Assignment: Review a Movie of Interest to College Students

Assignment: Review a movie of interest to college students. Choose something available for rental or purchase on videocassette or DVD. Make a recommendation, positive or negative.

One Fine Romance by Leslie Kelly

Released in 1987, long available on video and now on DVD, Roxanne is an easy movie to miss at your local video store. To find it, you may have to hunt for it far from the “new release” section, deep in the middle of the Comedy section, probably at the bottom of the Steve Martin rack. But hunt for it you should. For if you miss this movie, you’re really missing something.

For one thing, you’re missing a warm, funny, old-fashioned love story updated and given all sorts of hilarious twists by writer-producer Martin. If you were awake in high school English class, you may recognize that Roxanne is based on that version of the eternal triangle dramatized in Cyrano de Bergerac. Martin plays C. D. Bales (get those initials?), small town fire chief and possessor of one large nose. No, it’s more than large. As one character exclaims, “It’s big! I mean it’s really big! It’s huge!” C. D. falls in love with the beautiful Roxanne Kowalski (Daryl Hannah), graduate student astronomer in town for the summer, but she falls for C. D.’s blindingly handsome, inarticulate assistant Chris (Rick Rossovich), just arrived to help C. D. train his troop of volunteer fire fighters. Believing himself ugly, unwilling to express his love, C. D. finds himself approached first by Roxanne to help her meet Chris and then by Chris to arrange a meeting with Roxanne.

All of the plot complications and most of the laughs come from jokes involving C. D.’s nose and from his attempts to help Chris win Roxanne’s heart. Nose insults, slamming doors, and some trouble drinking wine alternate with C. D.’s increasingly hilarious schemes to give Chris the wit and charm Roxanne desires in her lover. What she really wants, of course, is the mind of one man and the body of the other. But three into two won’t go. Not when C. D. coaches Chris what to say, not when he writes Chris’s letters, not even when he tries to communicate the right words of love to Chris through an earphone hidden by a hunter’s hat with the earflaps pulled down. Not until C. D. stands in for Chris during the funniest balcony scene you’ll ever see does Roxanne surrender and Chris call out, “She wants us!”

But more is going on here than a wacky love story that takes its comic energies from two flawed suitors and one heroine who doesn’t know what she really wants in a man. Early in the movie, C. D. walks out of a café, stops before a newspaper vending box, drops in a coin, pulls out the paper, begins to read, cries out in alarm, reaches for another coin, drops it in the box and returns the paper. Through this small episode the movie tells us that Roxanne inhabits a different world from the real world of woe we read about in the papers. If you miss Roxanne, you’ll miss a magic world of romance, a world of real people but with its own laws of comic joy and poetic justice, where things turn out as happily as they should and as we wish they would in our far different world.

The setting, supposedly ski-country Nelson, Washington, but actually British Columbia, is a mountain-sheltered contemporary romantic retreat, everyone’s dream of an idyllic community. There is no pollution, no poverty, no crime, endless leisure, and only a few insensitive types in town on vacation, easily bested by C. D.’s wit and fencing skills with a racquetball racket. Except for C. D.s friend and café owner Dixie (Shelley Duvall), the only characters who do any work are the volunteer fire fighters. Led by whimsically sly and subversive Michael J. Pollard, these good-hearted bumblers, who can’t even coax a cat out of a tree, recall the gentlest of Shakespeare’s clowns and fools. Fumbling with their equipment, falling over one another, blown over by hoses, hoisted on fountains of water, setting themselves on fire, almost destroying their firehouse, they never will master fire fighting, it seems. That is, until the climax when, dancing a fire fighter’s ballet, they save the day.

Magical in another way is Daryl Hannah’s Roxanne. Dressed in white, her frank, open features framed by radiant hair, photographed to soften her angular figure, Hannah is at her most attractive best here. She makes it easy to believe that, as she says, she has mistaken sex for love in a past affair. Her role in the plot is to discover the difference. Prizing intelligence and wit as much as physical strength and attractiveness, Hannah’s Roxanne is a character too seldom the romantic attraction in American movies directed at young people—a woman who combines body, mind, and soul and who values that combination in her man. She may not have the mental fire and sharp wit of old-time romantic heroines like Katherine Hepburn, but Hannah is more than adequate for this role.

Most magical of all is Steven Martin’s C. D. Bales. Martin seems more relaxed here than in his earlier movies about divided or incomplete persons: The Jerk, The Man with Two Brains, and All of Me. Perhaps because he is so comfortable in his role he is able to harmonize many different forms of comedy and make them work naturally together. If you’re a fan of movie comedians through the years, you’ll see Martin pay tribute here to the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, and Buster Keaton. But he also combines wit with a dancer’s grace—in the way he fights his foes, walks on rooftops, and swings from balcony railings—so that he recalls Fred Astaire. Martin is capable of Robin Williams’ hyperkinetic action but without the sweat or hyperventilation.

So at home is he in his role that he becomes C. D. Bales, a complex human being. He never suggests that he is merely extending a Saturday Night Live sketch, making fun of another “wild and crazy guy.” Unlike so many comedians these days, Martin doesn’t punish his character with comedy. We laugh with him, not at him. The only objects of our scorn and his comic wrath are the insensitive brutes who insult his nose and threaten him with ski poles. There is real pain in his eyes from living with a nose so outrageously long (the make-up is very good, by the way). Better than anyone else, he knows the worst nose jokes that could ever be told at his expense— and he tells them. He has turned to laughter and fighting skills as his best defenses.

But what the film also shows is how a person’s greatest flaw may also become his greatest strength. C. D.’s nose saves the town, literally, since this fire fighter can smell smoke long before he or anyone else can see the flames. And living with his nose has given him the wit, sensitivity, and intelligence that eventually win Roxanne’s love. When at last she discovers that it is his words that have wooed her in balcony declarations and love letters, she speaks what in others’ mouths would be the greatest insult: “You’ve got a big nose, Charlie!” But when she utters them, they are words of acceptance, of recognition that he is loved not in spite of his flaw but because of it.

This wise, warm, funny, movie is just right for a great date-night-at-home video, for anyone who likes wit along with sight gags and slapstick, for viewers who want romance that carries us away to a magical land where real people live. Don’t miss it.