You Can Yell Bravo If You Want
Adultery movies were less elusive when they were called erotic thrillers and the culture at large was less bawdy. They were basically big splashy musicals with airplanes. Oh wait, that’s what Mo Rocca said about Top Gun. Which is an erotic thriller in every stretch of its blood-pumping muscles, so that account holds up.
The internet came all over Adrian Lyne’s face which is why he hasn’t shown it since. I snuck into Unfaithful after watching the first Spider-Man on opening day; that’s how long ago Diane Lane sat on that train, feeling bad about Richard Gere and his bulked-up bathtub-scene self, Tangerine Dream decidedly not playing overhead. Lyne’s BOW does not feel transgressive anymore, not because moviesex has been improved upon (it’s forever unfixable), or because cheating is so much more protean, but because cheating is comedy now. Sexting is nearing its post-ironic phase but ever since we moved our whole lives online it’s gotten pretty hard to do a straight-faced movie about married people slipping around in plain sight.
Closer, that golden snitch of perfect dialogue, was famous at the time for its use of chatroom life, Jude Law cockteasing Clive Owen the same way people had already been doing it for a decade. Movies really are way behind everything all the time, but even Closer, in its wider conceits, seems as distant now as Brief Encounter probably was to anyone who absorbed Fatal Attraction in all its fecund original scent.
So that’s what happened to Adrian Lyne and the erotic thriller. Now I want to talk about The Secret Lives Of Dentists, which, if your soul has no sense of humor or your sense of humor has no soul, is just another glutty indie from the turn of the century, when you could go to the Tower in Sacramento, which is where I saw movies then, and see something decent every single weekend.
The Secret Lives Of Dentists is a seriopoetic piece that happens to be about adultery, made by some guy named Alan Rudolph who doesn’t even have his own prompt in the IMDB search field. This does not explain why the movie looks so much like a damn painting most of the time, backed in humid light that’s more conjectural than real.
Hope Davis, in her pre-Hillary Clinton age, is married to Campbell Scott, about whom I could do a whole IMDB Files, how he went from wearing a Mudhoney shirt in Singles to being Peter Parker’s dad. He’s the best-looking indie-staple ever.
They are both dentists. Actually only one of them has a secret life, but no matter.
The following is one of my favorite opening v/o usages ever:
“Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keep teeth clean. A fire that burns away everything else, hair and skin, even bones, leaves your teeth dazzling. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in baby bottles, sour balls, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline…sand in your bread—if you were in the Roman army. Teeth are important.”
Davis cuckolds Scott. But you don’t see the infidelity or even the third party; it’s the greatest mystery ever written on the back of someone’s head. Reasoning his way through a complicated situation, Scott makes a disgruntled patient into an imaginary friend. Denis Leary occupies this role; so basically pretending Denis Leary doesn’t actually exist isn’t something only I do.
Watching Davis be in an opera the night he finds out (these disaffected bourgeois literary women always bury themselves in community theatre; you’d think every iteration of Hedda Gabler was abolished long ago, except the one.) Scott says to one of their daughters, “you can yell bravo if you want”. This is the same daughter who points out that “Mommy’s in the program: ‘Dana Hurst, as one of the virgins.’ ” This is so funny because it’s so sad, and funnier because Scott no doubt remembers Mr. Brown’s analysis of Like A Virgin (“it hurts, it HURTS her”).
Scott’s character is a classical study in composure, in maintaining epic calm while hallucinating Denis Leary, sexualizing Robin Tunney, and advising three kids through a whirlwind round-the-clock virus, INPO. Scott’s character is an avoider, like most men turn into when they suspect they’re being cheated on. The Secret Lives Of Dentists is great not just for showing that male perspective (there obviously being not enough movies about the male perspective) but for showing why that male perspective is so lame. We’ll choke on our own bravado before swallowing the reality that someone might be more desirable than us; women just want to choke the one we’re cheating with. Both erotic and thrilling, it is an infinitely smarter way to transact business.
