Autumn in New York
In his memoir entitled Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne describes how his original hard-hitting script about the life of ill-fated TV reporter Jessica Savitch became, through a series of artistic compromises and ill-conceived executive decisions, the lame-brained romantic comedy Up Close and Personal. They haven’t written a book yet about how director Joan Chen’s Autumn in New York was reduced to the piece of watered-down drivel it is now, but I suspect it’s a pretty interesting story, too.
Middle-aged womanizer and restaurateur Will Keane (Richard Gere) falls in love with Charlotte (Winona Ryder), a 20-something fashion designer who is equal parts winsome and coy. The two can’t possibly have a future together: no woman has ever managed to tie Will down, not even Charlotte’s mother, with whom Will once had a brief romance. Furthermore, Charlotte, it turns out, is dying; the doctors give her about a year before her heart finally fails. And yet the two stay together, talking and bantering cutely back and forth across the generation gap pretty much right up to the end.
Sex is at the heart of nearly every scene in Autumn in New York, but nobody who helped make this film has the guts to admit it. In the 70s, American moviemakers weren’t afraid to treat sex as a serious subject. (Gere himself appeared in the then ground-breaking Looking for Mr. Goodbar.) But here the two lovers act like brother and sister. No, not even that: they act like two co-workers who have amiably decided to share the same cubicle for a few days.
I think about what Bertolucci could have done with this movie, and I want to weep.
by Derek Neff