A Summer of Some Substance : Blockbusters had no monopoly on special moments

The summer of ’89 has already found its way into the record books. The most money in the shortest time. The biggest opening weekend. The strongest “legs.” The stoutest heart. The biggest disappointment. The greatest surprise. Enough numbers have been generated this summer to keep the power brokers’ statisticians busy for months, pouring over the numbers, storing them, grinding them into a handy mulch to be used in the future for--or against--future projects.

It seems to have been an uncommonly good summer for those of us out here in the audience too, and not only from the blockbusters. That’s not always the case with summer fare; you don’t have to rummage further back than the crop of ’86 to appreciate what we’ve had to pick from, a scant three years later. Remember? The summer of “Legal Eagles,” “Poltergeist II,” “Big Trouble in Little China” and “Heartburn”? We can consider ourself lucky.

We’ve had movies to stir us up, divide us and provoke discussions all the way from the editorial pages to the back seat on the way home: “Do the Right Thing,” or, in its quite different way, “Field of Dreams.” We’ve had the snappy and the haunting side of sex, “When Harry Met Sally. . .” and “sex, lies, and videotape.”

There were a pair of singular imports, “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” an arguable candidate for the year’s most haunting movie, and “The Taxing Woman Returns,” clear proof that sequels can dig deeper than their predecessors. There’ve been some first-rate memories for the out-of-school crowd, the beautiful live action of “The Adventures of Milo and Otis,” and the fantastic models and miniatures of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” whose effects will probably go straight into the memory banks of the very young in exactly the same way that “Dr. Cyclops” did, almost 50 years ago, with its tiny people in a lethally big world.

If this summer proved anything, it was that the moments most likely to be taken home and savored rarely came from the blockbusters. Those monster money-makers weren’t completely exempt: My own favorite is Sean Connery in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” bringing down a small plane by using just his umbrella and his wits. But, in general, the moments we remember are personal and frequently poignant and they seem to need a smaller scale and a more reflective setting.

“Parenthood,” for all its comedy, did a pretty evenhanded job of reflecting the full spectrum of that earth-shattering experience. It had its share of patented heart-tuggers, like the bedtime talk between Steve Martin and his dear, tensed-up little boy, or grandfather Jason Robards’ realization of the real character of one of his sons, the rootless charmer played by Tom Hulce. But for me, “Parenthood’s” real zinger came with one phone conversation: Dianne Wiest’s young son’s call to his dad to see if he can come live with him and his discovery of what his place really is in his divorced father’s life. This is real domestic tragedy, and you can read all of it right there on Wiest’s face.

Faces--and psyches--are the real stuff of “sex, lies, and videotape” too. No one is going to argue the appeal of the movie’s sensual discovery, Laura San Giacomo, who manages to be funny and fiery all at once, yet the more deeply banked fire of Andie MacDowell’s character becomes more fascinating by its inaccessibility. And so the long sequence in which MacDowell’s almost-somnolent wife finally comes alive and takes the upper hand--and the video camera--from James Spader to ask some disturbing questions of her own, becomes absolutely mesmerizing.

The other thing that “sex, lies”’ seems to reinforce is the absolute across-the-board magnetism of honesty. From a quick look around theater lobbies, this is a movie playing to well beyond the thirtysomethings of its characters’ ages, but no one seems to have the slightest trouble identifying with it. Haven’t teachers of writing and teachers of movie making been begging their pupils to work from what they know about for decades? Well, here’s an example, and it works like no other aphrodisiac in the world.

I suspect that’s one of the qualities that audiences are responding to in “Do the Right Thing” too. Beyond its technical bravura, it’s a movie made straight from the gut, on subjects the film maker knows totally. And from minuscule details, like Ruby Dee’s Mother Sister, complaining that she’s “tender-headed” while her hair is being combed on that front porch stoop, to the great, raunchy trio of Corner Men in front of that red wall, we can feel that this is the real thing.

It’s also great acting. There’s something to Ossie Davis’ gesture with his battered hat, which he does sardonically, elaborately or with the purest courtliness, which has a sweetly familiar jauntiness: See if it doesn’t look like one of Laurence Olivier’s little physical taradiddles, executed with the same lovely nonchalance. There are real-thing moments to Danny Aiello’s pizzeria owner, Sal, too; his habit of hitching up his stomach under his apron, the way he settles the wrangles with his sons, or (until the awful denouement) keeps peace in his own establishment, which signal acting and writing and directing on sure ground.

On the matter of sureness of subject, I’ve been fascinated to hear, from letters and conversations, how “Distant Voices, Still Lives” has hit a chord with 1980s American audiences. This is a movie made an in extremely stylized form about working-class Englishmen and women, scraping by in the postwar ‘40s and ‘50s. It’s marked by pop songs of the period, few of which ring in our ears the way they must to the English, yet I’ve heard it talked about like family history.

But then, “Distant Voices” also has one instant that seems to speak to everyone. It occurs when the camera’s vision rises up the brick wall of a movie theater, then over the heads of the audience inside, sniffling at the hyper-romanticism of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” Then, seconds later, it records the plummeting fall of two of the film’s characters, husbands or brothers, from their scaffolding onto a glass skylight below. All the bizarre, seemingly unrelated elements of those minutes: The treacly, familiar music, the soaring camera and the shock of these plummeting bodies come together in a moment of the purest visual astonishment.

Actually, if these special movies of the summer have any common thread it may be their brilliant look. It marks “Do the Right Thing” from its first seconds; it is the essence of “Milo and Otis”; and a different, softer kind of beauty suffuses “sex, lies, and videotape.” But, even in this company, this moment from “Distant Voices, Still Lives” is the visual adrenalin of the summer, and quite possibly of the year.

It’s been a good long time since we had as many joys like that in one season. Well, we did get “Zelig” and “Fanny and Alexander” back to back in 1983. That was also the summer of “Jaws 3-D,” “Krull,” “Porky’s II” and “Staying Alive.” Makes you think of this crop with outright affection, doesn’t it?