but wants to be
faithful to him, Danson as a warmhearted misfit, Young as a woman who wandered into
the wrong marriage by mistake.
And there are some other
family members who are very important to the action, especially Danson's gruff old
codger of a father (Lloyd Bridges), who has most of the best one-liners in the movie, and
Danson's punkster son from an earlier marriage (Keith Coogan). Acting as kind of a
chorus in the background are Rossellini's mother (Norma Aleandro), who loses one
husband and gains another during the course of the movie, and Aunt Sofia (Gina
DeAngelis), who is perfect as the bitter relative who attends every family event and
mutters darkly in the background about everything she sees there ("That dress, you
would wear to a hooker's wedding").
Rossellini and Danson are at
the center of the story, however, because theirs is the romance based on true love,
and they try, up to a point, to deny their feelings. And Rossellini is the key to
everything. She is so huggable in this movie, so funny, so sweet, that she brings
sunshine into scenes that might otherwise seem contrived. She has one moment almost
impossible to describe, when she and Danson have agreed to meet
"accidentally" at a restaurant by bringing their families there. And as
she looks up and is "surprised" to see Danson there, her joy and embarrassment
and good humor all bubble up at once, and she almost breaks out laughing as she
tries to go through with the charade.
Rossellini has the role in
"Cousins" that was played by Marie-Christine Barrault in "Cousin,
Cousine," the warmhearted 1975 French comedy that inspired this Hollywood remake.
Both actresses share some of the same qualities: sunny good humor and instinctive
warmth in a merry, zaftig package. And they both have particularly winning
smiles. Rossellini has been in only six or seven movies, and the one that made the
biggest impression (the gothic comedy "Blue Velvet") was scarcely designed
to bring out her warmth. But "Cousins" could make her into a real movie
star; she has the kind of qualities that audiences really respond to.
Danson is less perfectly cast
as her lover. This is his most believable and likable role, and yet there is a
certain reserve about him that never quite seems to lift, and maybe Petersen, who plays
the other man, would have seemed warmer. Still, the material is so strong that we're
inclined to believe that if Rossellini likes him, she must know what she's doing.
Petersen is very good as the womanizing salesman, tormented by guilt but a sinner
anyway. Young, as Danson's wife, is brittle and distant; we never really get to know
her.
We do, though, have a lot of
fun with Bridges and Coogan as Danson's father and son. Bridges has three or four
lines that are explosively funny, and Coogan, a self-styled "video performance
artist," makes an avant-garde version of a wedding movie that brings things to a
screeching halt.
"Cousins" is
basically a rambling, warmhearted but artificial construction that seems more
convincing because of the riot of life that surrounds the manipulated central characters.
We don't really believe what's happening - adultery is never this simple, and seldom
this life-affirming - but the movie gets away with murder because it's funny,
because the dialogue has been written with an ear for the funny things people say,
especially when they're being serious, and because of Rossellini.
Cousins (STAR) (STAR) (STAR) 1/2 Larry Kozinski Ted Danson Maria Hardy Isabella Rossellini Tom Hardy William Petersen Tish Kozinski Sean Young Edie Costello Norma Aleandro Vince Kozinski Lloyd Bridges Mitch Kozinski Keith Coogan Aunt Sofia Gina DeAngelis Paramount presents a film directed by Joel Schumacher and produced by William Allyn. Screenplay by Stephen Metcalfe, inspired by the French film "Cousin, Cousine." Photographed by Ralf Bode. Edited by Robert Brown. Music by Angelo Badalamenti. Running time: 110 minutes. Classified PG-13. At local theaters.
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