With COLD HEAVEN, an often incoherent adaptation of Brian Moore's novel, director Nicholas Roeg proves that even when he's boring he can still be interesting.
Marie Davenport (Theresa Russell), the pampered wife of a successful doctor, Alex (Mark Harmon), has chosen a Mexican vacation to tell her husband she's leaving him for one of his medical colleagues, Daniel Corvin (James Russo). Before she can break the news, Alex is hit by a boat while swimming,
crushing his skull and apparently killing him. The next day, when Alex's body disappears from the local morgue, Marie suspects that he may not have been dead in the first place. But that doesn't stop her from continuing on to a rendezvous with Corvin at the resort where much of the action takes
place.
There, while awaiting Corvin, Marie is surprised to find Alex staying at the same hotel--ashen, oozing from his head wound and raving about plots against his life. Taking a walk on the grounds of a nearby mission, Marie has a vision of a young girl rising from a creek at the bottom of a seaside
cliff. She is driven to reveal this apparition to the local monsignor (Richard Bradford) and urges him to construct a shrine to the Virgin Mary at the creek. The monsignor dismisses Marie's claims, but the story catches the interest of a young priest (Will Patton) after a nun (Talia Shire) tells
him that she had dreamed of Marie and her vision long before Marie's arrival at the mission.
The situation at the resort becomes exceedingly awkward with the arrival of Corvin, who has left his own wife (Julie Carmen) to be with Marie and finds himself examining Alex and checking him into a hospital. Though Marie never tells Alex of her affair with Corvin, Alex puts two and two together
and, after being released from the hospital, decides to make a quiet exit from Marie's life. Returning with the nun to the site of her vision, Marie has her own revelation about what she must do and races back to the hotel, into Alex's arms.
Nothing ever really clicks in COLD HEAVEN, a weird cross-mixture of genres that dips and whizzes from Hitchcockian suspense to religious inspirational to romantic melodrama to Edgar Allen Poe and beyond. It doesn't help that Roeg's approach to narrative remains as fuzzy as ever. For the longest
time, it's never clear whether Marie actually planned with Corvin to kill Alex or just to leave him. Alex's reappearance is similarly treated in such a way that it's not clear, at first, whether he actually has reappeared or is just a figment of Marie's feverish imagination. The exact nature of
Marie's vision and precisely why it makes such an impact on her is never quite clear either, although Marie does reveal that she was an extremely devout girl who renounced God following the untimely death of her beloved mother.
As COLD HEAVEN goes on Roeg seems uninterested in or unable to tie up his three major plots compellingly; instead he lets them run awkwardly on parallel tracks to the film's perfunctory end. Yet what Roeg has consistently managed with authority throughout his career--or at least since 1970's
PERFORMANCE--is to give cinematic shape to the psychological disintegration, amid the violent chaos of modern life, of his protagonists. Here, if nothing else, he brings conviction and clarity to Maria's plight as a lapsed Catholic whose paralyzing guilt over her adultery seems to drive her to
religious mania.
Russell's anxious vacuity as an actress, which has elsewhere garnered her a reputation as perhaps the world's greatest bad actress, becomes an asset in Roeg's films. She's like some sort of caged animal here, perpetually on the edge of panic while trapped in an infernal triangle between two
inadequate men, one representing domesticity so dreary that he seems more lively as a "dead" man than he did when he was "alive," and the other representing destructive, self-absorbed lust. Completing the triangle is the power of the Divinity, who has chosen her, like a deranged Mary Magdalene, to
deliver the Word to the doubting priests.
It never makes much sense. But, at its best, COLD HEAVEN is anything but run-of-the-mill. When it's working, it's bizarre, bewildering, infuriating and frequently inexplicable, but it's also a fascinating psycho-puzzle of a movie that is silly as often as it is sublime. Roeg and Russell may never
appear on the Oscar stage together hoisting twin statuettes; however, it's all but impossible to imagine what modern cinema would be without them. (Violence, adult situations, nudity, profanity.) leave a comment
