Dir: Tony Richardson
Star: Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, Beau Bridges, Nastassja Kinski

“Ms. Kinski’s bear costumes by Richard Tautkus.” That is, I feel fairly confident in saying, a unique credit in cinematic history. However, I can’t say I was too impressed by a film which seems largely like a Hollywood liberal’s wet-dream, nodding its head at the entire gamut of sexual relations, from inter-racial through homosexual to incest. Except rape. For some reason, they draw the line there. I’m still not sure of the era in which the body of the film is supposed to take place. It appears the early stages, where Win Berry (Bridges) marries Mary,  are set before the war, which would make the main section, with the oldest kids in high school… the late fifties or early sixties? Maybe the novel is clearer, but otherwise, it seems a much-more tolerant era than I’d heard.

The focus is on the Berry family and their five kids, mostly on Franny (Foster) and John (Lowe), and the saga as they open one hotel in New England, move to Vienna to open another, then come back to fame and fortune. They go through a series of, frankly, largely implausible escapades, involving everything from terrorists to air-crashes. Irving’s style is often described as “Dickensian,” but I was always much more of a Wilkie Collins fan myself (The Woman in White FTW, bitches!), so you probably have a better handle on what that means than I do. The Berrys seem intent on putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional”; the parents are likely the most well-adjusted, but where’s the interest in a normal, married couple? Hell, even the family dog is affected with perpetual flatulence – oh, hold my aching sides, for this is great literature! The film seems most fascinated by the bundle of neuroses which is Franny, along with her brother, who narrates the movie, and has an interest in his sister which would, under just about any other circumstance, be deemed entirely unhealthy.

What stops it from being entirely unwatchable is the quality of the acting, which is genuinely impressive and turns these (often sex-obsessed) caricatures into something approaching human beings. Even toward the bottom of the cast, there are a lot of people who would go on to achieve fame down the road: Matthew Modine, Joely Richardson, Amanda Plummer, and even a very young Seth Green, as the youngest of the Berry kids. Foster and, perhaps surprisingly, Lowe are both extremely good in their roles, but there is hardly a performance which doesn’t ring truer than the ridiculous characters they’ve been given by the script. Full disclaimer: I haven’t read any Irving, and on the basis of this, won’t exactly be rushing to do so. But I suspect director Richardson may have been too true to the source material, and one senses trimming some of the excess elements might have made for a less over-stuffed movie as an end product. Instead, it seems to tire of some characters and discard them, throwing new ones at the screen instead, before eventually growing bored with them too.

Kinski’s would be a case in point. She doesn’t appear until almost an hour in, playing “Suzie the Bear,” and some backstory is likely necessary first. Early on, we meet Freud, a Jewish entertainer who travels round giving shows with his trained bear. He heads back to Europe, leaving his bear in Win’s custody, but is responsible for bringing the Berrys to Vienna, where he is now blind (blame the Nazis!), and needs help running a hotel. He now has Suzie, an irritable young woman who is convinced she is ugly – pardon me if I give that the snort of derision it richly deserves – and, to avoid having to deal with other humans, spends her life dressed in a bear-suit. Yeah, in other words: the sort of bullshit act only characters in questionable novels actually get to pull off. She’s the focus for a small chunk, forming a brief lesbian relationship with Franny – though their scene in bed is shot so murkily as to be pointless – then heads off to one side, joining the pile of discards in the background. I was, however, taken by the similarity between this and Unfaithfully Yours, both of which have Kinski taking off an animal mask:

Unfaithfully Yours

The Hotel New Hampshire

I find these kinda hypnotic, and am sure that any furry Kinski fetishists will be in raptures for most of her scenes. Not being one myself, I was rather more luke-warm – though as should be clear by this point, that applies to the entire endeavor, rather than just her character. I’ll confess I did keep watching, somewhat engrossed to see what lunacy would be thrown at the screen next, which I guess is the basic tenet of story-telling. That, the acting and Jacques Offenbach’s hummable tunes on the soundtrack were just about enough to make for a palatable hour and three-quarters, though I was also reminded of why this made little or no long-term impression, the first time I saw it, almost 20 years previously.

Here’s the trailer. It doesn’t have much Kinski in it – and most of what there is, is in the bear suit. However, it does actually do a fairly good job at capturing the insanity of what unfolds. Personally, if I want to watch dysfunctional families, I’ll have rather more fun with a marathon of Jerry Springer episodes.