Chapter Two: Texasville vs. The Evening Star
By Brett Ballard-Beach
July 7, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Making a sequel to a moneymaking cash cow may be a no-brainer in Hollywood, but what about a film that is financially successful, critically acclaimed, a multiple Oscar winner, one that wears the mantle of “beloved” as well as any film can? It may still be a no-brainer for the moneymen involved, but there’s a lot more at risk, namely the legacy of the original film. Neither of these sequels was intended to launch a franchise, but both took a risk by choosing to extend a tale that could easily enough have been left alone, and yet both were calculated as crowd-pleasers, with full intentions of reaching a wide audience. Texasville ran into distribution troubles and wound up with a release in only a couple hundred theaters and didn’t crack the $3 million mark. The Evening Star was set forth in a modestly wide debut of around 1,300 screens and played for only a few weeks, eking out just under $13 million.
The perverse irony is that both films failed in their commercial endeavors, but not spectacularly so, not by enough to remain on the radar by even that measure. They came and went so quietly; it can be easy to forget, these years later, that they are still out there. (Although, if my favorite Portland indie video store, Movie Madness, is to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt, The Evening Star is out of print on DVD, meaning there is just that much less “there” out there.)
Texasville (1990) and The Evening Star (1996) took 19 years and 13 years respectively to reach the screen largely because they were based on book sequels that didn’t come out until many years after the movies. In terms of their journey from the page to the screen, each of them arrived in a shorter amount of time then it took the first films (The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment) to achieve their adaptation from the literary to the celluloid medium.
For Texasville, the task was aided by the return of the co-writer/director of the first film, Peter Bogdanovich, as well as the key cast members who were still left alive at the end of The Last Picture Show. The Evening Star marked the directorial debut of an author famous in another medium - playwright Robert Harling - who is best known for penning Steel Magnolias (the play and screenplay), as well as adapting The First Wives’ Club into a surprise hit for Paramount, in the fall of '96, mere months before the Christmas Day release of The Evening Star. In a case of parallelism that suggests to me the powers that be were hoping to catch lightning in a bottle again, Harling’s novice status mirrors television writer and producer James L. Brooks’ first trip to the director’s chair in 1983 with Terms of Endearment. That won Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Screenplay Adaptation and wound up pulling in over $100 million. The Evening Star grossed only about a tenth of what its predecessor did and has a single Golden Globe nomination in its corner.
Before I go any further with individual film analysis, it must be noted that, though the stories told in Texasville and The Evening Star continue the stories told in previous films, and each come to a fairly satisfactory stopping point, both are based on books that are part of a much larger community. Author Larry McMurtry has won the Pulitzer (for Lonesome Dove) and the Oscar (for Brokeback Mountain) among his many achievements and has seen the majority of his novels turned into either theatrical or television movies.
Chapter Two could focus on him solely for a quarter, as his output includes no less than four different series containing at least four parts. The storyline begun in The Last Picture Show in 1966 continued for 43 years and four more books (of which Texasville was only the second). Terms of Endearment and The Evening Star are the fourth and sixth/final installments in a 22-year journey that began in part by focusing on a character, Patsy Carpenter, who is important in both films, but not the lead character.
A final caveat: I have read none of McMurtry’s work so any observations of mine about what the films accomplish or don’t in no way reflect an implicit approval or disappointment with how the book was adapted or even the extent to which changes were necessarily made. (I am aware, for instance, that Jack Nicholson’s character was created for the films, and enjoy him, but cannot say if I would prefer the lack of him in the book.)
Both films have as their major theme the passage of time and the effect that simply putting forth and surviving day-to day living among family and friends, in particular social and economic climates in large and small Texas towns alike in the 1980s and ‘90s, can have on one’s physical and mental well-being. In this respect, both stories are well-served by having actors reprise their roles from the first film, to be able to compare youth with middle age (the cast of Texasville) and middle age with old age (Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson in The Evening Star). The plot, occupations, and actions of the characters, in a sense, do not matter. These are character studies.
What complicates things is that both films are extremely plot-heavy, particularly in regards to the sexual congress of the characters. At times in Texasville, I thought I might need a scorecard to keep track of who was bangin’ whom or had knocked whom up. Both of the plots are in fact, glorified soap operas, with Texasville reminiscent at times of the underbelly of the glitzy 1980s nighttime soaps like Dallas or Falcon Crest and The Evening Star best understood as a slightly ribald embroidered tablecloth covering a daytime soap.
(A brief aside: to pursue this line of thinking one step further, perhaps the most insightful criticism I can offer of The Evening Star is that it is the kind of film that used to play a lot on Saturday or Sunday afternoons on your local television affiliate if no major sporting events had been scheduled. Or perhaps a last-minute replacement if said event had been cancelled. It is not to be confused with one that would garner repeated play, usually a B-grade level action flick, when those existed, and if you just waited long enough, you could catch it again. The likes of The Evening Star would come on and if it was your cup of tea, it could catch your interest for an hour or two, but you would have total amnesia upon its completion.)
I’ll start by focusing on The Evening Star, not because I think it is the lesser of the two, but because it has more in common tonally with Terms of Endearment than Texasville does with The Last Picture Show, and this makes it a little easier for me to talk about. The two former films are both tragic-comedies, or serio-comic tales, perhaps even dramedies (though I tend of think of TV shows like Hooperman or The Days & Nights of Molly Dodd when I say that.) Both films aspire to be tearjerkers with laughs, pile most of the laughing in the first half and save the jerkin’ for the second half.
Like all “good” sequels should, The Evening Star wants to give the audience more, but it misjudges the ratio, squanders most of the laughs, and ups the tragedy to maudlin proportions, resulting in a lot of sex in the first half and in a stroke and three deaths in the final hour. How does Brooks succeed (I believe he does) where Harling fails, when dealing with very similar material? An even more accurate question would be what separates the conventionality of Harling’s screenplay, which seems very sitcomish at times and overstuffed in the final act, from the writing of Brooks and subsequently, what delineates a great Brooks film (Endearment, Broadcast News) from a mixed bag (I’ll Do Anything, As Good As It Gets) from a perplexing misfire (Spanglish, How Do You Know). And yes, I realize I have charted the arc of his directing career in that last sentence.
There is some mystery as far is this concerned. Coming from a background in television, it would seem natural for Brooks to favor conventional sitcom rhythms and clichéd sentiment and characters who have oversized quirks or a semblance of psychological depth, but never both. And at times he does. But paying close attention to something like Terms of Endearment can be a little unsettling. It walks like a crowd-pleaser and talks like a crowd-pleaser, but in its underlying rhythms, the way it captures how 25 years ago is now today, and your wedding night has been buried in a move to the Midwest and three children under the age of 10, it always registers as more off-kilter than you expect, like the sprung rhythms and long takes and deadpan humor of his friend and sometimes collaborator Albert Brooks. Or like life itself, I suppose.
Harling’s narrative is filled with herky-jerky plotting (characters important in the first half drop out of sight later on), an incongruous mix of physical humor, insults, and tears, and navel-gazing for nostalgia itself. The chief project of MacLaine’s character, Aurora Greenway, in the story, is to assemble her mountain of photos and clippings into yearbooks - which registers as nostalgia for the first film, and only serves to remind the viewer of how much better it was. Nicholson’s eight-minute appearance late in the film is a prime example/offender. It injects the storyline with a stand-alone actors’ tango, and lets the pair recreate the driving the car along the beach scene from Terms of Endearment, but Nicholson only has time to register as Jack, not Garrett Breedlove, particularly at one moment where he raises his eyebrows and laughs his incredulous laugh after a one-liner.
Harling also badly handles the final 15 mins in which eight years roll by like a series of Auld Lang Synes, signaled by the successive appearance of a new scrapbook, for each year. The passage of time feels out of joint, as if several hundred pages at the end of a book needed to be raced through, and the final two scenes, which are supposed to be the culmination of the heart tugging and life goes on vibe, bring the film to a lackluster close.
Watching The Last Picture Show and Texasville back to back is a jarring experience. The former is in heartbreaking black and white, the latter in gentle color. The former is a tragedy with some comic undertones. The latter is a comedy with bittersweet overtones. The Last Picture Show is set in the small town dead-end nowheresville of Anarene, TX in 1951-1952, but is really timeless in the way it evokes not small town life per se, but the way the movies capture small town life. The lingering opening shot, where the camera tracks down an impossibly dusty road, on which whipping fall winds send dust clouds and leaves sputtering and jittering, encapsulates the claustrophobia of Anarene, but also the air of unreality, as if no place could feel so ridiculously desolate and isolated except at the movies.
Texasville is set in the summer of 1984, 30 years + from the post high-school events of the first film, with an opening radio newscast that sets the larger backdrop for the story to unfold. Without any overt or easy “80s references” and without being all that political, Bogdanovich effectively captures the economic and moral malaise that has settled in across America as Reagan and Bush hurtle towards their landslide re-election.
The film opens on the sight of a lonely satellite dish pointing off with a shrug to the skies and then slowly pans left to reveal Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), former football "star," homecoming king, and golden boy, with pistol in hand taking drunken pot shots at his dog’s absurdly oversized doghouse, from the comfort of his hot tub. Duane has a crumbling marriage, crumbled financial fortunes ($12 million in debts) and frayed family connections (he finds his teenage son is his greatest competition for the ladies in town). And this is all before his high school sweetheart, homecoming queen turned famous actress Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd) returns to town following the death of her son and parents. Texasville follows their relationship, that of Jacy’s with Duane’s wife Karla (Annie Potts), and the climate of the town in general as it prepares to celebrate it’s centennial over Labor Day.
Like many elements of the past in Texasville, the death of Jacy’s son lingers there in the air, but isn’t discussed and dissected. Texasville is ultimately about healing and moving on from the past, but I don’t want to oversell the pathos. Texasville is more frequently than not bawdy, vulgar, larger than life and, like the apple that Jacy bites into as she and Duane do an Adam and Eve skit at the centennial, pretty damn sweet.
The riddle at the heart of the movie is exactly what kind of lothario Duane is. I have no doubt that he may have once been the kind to juggle several ladies on the sly, but he now seems so befuddled by his plummeting financial/social status and so overwhelmed with the pace of his existence, as to be beyond sex. Bridges plays Duane as a bemused outsider and observer to the escalating sexual shenanigans of his family and friends, almost as if he is the asexual Jughead from the old Archie comics. This disconnect between the way everyone treats him and who he appears to be is jarring, but it feels natural. Texasville is seen from his POV and it makes sense that he would be, if not the hero, no villain either.
As I alluded to earlier, there are a lot of incidents in Texasville, many of them entertaining, but not much of a plot. The film does not need one. As it ambles along following its frequently oversized characters, with their lusts, and their shotguns, and their needs, it doesn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular, until it arrives at a climax where a fractured group must unexpectedly coalesce on the spur of the moment and in which friendship and love actually do save the day, clichés be damned.
Seeing the actors from The Last Picture Show older and (sometimes) wiser is both a kick and a little sad. Among the newcomers, Potts is a revelation with a brassy, bluesy performance the likes of which her career has never seen since. Bogdanovich seems older and wiser too, for his part, as if in reading Texasville he was delighted to see where the characters had gotten off to and couldn’t wait to share the experience. Texasville is a small delight, but since the film is all about recognizing such things wherever they may be, it seems appropriate the art should mirror its message.
Next time: Come wander down Satan’s Alley and take a cinematic trip through Hell as Chapter Two begins to take on the most notorious sequels of all time.