Siskel and Ebert went two thumbs up on Ironweed in 1987, but most other reviewers joined audiences and went thumbs down, way down, on this adaptation of William Kennedy’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, which is only now making its DVD debut. I decided to take a second look to see if it had improved with age. No dice.
It’s an honorable failure—but, still, a failure. In this it’s not unlike Blindness, which I previously reviewed on the site. Both are taken from contemporary literary classics, and both are directed, as it happens, by South Americans abroad: Ironweed was Argentine Hector Babenco’s followup to Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), for which he was an Academy Award nominee. Lust for Oscar gold was no doubt a factor in both productions, and Ironweed, at least, came close, as its two stars, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, were nominated. I suspect the actors, who became friends on the set of Heartburn the previous year, put their feet up at the Shrine Civic Auditorium and had a good time, confident that they had done their best but knowing they hadn’t a chance at winning given the movie’s tepid reception.
For them, it was a riches-to-rags story, removed from the posh Manhattan of the Mike Nichols comedy-drama to the doleful Depression-era Albany of Ironweed, where they’re alcoholic tramps. Kennedy’s capital-set novels, which include Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Very Old Bones, are terrific reads, but if there was ever a movie in Ironweed, Kennedy, who adapted, didn’t find it. (There was a movie, a good one, in another of his upstate novels, the gangster portrait Legs, which may have gotten him his only other screenwriting credit to date, The Cotton Club.)
The synopsis supplied by the DVD distributor, Lionsgate, pretty much hangs a “Keep Away” sign over the production. “Francis Phelan (Nicholson), a drunken former baseball player is running away from life and the painful, guilty memories that haunt him. Helen Archer (Streep) is Francis’ longtime girlfriend and partner in drink. Together they lament the misery of life and ponder their tragic pasts, hoping to find a way to free themselves from their troubled lives. Told in a series of drunken flashbacks, Ironweed is a dark portrait of Depression-era hopelessness and a searing character-driven drama.” Ponderings of miserable lives, dark portraits, drunken flashbacks…and did I mention it’s 143 minutes long? Tumbleweeds were blowing in theaters stuck with Ironweed. (more…)
