Milk Money (1994) + I.Q. (1994) – DVDs

MILK MONEY
*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris, Michael Patrick Carter
screenplay by John Mattson
directed by Richard Benjamin

I.Q.
**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau, Charles Durning
screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw The first preteen sex comedy I’ve ever seen, Richard Benjamin’s inexplicable Milk Money is a fascinating example of a movie that was never a good idea brought to life in a presentation that is every bit as misguided as its appalling premise would suggest. Melanie Griffith is a hooker who flashes her goodies for a bag of change collected by a trio of pre-pubescent youngsters who seem to live in 1994 but act like they’re from 1950. They’ve idealized The City in an impossibly provincial “aw shucks” country-mouse sort of way, proclaiming it the place where anything can happen and, more importantly, anything can be bought. It’s stupid, but at least its naivety is echoed in the way they earn their cash, the cool “Fonzie” kid selling a brief turn with his leather jacket for a handful of change. I’m not certain what freakish netherworld Benjamin and writer John Mattson (responsible for this and two Free Willy sequels) dragged themselves out of, but Milk Money is a product of the same kind of autumnal bullshit-spring from which wells magnificent falderal like The Majestic.

Melanie Griffith’s been in a couple of good films (Night Moves, Another Day in Paradise) and played a few hookers (Cherry 2000, Body Double), but mostly, she’s an outsized distraction with a Betsy-Wetsy voice who likes to show her abundant posterior whenever possible. Not an exhibitionist so much as self-aware, Griffith’s “V” character (Thomas Pynchon roils uncomfortably at the weird connection–hell, that mini-series about lizard chicks roils uncomfortably) saunters down the street to the strains of Randy Newman’s “I Love to See You Smile” (“I was born to make you happy”) in a suggestion of biological determinism–that women were born to be whores–borne out in the end of that scene where two prepubescent sirens, gripping ice cream cones, comment admiringly on how “very, very bad” V is. Pedophilia, ain’t it a gas? Better yet, adorable Frank (Michael Patrick Carter), desperately in need of a new mom to replace his tragically martyred one, hatches a plot to unite V with absent-minded professor Tom (Ed Harris).

The film is a feel-good family comedy about streetwalkers and children wanting sex, a movie set somewhere between 1950 and 1994 with characters so stupid they’re timeless. And yet, Milk Money isn’t entirely clueless about stuff for all the evidence to the contrary–it indulges in contrivances like vultures indulge in dead things, devouring a horse’s portion of cinematic carrion (mansions on a grammar school teacher’s salary, meet-cutes, adorable matchmaking moppets), gulping it down in toxic doses and remaining, somehow, a film that got major studio distribution and now a major studio DVD release. How something like that happens, and how a filmmaker as maybe subversive (but more likely dafter than a drunken monkey) as Benjamin continues to make films, is a phenomenon that by the fact of itself speaks to the idea that there’s something attractively seditious about the whole mess. A scene in which Frank brings the whore to sex class as the subject of a show-and-tell (“This is a woman… These are her breasts”) is maybe the most astonishing thing that I’ve ever seen in an uplifting mainstream family comedy. This includes Love Potion #9‘s ode to gang rape.

Also released in 1994 and also about the child (well, relative) of a dorky genius (Meg Ryan, playing Einstein’s (Walter Matthau) niece) who finds love in the blue-collar end of the public pool, Fred Schepisi’s I.Q. is, too, a light-hearted fantasy, but one that, unlike Milk Money, is congenial and largely inoffensive. After Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and The Devil‘s Playground, however, that the director is now best known as a shepherd of congenial and largely inoffensive garbage is almost as tragic as Benjamin’s continued employment. Ryan is in full-bore cute mode here, incapable of using a colour wheel in an opening scene, which brands her as a freakish non-female–as succinct a distillation of her career up to In the Cut as any, I guess: an inhuman archon of an impossible idealization of perky asexuality. And she falls in love with Zen car mechanic Ed (Tim Robbins).

The typical Ryan relationship comedy, with a meet-cute structured a little around e.e. cummings’s “she being brand” and continuing through busting her relationship with stuffy James (Stephen Fry), all of it tied to a rather interesting, truth be told, unifying trope of the theory of relativity, I.Q. is unbearably cutesy, seeing Einstein as he’s most often seen–as a cuddly freak. Echoes of Ryan, again, as her cuddly freakism is ratcheted up to dangerous levels: the curious, duck-walking, mule-stubborn, birdlike aspect of her persona, front and centre and enough to make you want to hit her with something blunt. The picture casts Einstein in the Frank-from-Milk-Money matchmaker role of preternaturally precocious naïf with love in mind for his incurably distracted relation. A description of Ryan’s soon-to-be-jettisoned fiancé as an experimental psychologist obsessed with rodent behaviour has weird echoes of Robbins’s recent turn as the same in Human Nature, and a supporting cast including Tony Shalhoub, Frank Whaley, Lou Jacobi, and Charles Durning gives the piece a depth that’s as pleasing as it is illusory. It’s not a good movie, but in a different way from Milk Money. It’s bad in the way, in fact, of a film that seems a lot like a good movie until you accidentally think about it for just one second (the weird thing about progeny, the weird Cyrano De Bergerac thing that echoes Schepisi’s Roxanne, and so on). Best not to even engage in an exercise so predestined to cause disillusionment.

THE DVDs
The picture, however, looks great, with Schepisi’s long-time DP Ian Baker providing the best-looking visuals with the director since their work together on the underestimated The Russia House, a visual beauty reproduced with some level of workmanlike faithfulness by Paramount DVD’s 2.35:1 anamorphic video transfer. Colours are deep, separation is sharp, and edge enhancement, noticeable, isn’t distracting. A shot of cherry trees in bloom, especially, demonstrates a level of minute detail that impresses for the demonstration of the format’s capabilities as well as for Schepisi/Baker’s communal eye. The Dolby 5.1 audio mix is mostly a waste, as it tends to be with dialogue-driven films: rain and orchestral soundtracks being, as they always are again, the chief beneficiaries in productions such as these.

Milk Money, dating from the same time and receiving a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer from the same studio, looks a lot worse: grain abounds in second-unit photography, and there’s more edge enhancement–both products, more than likely, of the negative, further cementing of the suspicion that Benjamin is well and truly hopeless. There are no special features to speak of on either disc and none would help either film for good or ill.

• Milk Money
  108 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
• I.Q.
  95 minutes; PG; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount