Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [84]
115. RESURRECTION
(1980)
Directed by Daniel Petrie
Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino
Actors:
ELLEN BURSTYN
SAM SHEPARD
RICHARD FARNSWORTH
ROBERTS BLOSSOM
CLIFFORD DAVID
PAMELA PAYTON-WRIGHT
LANE SMITH
EVA LE GALLIENNE
LOIS SMITH
Ellen Burstyn has given many fine performances, but I have a special place in my heart for her work in Resurrection, which earned her an Academy Award nomination, her fifth following The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—which earned her the gold statue—and Same Time, Next Year. (She earned another nomination twenty years later for Requiem for a Dream.) Consider the caliber of those movies and then note that Ms. Burstyn names Resurrection as her personal favorite of all the pictures she’s made.
It was written by Lewis John Carlino, who has penned such screenplays as Seconds, The Mechanic, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and The Great Santini. (Many of those are adaptations, but this film is an original work.) It was directed by Daniel Petrie, whose many credits include such lauded TV movies as Eleanor and Franklin, Sybil, the Dollmaker, and My Name Is Bill W., and whose features range from Lifeguard to Rocket Gibraltar. When Janet Maslin reviewed Resurrection for the New York Times in 1980 she opined that “they have outshone their past work to a remarkable degree; this is a movie that really seems to have brought out the best in everyone who worked on it.”
The critics who didn’t care for Resurrection were those who couldn’t buy into its story, about a woman who is in a terrible car accident and undergoes a near-death experience. Sometime later she has an encounter with a man (Richard Farnsworth) during a trip through the desert—and shortly thereafter discovers that she has the ability to heal people through the laying on of hands.
Burstyn’s character, Edna, doesn’t question how she came to acquire this gift. (Was it her own brush with death? Did it have something to do with that man in the desert?) She bestows it willingly on others through love, but her new boyfriend (Sam Shepard) urges her to acknowledge her connection to God.
What the movie captures so well is the concept of belief—a kind of wish fulfillment that old Hollywood movies trafficked in so effortlessly. By 1980 a seemingly permanent cynicism had begun to set in, to the point where it’s very difficult to sell a modern audience on even the kind of lighthearted fantasy several generations grew up on in movies like Topper, Miracle on 34th Street, and Harvey.
Earlier movies about faith healers, like Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman, were generally concerned with commercialism and fraud. Burstyn’s character is the real thing, and that’s what sets this movie apart.
The film is beautifully designed (by Paul Sylbert) and photographed (by Mario Tosi) and flawlessly cast. One of its many other assets is the presence of the legendary stage actress and teacher Eva Le Gallienne, who was then eighty-one years old; she was so effective she earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. But in spite of a strong supporting cast, the movie rests squarely on Burstyn’s shoulders. If we don’t believe her, the whole thing collapses. As it happens, we do put our faith in her, and she is incandescent. (Incidentally, Resurrection was not a great success, and it’s difficult to find on video, but it made a deep impression on people who did see it. Burstyn told me that people talk to her about it all the time. It was remade for television in 1999 with Dana Delany in the leading role.)
116. SAFE MEN
(1998)
Directed by John Hamburg
Screenplay by John Hamburg
Actors:
SAM ROCKWELL
STEVE ZAHN
MICHAEL LERNER
HARVEY FIERSTEIN
MARK RUFFALO
JOSH PAIS
PAUL GIAMATTI
CHRISTINA KIRK
ALLEN SWIFT
I enjoyed Safe Men when I first saw it in 1998 because