MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Byline: Merle Ginsberg
LOS ANGELES — On a pastoral August afternoon in the Larchmont area of Los Angeles — a pretty residential part of old Hollywood — Sally Field is taking a short break from shooting her umpteenth movie. The peace is suddenly interrupted by an onslaught of bikers — in this case, young kids on their first bicycles — who’ve recognized Field.
“Were you in ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’?” a little girl asks. “What were you?”
“I was the mom,” Field answers forthrightly.
“She was also in ‘Forest Gump,”‘ offers a bystander.
“You were?” asks another child. “What did you play in that one? Were you the girl?”
“No,” smiles Field, shaking her head. “I was the mom. I was the one who said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates.’ I just looked different in that movie.”
“I guess it’s better to be thought of as Mrs. Gump than The Flying Nun all your life,” Field says with a smile after they’ve gone.
In “An Eye for an Eye,” with veteran English director John Schlesinger at the helm, Field is a mom again, but not a sweet matronly one. She’s a mom-slash-vigilante. Early in the film, her daughter is brutally murdered, and even though it’s proven that the character played by Kiefer Sutherland has committed the crime, he walks on a technicality.
Field begins to go mad, and decides to seek justice herself, e la “Dirty Harry,” against the better wishes of her husband (Ed Harris). It’s not a pretty picture of crime in America — or even Los Angeles, for that matter — but according to Schlesinger, the 69-year-old director of “Darling,” “Far From the Madding Crowd,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” “The Day of the Locust” and “Marathon Man” — it’s not a distorted one.
“Los Angeles, like most American cities, is a city of faux security,” Schlesinger says, as he pads around the outdoor setting in khaki shorts and sneakers, all the while sipping a fruit smoothy. “It’s a city of barbed wire, metal mesh, alarm systems, police. It is a very deceptively scary place because it seems so damn normal: all green and lovely and oranges dropping from the trees! I’m ensconced in a condo here, and I’m a bit nervous every time I drive into the carpark. A friend of mine was attacked in his own garage because of someone slipping in behind his car. It’s a frightfully unsafe place!” he says, in his perfect Queen’s English, which hasn’t been chipped away by all his work in Hollywood.
“I have always found here that the ivy that grows everywhere contains sinister things.”
Schlesinger finds L.A. more violent than even New York or London.
“Maybe you expect it there,” he muses. “There’s more separation between rich people here and poor people. When I first came to America to make a film — ‘Midnight Cowboy’ — a lot of the violent incidents that went into the story, which was set in New York, were based on things I saw happen right here, on Hollywood Boulevard.”
Asked whether “An Eye for an Eye” — which opens in theaters Friday — will cause people to feel even more paranoid about violence than they already do, he chuckles.
“I don’t mean it to do what ‘Marathon Man’ did for the dentist,” Schlesinger says. “It’s essentially an entertaining film, not a polemic. But it does have overtones — and undertones. I like to take something and give texture to it. People say I don’t have to work at my age, but must I retire? I like to work. It gives me pleasure — as well as pain. I like to make things. This is a meaty subject, something I wanted to tackle.”
An alarm goes off, announcing that the next shot is ready. Schlesinger slips into place behind the camera as Sally Field says goodby to a forlorn Ed Harris, while he drives off in the family Volvo, knowing something dangerous is brewing.
“This movie isn’t about a woman getting empowerment,” the very svelte Field says after the shot is completed. “Both John and I see it as a spiral into madness, not a rising up. It’s not about a victim taking control; it’s really about violence seeking its own level. If society is violent and lets off a violent criminal, doesn’t that pull society into a different level?
“I don’t know,” sighs Field, a mother herself, and an avowed Democrat. “We are all very liberal and look at capital punishment and think it’s philosophically wrong. But if it becomes a personal thing — if it’s about your child — you’re not elevated by it; you’re lowered by it. If that kind of violence strikes your life, you are never the same person again.
“My kids know I’m thinking about them a lot as I make this film, and it’s painful. I don’t know how I’m going to feel, shooting the last scene of the film where I physically attack my daughter’s murderer. I know how Bob Dole would feel about it!
“Look — we don’t need him to tell us about the morality of film, we’ve all questioned it for a long time. I was in two films, ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ and ‘Forest Gump,’ that had no violence and made a lot of money. But there are violent films that are very well done and have made a lot of money. It has to be up to the parents, not to censorship, if we’re going to live in a free culture. A parent has to be able to say, ‘My kid can’t see that.”‘
“Excuse me!” Field is once again interrupted by one of the neighborhood kids on a bike, who wants to know what she’s playing in this movie.
“Just the mom — again!” she smiles.
And as he rides off, she calls after him.
“Watch what you’re doing! Don’t cross the street without looking!”