The Voice of the Moon
With Roberto Benigni, Paolo Villaggio, Nadia Ottaviani, Marisa Tomasi, and Angelo Orlando.
With Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak, and L.Q. Jones.
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I don’t know how well The Voice of the Moon did in Italy, but it opened in 200 theaters, and the fact that the two lead actors, Roberto Benigni and Paolo Villaggio, are popular Italian comics undoubtedly helped draw people in. Yet we all know that Casino will take in more money–not because people will like it more (something I tend to doubt), but because it cost a lot more, and Universal wants to get its money back. People all over the world will see it because of the names connected with it–especially Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and Scorsese–and they probably won’t regard it as being “too American.” Chances are they won’t think too much about it being American at all, just as McDonald’s hamburgers aren’t perceived as American to the degree they used to be: they’re too familiar to be exotic. My guess is that the folks in Hong Kong who see Casino will care almost as little about what it says about American life–its only artistic excuse, assuming it has one–as most American fans of Hong Kong action movies care about Chinese life.
This was the gist of my demurral–and, if I’m not mistaken, Kehr’s–for most of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But once Bergman retired from filmmaking and Fellini’s work stopped getting U.S. distribution, I began wondering whether their oeuvres were getting their proper due. Bergman’s last major film, Fanny and Alexander, has to the best of my knowledge never been shown here in its five-hour version–the only version Bergman recognizes as his own, but one that was excluded from a supposedly definitive Bergman retrospective held recently in New York. The declining interest in distributing Fellini’s late work here has also been distressing.
A friend who likes this movie (and all other Scorsese movies, for that matter) tells me it’s about what money and power do to people–as if we hadn’t heard that song before. It’s certainly about what money and power have done to movies. But now that dreary and unimaginative executives are setting most of our cultural agenda, buying “style” from able courtiers like Scorsese, do we have to sit still for dreary and unimaginative movies about these deadbeats?
