"Lost in Yonkers"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister

   This week I continued my practice of trying to see all the films
that come out of Hollywood that have women directors, so I went to
see Martha Coolidge's latest effort, "Lost in Yonkers."   Just to
remind you of Coolidge's career: she started out in the '70s doing
feminist documentaries, then spent a lot of years in Hollywood
doing less than inspiring schlock that was decidedly unfeminist and
emerged, finally in 1991 to direct the very fine period study of a
young woman trying to find her way in the rural South in the 1920s,
"Rambling Rose."  This time Coolidge has taken on a Neil Simon
vehicle, "Lost in Yonkers" adapted from his Broadway play of the
same name.  It, too, is a period piece; it takes place in Yonkers
during World War II and Coolidge and company do a wonderful job of
evoking the time and place.  The only time I found myself jarred by
an anachronism was a scene in a movie theater when at the end of
the film people stood up silently and left.  In the '40s, films ran
continuously so people arrived anytime during the film and stayed
until the next showing reached the point where they'd come in.  So
there wasn't ever a mass exodus at the end of the film.  Also
people in the 1940s almost always applauded at the end of a movie,
a detail Coolidge missed here.   Besides being a period piece this,
too, is a character study of a highly dysfunctional family and the
two women at its center, Grandma and her youngest daughter Bella.
In these roles Coolidge has cast the actors who played them on
Broadway, Irene Worth and Mercedes Ruehl and you cannot imagine
them being improved upon.

    The film is narrated and seen through the eyes of two teenage
boys whose mother has died and whose father wants to go South to
try to earn money selling scrap metal to the war industries.  He
brings his sons to visit their Grandmother and to ask if they can
stay with her while he is away.  Grandma lives with her youngest
daughter, Bella, over the candy store/ice cream parlor she owns and
runs in still-bucolic Yonkers.  Grandma, a German Jewish immigrant
who has raised four children and buried two as children, is no
warm, loving bubala.  She rules the family with all the cold,
steely, emotionless, cruelty of a martinet.  Her children, with
the possible exception of Louie, a small-time gangster (played by
Richard Dreyfuss) are totally cowed by her though all but Bella
have escaped her immediate household.  Bella at 36 is virtually a
slave to her mother, working in the store, cooking for her,
treating her aches and pains.  Bella is a little slow mentally.  On
the borderline, perhaps, of being retarded, though she can read and
write and attended some high school.  She is childlike in her
enthusiasms and joys and in her sorrows.  And though her mother
rules the roost, Bella does have her ways of making things happen.
After Grandma flatly refuses to take the boys in Bella simply
ignores her and on the sheer vitality of her enthusiasm for having
her nephews with her, Grandma is, for once, overridden.

   The film is a series of vignettes of life in Grandma's house
that summer.  Through the conflicts and confrontations,
particularly those surrounding Bella's romance with Johnny, a
retarded man who works as an usher at the movie house Bella
frequents, we come to learn something of the history that turned
Grandma into the monster she has become and we see Bella ever so
gradually growing, becoming more her own person.

   In addition to the tour de force performances of Irene Worth and
Mercedes Ruehl I want to comment especially on the work of David
Strahairn who plays Johnny.  We saw him last as the sexy Cajun love
interest in "Passion Fish" and with that performance fresh in mind
the job he does here of playing a 40-year-old retarded man
ultimately frightened and overwhelmed by the idea of change seems
all the more remarkable and reminds us what a vast range of
characterization a skilled actor is capable of.

   The film is "Lost in Yonkers."  It will make you cry, it will
make you laugh, it will invite you to reflect on the human
condition.  I liked it a lot.

  For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.