Posted by nastypup at pcp04985504pcs.benslm01.pa.comcast.net on March 20, 2004 at 15:39:41:
Posted on Sun, Mar. 21, 2004
Mr. Tenderness
Director Kevin Smith cleans up a little and delivers a poignant family movie, "Jersey Girl."
By Carrie Rickey
Inquirer Movie Critic
A decade and six films after Clerks made his reputation, and earned more than 100 times the $27,000 it cost, Kevin Smith remains a profanity-spouting fireplug of eloquence.
"Howard Stern crossed with David Mamet," in the words of one admirer.
But the Rabelais of Red Bank, N.J., has logged many miles since his days as a Yoo-hoo-swilling, Cheetos-chomping convenience-store clerk. Now 33, the bearded bard in the Green Hornet jersey is a VIP guest of the Four Seasons Philadelphia, dining on an Atkins menu of filet mignon and veggies one suite down the hall from newly deposed Disney chair Michael Eisner.
On this day in early March, Smith is touting his $40 million Jersey Girl, starring Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and some chica named Jennifer Lopez. It's a poignant comedy of love, loss and fatherhood that is a marked departure from the potty-mouthed filmmaker's entertaining juvenilia.
Curiously, for a guy accustomed to working in the cultural margins, Smith finds himself just one degree of separation from the newsmakers du jour. With a few minutes to kill, he watches in amusement as reports on the chastened Eisner, The Passion of the Christ, and the career damage sustained by splitsville sweethearts Affleck and Lopez appear on TV.
In 1999, Smith, who has made all but one of his films for Disney subsidiary Miramax, produced Clerks: The Cartoon for Disney-owned ABC-TV. Eisner canceled it after two episodes.
That same year, the Disney mogul also pressured Miramax not to distribute Smith's irreverent satire Dogma, about a religious war between fallen angels and Lucifer that's mediated by God, played by pop thrush Alanis Morissette.
"Watching CNN this morning I realized Eisner was staying here [in Philadelphia] and that he'd received a no-confidence vote from shareholders," Smith says. "I flashed back on our ill-fated Clerks cartoon and thought,'How just.' On Dogma he pooched us, too."
The practicing Catholic is similarly wry on the success of Mel Gibson's Passion: "I wish Dogma had the same problems. The people who were lambasting [Dogma] without seeing it... are the people who showed up in droves for [Passion]."
The director, whose largest audience to date is for the goofy travelogues he does as a Tonight Show regular, hasn't yet caught Gibson's opus, though he has been tapped to review it in the movie-geek monthly Film Comment. Going in, he admits to certain, shall we say, spiritual preferences.
"I like Jesus' life, I don't fetishize the death," Smith says. He's a little miffed that "now everyone's calling Him 'the Christ.' It used to be just Jesus. Jesus is your friend, your homey. The Christ is your Lord, your savior."
And about casting the entity formerly known as Bennifer, whose lesbian hit- woman romantic comedy Gigli bombed so spectacularly in August that it led to recuts and a delayed release of Jersey Girl?
"Zero regrets," says Smith, who appears not to be blowing smoke beyond his customary exhalations of Marlboro Lights. "The Bennifer setbacks were just curveballs."
"Even though she's in it for only the first 15 minutes, Jen is the linchpin of the movie," he says. The couple were newly in love at the time of the shoot and, thanks to that, "we got a stronger Ben than we would otherwise have gotten. Thanks to Jen, Raquel is great," he says, referring to 7-year-old Raquel Castro, who plays Lopez's daughter and could be the actress' Mini-Me.
Smith cast the unknown Affleck in his 1995 stinker Mallrats and atoned for it by giving him his career-making role in 1997's Chasing Amy, the actor's first lesbian romantic comedy. Then he helped Affleck and buddy Matt Damon shop their Good Will Hunting script to Miramax, a movie that won the writer-actors an Oscar for their screenplay.
While Affleck became a star of blockbusters such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, Smith remained in the eddies with modestly budgeted adolescent comedies such as Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. By 2001, both were emotionally and professionally played out. They hoped a mature family comedy might reinvigorate them.
It was time for the filmmaker, husband and father of daughter Harley Quinn, now almost 4, to go beyond his Gen-X fan base. It was time for the actor, then on the brink of marriage, to abandon the bangs and clangs of action films for more subtle chords. Neither expected the army of paparazzi.
It's funny, reflects Smith, who shot much of Jersey Girl in Philadelphia and Paulsboro, Gloucester County, in August and September 2002. "While we were here in town, the Bennifer fever pitch began, but the city of Philadelphia was incredibly polite."
Affleck reported at the time that he and Lopez strolled LOVE Park and South Street without being mobbed. And Smith remains so high on the quality of the local crew base that he could flack for the Greater Philadelphia Film Office.
Alas, by the time the production moved to New York for three days of shooting exteriors, Lopez was sporting that 6.1-carat pink diamond. "It was insane," Smith says. "Tabloid photographers everywhere. Even when Ben dated Gwyneth [Paltrow], it wasn't like this."
When Gigli hit the screens last summer, the Bennifer backlash began. The media outlets that hyped the matinee idol and his singer/actress/model/mogul fiancee suddenly judged the couple "dangerously overexposed." In Smith's estimation, it was "the classic case of the media building 'em up in order to knock 'em down."
But even before the backlash, the director says, the Jersey Girl scenes featuring their characters' courtship and wedding tested poorly with audiences.
"Our first screening was in New Jersey, the cradle of civilization," recalls Highlands-born Smith, nonplussed that "Jerseyans didn't give it up for us." The movie, first slated for a November 2003 release, was reedited, and the couple's few remaining sequences reveal a chemistry conspicuously absent in Gigli.
Unfortunately for Smith's domestic relations, virtually all the scenes featuring his Jen - Smith's wife, actress Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, who plays Affleck's assistant - were discarded. "My Jen understands why her performance got lost on the cutting-room floor." The work of George Carlin, as Affleck's father, and Liv Tyler, as a video-store clerk (what else?) who helps heal Affleck's grieving heart, is particularly fine.
Smith's movie about fatherhood's being more important than career - in terms of both Carlin's relationship to Affleck and Affleck's to Castro - arrives in theaters at a vulnerable time in his life. In June, as he was tweaking Jersey Girl, Smith arranged a family reunion in Philadelphia to coincide with a comic-book convention he attended. After a steak dinner with his children and grandchildren, Smith's father, Donald, 66 and a diabetic, took ill. He died en route to the hospital.
"If you're going to lose your father, it's the best possible way. We had the man's last supper," says a misty Smith, without the customary comic bravado. Smith worries whether he somehow prophesied the death of his dad by making a movie about the death of a loved one.
As he reflects on life since he hit the Clerks jackpot 10 years ago, Smith can't avoid being superstitious. "I've had a great decade, but I keep wondering, 'Where's the bill?' I keep expecting to wake up at the counter of Quick Stop," the convenience store featured in Clerks.
Write it off as the garden-variety stage fright all filmmakers experience before their movie debuts, worrying that it will flop and they'll never work again.
There are two reasons Smith needn't sweat. First, Jersey Girl is a freakin' fine movie, as Carlin's character might say, with a key modification in language.
And second, Smith is already in preproduction on The Green Hornet, based on the character created by Fran Striker and George Trendle for a 1936 radio serial. Smith is both writing and directing the movie, his first foray into mega-budget territory.
His only worry should be to cast someone as offbeat and spot-on as Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man.