Tadpole; A Delicate Balance
There might never have been a genre of teen sex comedy if the 1978 success of National Lampoon's Animal House had not given big-screen, mainstream sanction to fratboy vulgarity, but at least its context was appropriate. (And Otter's devil/angel moral battle was recognizable, thus hilarious.) But Tadpole tries to pass off a stink bomb as a character study. Prep-school genius Oscar (Aaron Stanford) comes home to his father's luxury New York apartment for Thanksgiving break, intending to seduce his stepmother Eve (Weaver) between reading chapters of Candide. His big head and little head don't battle conscience for even a nanosecond.
Despite its high-tone pretense, Tadpole simply diverts the currently proliferating teen sex comedy away from the exuberance of youth?and the liberating honesty of juvenile bad taste?toward the earlier, less defensible, formerly moribund genre of Broadway's adult boulevard comedy. It's a smarmy, self-satisfied version of what used to be called "Tired Businessman's Theater." Here, it takes the form of a Sundance No-Brainer; an indie movie, trendily and cheaply shot on video (this is another deplorable InDigEnt presentation), and calculated to get dirty laughs and big box office. Porky's IX.
Winick thinks he's elevating this craven premise by having Oscar speak French to a waiter at Boulud and quote Voltaire. Aaron Stanford's nerd-slim body and dark-circled eyes make him a provocative choice for this bookish, horny role, but he comes off smug, lacking charm or naivete. His fixation on older women?especially their hands?is Eric Rohmer shtick but not taken to Rohmer's logical, philosophical conclusion. Instead of confronting Oscar's selfishness and manipulation of others' emotions, Winick wants audiences to enjoy Oscar's erotic fumblings, his snide disregard for other people's personal and social arrangements. This well-heeled world of spiritually unconscious WASPs revolves around Oscar's (perhaps Winick's) solipsism. It isn't accidental that Tadpole is punctuated by white-on-black intertitles of Voltaire quotations ("Love shows no signs that cannot be mistaken," "It is not enough to conquer, one must know how to seduce"). These self-aggrandizing affectations ape Woody Allen's intertitle quotes of e.e. cummings in the also morally obtuse Hannah and Her Sisters.
Twerpy but less forthright?and less humane?than Toback's Harvard Man alter-ego, Oscar (nickname Tadpole) is not a believable kid so much as the filmmaker's self-flattering view of his own youth and precociousness. Oscar clearly represents nothing more than Winick's appropriation of the teen sex comedy to glorify his unchecked egotism. He shares the boulevard comedy's purpose: to slake errant emotions and class-based guilt. Winick also derives his younger-man/older-woman premise from The Graduate. Weaver and Bebe Neuwirth (who plays Diane, Eve's lecherous best friend, and Oscar's first conquest) both seem to be working under the delusion that they're halving and updating Mrs. Robinson. But the only real shock in Tadpole is that it demonstrates the complexity and nuance in Anne Bancroft's now-mythic characterization and the sense in Mike Nichols' film (which always seemed glibly exploitative of 60s cultural stereotypes). The limited social sense in Tadpole is an unmasterful example of topical satire.
Winick's french-fried Manhattan turns crisp only when Oscar chases down Diane while she's gossiping with a group of ladies at Payard. They all know about the jailbait assignation and want their turn at Oscar's young flesh (even handing him their business cards). But it rings false; Winick doesn't explore the weakness within these women. He lets Neuwirth's over-practiced moves as a man-eater (by now camp and dubious) set the terms of his older-female psychology. It's a cheat?and eventually unflattering?to have these women so sexually appealing in this comic context. (Winick's big on cleavage but light on Oedipus.) Unthinking viewers will see this as a sign that Oscar's fate is biologically predetermined?he can't help himself. But Winick's dishonesty shows in his inability to look with equal fascination at Oscar as a sexual object. To not admit?or consider?the sexuality in youth (what might dangerously attract the tableful of female pedophiles) is being disingenuous about sex. By not addressing female sexual appetite (by keeping it hidden), Winick privileges the smut of boulevard comedy, reducing women to conquests. Given that Winick teaches film at NYU, shouldn't he have thought about the psycho-political ramifications of his Playboy party joke?
Basically sexist, Tadpole is a chauvinist fable in which older women love the boy who will grow into his traditional patriarchal class role. They glom onto the inheritor of their system of privilege and indolence. That's the booger in Winick's sexy conceit. When a sex scene like Oscar and Diane's boot-knocking fades out, the action isn't elided because Winick is discreet or tasteful. He, like all smutty filmmakers, has no interest in the psychology that can be revealed through sex (that, at least, was the bravery of Toback's Harvard Man). Using violins as comic punctuation is smirky; so is the spurious moral discussion between Eve and Diane: "If you hadn't found someone who was smart and passionate about life you'd consider a 15-year-old," brags the emotionally undisturbed chickenhawk. Maybe not. Besides, Tadpole doesn't reveal what 15-year-olds risk in the adult power game, as the British Queer as Folk tv series did.
Diane's assertion to Eve ought to be, "I betrayed you once and won't do it again." Eve is right to argue Diane's permissiveness, but Winick is wrong to follow it with Eve having moments of temptation. (This, in dramatic terms, is a rotten apple.) Though Eve eventually realizes her responsibility to her husband and her stepson, Winick never provides Oscar the kind of moral clarity that won audiences to Ferris Bueller (the inheritor of Animal House entitlement) or Rushmore's Max Fischer. Plus, he never matches the funny, honest, farcical scrutiny of the Peter Chelsom-Warren Beatty Town and Country?a considerable moral comedy that lacked a Miramax/ Sundance imprimatur. Shouldn't Winick be embarrassed to indulge adolescent schwing so foolishly? Instead of privileging youth to guarantee some commercial potential, he should understand that Youth has to wait and earn a tired businessman's folly. Tadpole is The Graduate as if made by a freshman.
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Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance returns to the screen as part of Lincoln Center's American Film Theater retrospective?a revival of producer Ely Landau's ambitious project 30 years ago to preserve the great modern plays on film. A Delicate Balance, The Iceman Cometh and The Homecoming were felicitous adaptations; AFT helped make the 70s the climactic moment of American movie history.
The good use of language as language and acting as humane expression has been lost in this era of movie culture. Tadpole starts by offending sex-farce sensibility. It is unacceptable?especially at the moment?because Albee's current Broadway play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? not only invigorates theater but recalls how a theatrical form can be revived, subverted, transcended. The Goat proceeds from A Delicate Balance's middle-class family setting to become a screwball comedy about mystery?of love, lust and feelings that go beyond normal expectation and other people's recognition or approval. In A Delicate Balance, a legendary cast (Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Kate Reid, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten, Betsy Blair) execute the sharp movements (and language) that at any moment turn farce to perplexity.
It isn't enough to indict garbage like Tadpole. But Albee helps us realize where we stand now in our liberation, our license, our sexual and spiritual options. The late life lessons Agnes and Tobias (Hepburn and Scofield) learn play onscreen like rediscovered wisdom. The "Terror" this aging couple confronts when family and friends descend makes even the nuclear conflicts now favored in movies seem trivial. (And in The Goat, Albee reveals what's basic and truly terrifying in human nature.) Tony Richardson and cinematographer David Watkin compose A Delicate Balance in stark, harsh images. Even its rough look is superior to Tadpole, because it purifies one's concentration. Don't miss it?or The Goat.