Issue #168

John Travolta: The Second Wind (1994-2000)

Greetings, all!

Things are wild out there, huh? I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about any of it, but if you need a short break from the insanity of the news, I can give you that much. This week, we resume our exploration of the filmography of John Travolta. If you missed Part 1, you can find that here. Let’s dive in!

Pulp Fiction (1994): Here’s the movie that not only fully revived Travolta’s flagging career, but more or less changed the entire cinematic landscape of the 1990s. Quentin Tarantino’s distinctive brand of blood-soaked chic became omnipresent, with countless movies trying (and usually, failing) to recapture the profane magic. It remains a singular role for Travolta, as the actor — playing a stoner hitman — has a relaxed, entirely unforced charm that he has never quite managed to duplicate elsewhere. His scenes of banter with Samuel L. Jackson (who is even better, announcing himself as an explosively talented movie star after years of doing the rounds as a character actor) remain an absolute pleasure to listen to, and the performance he offers in his final scene with Uma Thurman — an exhausted conversation at the end of a harrowing night — may be my single favorite scene of his career: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack.” If the film has a significant shortcoming, it’s that the Bruce Willis segment doesn’t quite have the pop of the rest (despite containing the film’s most lurid material). But this remains an impressive achievement from a hungry young filmmaker determined to prove himself as the real deal.

Rating: 9/10

Get Shorty (1995): Barry Sonnenfeld’s Elmore Leonard adaptation feels like a natural follow-up to Pulp Fiction, though it doesn’t feel like an imitation: after all, Leonard is the sort of writer Tarantino was riffing on in the first place. Here, Travolta plays Chili Palmer, the cool, collected loan shark who finds himself placed directly at the intersection of Hollywood filmmaking and organized crime. He’s surrounded by a gallery of entertainingly colorful supporting players: a struggling B-movie director (Gene Hackman), a world-weary scream queen (Rene Russo), a vain yet savvy gangster (Delroy Lindo), a vain yet stupid gangster (Dennis Farina), an indecisive movie star (Danny DeVito, whose stature supplies the film’s title), a rough but good-hearted stuntman (James Gandolfini), and everyone seems to be having a grand time playing with Leonard’s snappy dialogue. By occupying the calm center of the storm, Travolta effectively cements his newfound status as a movie star. A slight movie, but a consistently entertaining one.

Rating: 8/10

Michael (1996): This Nora Ephron-directed comedy-drama tells the story of a group of tabloid writers (William Hurt, Andie MacDowell, and Robert Pastorelli) who encounter a real-life angel (Travolta). Not a guardian angel, mind you. An archangel, the kind tasked with fighting demons. The only problem is, there are no demons around to fight, so the angel mostly resorts to bumming around earth, smoking, drinking, and occasionally picking fights with bulls. If it sounds like an odd premise, let me assure you that it feels at least twice as odd as it sounds. The movie can’t seem to settle on what tone it wants to go for. Hurt’s straining to keep things grounded and credible, Travolta is goofing off and hamming it up for the camera at every possible opportunity, Bob Hoskins (playing the tabloid editor) goes so far over the top that he seems to be in another film entirely, and Randy Newman’s score — which incorporates lots of familiar melodies from beloved hymns — feels satirical without quite landing on what is being satirized, exactly. The end result is a film that never manages to be particularly funny or moving, despite constantly straining to be both.

Rating: 4/10

Phenomenon (1996): Though Battlefield Earth is generally considered to be the most direct connection between Travolta’s Scientologist beliefs and his film career, there’s more actual Scientology in this movie, about a man who sees strange lights in the sky and suddenly becomes the smartest man on earth. An incredible gift? Yes. A curse? Even moreso. In tone, it plays like an adaptation of one of Stephen King’s more sentimental short stories, and it’s generally pleasant and well-acted (the supporting cast includes Robert Duvall, Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker, Jeffrey DeMunn, and Brent Spiner, and the whole thing is backed by a largely soothing Thomas Newman score), but it has a fundamental dullness that it never quite finds a way out of.

Rating: 5/10

Broken Arrow (1996): This dumb-but-stylish John Woo actioner serves as effective counterprogramming for Travolta’s other 1996 movies: this time around, he sheds the saintliness and plays an unapologetically nasty villain. He’s vastly more effective here, and seems to truly relish the opportunity to spend the movie needling his effectively beleaguered co-star Christian Slater. The film’s plot, provided by Speed screenwriter Graham Yost, is the sort of thing that falls apart if you give it any degree of serious thought, and the film runs out of steam before it hits the finish line. Even so, time has been kind to the movie: Woo’s stylish and clear direction is the sort of thing that might have been easily taken for granted at the time, but now stands head and shoulders above too much of what passes for action filmmaking at this budget level.

Rating: 6/10

Mad City (1997): A disgruntled former museum employee (Travolta) attempts to get his job back by bringing a shotgun to the museum. This situation naturally spirals out of control, someone gets shot, and the disgruntled employee ends up holding an entire group of school children hostage. Also present among the hostages: a local news reporter (Dustin Hoffman) who is absolutely thrilled to have such a huge story fall right into his lap. The set-up is compelling, and for a while, so is the movie. Hoffman is predictably solid as the oily reporter, and Travolta finds some entertainingly offbeat notes within his dim-witted character. However, as the movie proceeds, the plot machinations begin to feel increasingly strained, and character behavior starts to feel less credible. Hoffman’s gradual transformation from self-serving journalist to bleeding heart feels rushed, and the movie doesn’t quite succeed in its increasingly earnest bid invoke pity for a character who spends much of the movie waving a gun at children. It begins as an absorbing character study, then buries its characters as it transforms into a message movie. A well-intentioned misfire.

Rating: 5/10

Face/Off (1997): The thing is, John Travolta doesn’t do a particularly good Nicolas Cage impression, and Nicolas Cage doesn’t do a particularly good John Travolta impression. However, it’s a hoot and a half to watch them impersonate each other, not because they’re so good at it, but because there’s just the right amount of cheerful derisiveness in the ways they impersonate each other: Cage-as-Travolta keeps bursting into tearful hysterics at every difficult moment, and Travolta-as-Cage keeps doing entirely unprompted kooky things because, well, that seems like what Cage does. It’s among the most “just go with it” blockbusters ever made, and that’s part of why it works so well: it’s so easy to imagine a movie that gets lost in the weeds of explaining exactly how the mechanics of trading faces works, instead of a movie that is more focused on wringing as much fun as possible out of the idea of two extremely distinctive actors trading faces. Pretty easily the best of John Woo’s Hollywood outings, and one of the most purely entertaining movies on Travolta’s resume.

Rating: 8/10

She’s So Lovely (1997): This movie is based on an unfinished screenplay by the late John Cassavettes, and is directed by his son Nick Cassavettes. Take a look at the films made solely by John (Shadows, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence) and Nick (John Q, The Notebook, My Sister’s Keeper), and you get a sense of why this feels like a John Cassavettes movie with too many of the rough edges sanded off. Even so, it’s a fascinating project, full of prickly, unlikable characters who are simply allowed to be themselves in a way that feels uncommon for a glossy Hollywood production. Sean Penn and his then-wife Robin Wright are the film’s stars (they spend much of the film bellowing at each other in shrill, squawking voices, and it’s to their credit as performers that this remains more compelling than tiresome), but Travolta — who doesn’t appear until the film’s second half — is the real surprise. Here’s a character who feels much closer to the charismatic-yet-volatile Tony Manero of Saturday Night Fever than the watered-down version that Staying Alive gave us, a man who is trying his best to do the right thing but is constantly having to wrestle with his own self-destructive rage. The film falls apart at the finish line, providing a way-too-pat ending for an emotionally complex situation, but up until that point it’s a genuinely interesting, ambitious endeavor that stands as a legitimate attempt by Nick to let us hear his father’s voice one last time.

Rating: 7/10

A Civil Action (1998): The basic dramatic thrust of this legal drama may be entirely predictable — a hotshot big city lawyer (John Travolta) gradually becomes selfless after encountering a community that really needs his help — but legal dramas that hit a certain baseline of competence are nearly compelling by default, and this one reaches that line. Travolta’s not bad, but the real scene-stealer here is Robert Duvall, who makes a meal of every scene he appears in as the attorney representing the Big Bad Corporation. The supporting cast is kind of a who’s who of ‘90s character actors: William H. Macy, Tony Shaloub, James Gandolfini, Dan Hedaya, John Lithgow, Stephen Fry, Kathleen Quinlan, Sydney Pollack, Zeljko Ivanek, and Kathy Bates are all here. Solid, no-nonsense dramatic filmmaking.

Rating: 7/10

The Thin Red Line (1998): This barely counts, honestly, because Travolta only appears in one scene (as a Brigadier General offering words of advice to Nick Nolte’s character). But I’ll gladly take any excuse to revisit this Terrence Malick film, which only grows richer each time I go back to it. It’s a meditation on the nature of war that both pulls us in on as intimate a level as any film in the genre ever has, and a movie that often pulls back so far that it offers what might be described as a “God’s-eye-view” perspective. It captures the awful senselessness and inhumanity of war without diminishing the inescapable complexity, and even necessity, of war. Some films, even some great films, want to give you a series of affecting bullet points to take home. The aforementioned A Civil Action does that. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, released the same year and often put into fruitless competitions with this movie, does that. This one wants to linger in your mind, giving you something to reflect on and wrestle with every time you drift back to it. An extraordinary work from one of our greatest filmmakers.

Rating: 10/10

Primary Colors (1999): Boy, revisiting the political climate of the 1990s feels like visiting another planet. Based on a lightly fictionalized account of the Clinton presidential campaign (published anonymously, but eventually revealed to be the work of journalist Joe Klein), Mike Nichols’ political drama is a fascinating, empathetic evisceration of both America’s 42nd President and the political machine that allowed him to thrive. Travolta’s Clinton — er, “Jack Stanton” — is introduced as that all-too-rare figure: a politician who actually cares. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s savvy, and he really does want to help people. He also, much to the chagrin of his longsuffering wife (Emma Thompson), has a complete inability to keep his pants zipped up. Through the eyes of campaign manager Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), we’re given a firsthand look at how the political process gradually extinguishes idealism. It’s a furious movie, but you don’t feel that for much of the runtime because of how zippy and entertaining the whole thing is. Elaine May’s sharp screenplay is often wildly funny, Billy Bob Thornton is terrific as the film’s James Carville stand-in, and Kathy Bates turns in one of her best performances as a salty advisor brought in to help Stanton navigate his potential scandals. When the film finally brings the hammer down in the closing moments, it’s genuinely impactful. In many ways, it feels like the best movie Aaron Sorkin never made.

Rating: 8/10

The General’s Daughter (1999): This is an unusual one… a genuinely compelling mystery about military corruption that keeps shooting itself in the foot. It does this by never quite locating the right tone, shifting between pulp thrills and more serious-minded drama, and it does this with scenes that veer too far into exploitative lecherousness. Travolta feels fully settled into his renewed movie stardom at this point, concerning himself less with digging into the part than with finding ways to amuse himself from scene to scene. It’s sort of fun to watch, but the more committed performances from actors like James Cromwell, Clarence Williams III, and Timothy Hutton would probably benefit from a lead actor who is willing to get on their level. The film is undeniably absorbing from scene to scene, but director Simon West can’t seem to decide whether he’s making the next A Civil Action or the next Broken Arrow.

Rating: 6/10

For this batch, only one theatrically-released movie was unavailable to stream or rent: White Man’s Burden, the 1995 racism-themed drama co-starring Harry Belafonte.

Next time, we’ll move into the 2000s, as Travolta finally brings a long-gestating passion project to the big screen.

Back at ya later