Subject: REVIEW: BOGUS (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Scott Renshaw)
Date: 10 Sep 1996 18:05:58 GMT

BOGUS
                       A film review by Scott Renshaw
                        Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw

Starring:  Whoopi Goldberg, Gerard Depardieu, Haley Joel Osment.
Screenplay:  Alvin Sargent.
Director:  Norman Jewison.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

     It is a frustrating thing to watch a high concept get in the way of a
perfectly good film.  In BOGUS, there is a scene in which the Jimmy
Stewart classic HARVEY is showing on a television, and the reference makes
you suspect that someone went into a pitch meeting to describe BOGUS as
"HARVEY, but you can see the rabbit...and he's Gerard Depardieu."  BOGUS
could have been -- and should have been -- a simple story of mutual need,
and there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been a rather
good one.  Instead, poster-driven film-making has turned out yet another
promising but disappointing effort.

    BOGUS begins in Las Vegas, where 7-year-old Albert Franklin (Haley
Joel Osment) is living with his mother Lorraine (Nancy Travis), a circus
performer.  When Lorraine is killed in a car accident, Albert is left in
Lorraine's will to the care of her foster sister Harriet (Whoopi
Goldberg), whom she had not seen in many years.  Harriet, a serious-minded
businesswoman living in Newark, NJ, claims she doesn't "have a maternal
bone in (her) body," but she agrees to take Albert in when the only other
option is state care.  Still, Harriet has difficulty relating to the young
boy, who has chosen to relate instead to an imaginary friend who emerged
from a coloring book, a Frenchman called Bogus (Depardieu).

     There are a lot of things right with BOGUS, beginning with the
performances.  Whoopi Goldberg apparently decided to shake off a string of
one-note trash-talkers and turn in some of her best work in years; Harriet
is not the typical Whoopi wiseacre, although she still gets in a few
decent lines.  Instead, she is a woman dedicated to over-compensating for
a harsh childhood by becoming a more successful adult.  Shaggy-haired
Haley Joel Osment hovers just this side of precocity, doing surprisingly
little posing and emoting as the smart but lonely Albert, and he really
seems to work well with other actors.  The connection between Goldberg and
Osment develops slowly, but eventually it seems quite genuine.  And
Depardieu, who is genetically incapable of sleep-walking through a
performance, has the ideal comical demeanor for his role.

     That role, unfortunately, is the real problem with BOGUS, because
someone should have realized that its central conceit was a big mistake.
It is evident enough in the fact that Depardieu really has nothing to do
but strike an offended pose when someone doesn't believe in him or feed
Albert lines like a French TelePrompter.  Bogus is a prop, not a
character -- he is required strictly to smile benignly and to offer
advice which one would expect from a child psychologist rather than an
imaginary playmate.

     The more substantial issue from a structural standpoint is that
screenwriter Alvin Sargent never commits to whom this story is about, and
Bogus is the crutch which allows him to do it.  When Albert and Bogus are
conversing, BOGUS is about a boy in need of comfort, and that is _not_
what it should be about.  This is Harriet's story, and we should watch her
grow into an understanding of what her life is missing through her
attempts to understand what Albert's life is missing.  By attempting to
place those two stories on an equal footing, Sargent and director Norman
Jewison diminish both of them.  They also end up condescending both to
Harriet and to the audience, because we should no more be able to see
Bogus than we are able to see Harvey.  Harriet's doubts are given no
weight, and there is a strange lack of trust in the audience demonstrated
by the refusal to allow our imaginations -- which the story seems to value
so greatly -- do their work.

     I am certain that some viewers will find the more fanciful elements
in BOGUS enchanting.  These same viewers might also consider my
pooh-poohing of those elements so much humbuggery, but to do so is to
misunderstand my meaning.  BOGUS should be fanciful; it simply didn't need
to be obvious.  Imagine the story with a boy fond of magic, chatting with
an invisible friend instead of grieving, and the severe Harriet (whom we
see in a wonderful scene reacting so violently to a gathering of children
that she actually knocks several of them over) struggling to connect with
Albert by re-connecting with a childhood she feels she never had.  Imagine
more time spent establishing Harriet's workaholic character, and less time
spent on goofy scenes like Albert's defense of Bogus in his classroom.
BOGUS is far from a bad film -- Goldberg is too good, and there are some
solid laughs -- but there is a far more affecting film to be found
somewhere where a tale of redemption and imagination takes precedence over
how easy it will be to construct an advertising campaign.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Bogus journeys:  6.

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