Maybe because it's the holidays, and all the seasonal good will brings out the incautious romantic in me, but I'm going to admit that I'm a sucker for a certain kind of movie that proliferates at this time of year, the one in which a character who's found himself with a Hardened Heart because it's been Trampled on by a Cold World has a Conversion because of some Small Miracle or Act of Kindness. I love it when Jimmy Stewart finds ZuZu's petals in his vest pocket in It's a Wonderful Life, when Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby roll back the barn doors in the middle of their Christmas concert to show Dean Jagger that it's started to snow finally and his ski lodge is saved in White Christmas, when Maureen O'Hara finds Edmund Gwenn's cane in the corner of the house her daughter wants her to buy in Miracle on 34th Street. Although I don't like the movie, I even get choked up (against my will ) when Catherine O'Hara finds Macaulay Culkin near Chicago's biggest Christmas tree in Home Alone.
I say all this because I wanted to make clear that I'm susceptible to the kind of movie Nora Ephron tried to make with Michael. In fact, I'll admit that I went into the theater predisposed to give in to whatever sentimentality it served up. I was ready to buy it all: holiday movie, hard heart, conversion.
Buy it?
I was ready to mortgage the house.
After seeing it however, the checkbook's still in my pocket and the house still in my name, because Michael falls so far short of being affecting that the only reason to get choked up over it is if you think about what more life-affirming task you could have done with the hour and forty minute running time — like maybe doing some Martha Stewartesque project by gluing uncooked pasta bows to Don Ho, Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow records and spray painting them with green Krylon to turn them into festive vinyl wreathes.
Michael is about a jaded reporter named Frank Quinlan (William Hurt) who writes about faked phenomena like werewolves and Santa-sightings for a National Enquirer knock-off. He gets a tip one Christmas season that Michael the Archangel (John Travolta) is holed up in a run-down motor court run by a poor widow (Jean Stapleton) in rural Iowa. Joined by a fellow reporter (Robert Pastorelli ), a wounded-in-love woman, Dorothy Winters (Andie McDowell), who claims to be an angel expert, and the tabloid's mascot, a mongrel dog named Sparky, Hurt finds the angel is nothing like what he expected — rather than ethereal, he's crude, poorly groomed, a chain-smoker, a beer drinker, a chaser of women.
Nonetheless, he has wings and the publisher wants the story for page one, so Quinlan and his colleagues set out to drive Michael to the tabloid's headquarters in Chicago. Michael, however, is in no hurry to arrive there — it turns out that angels only get so many earthly manifestations, and this one is his final one and he wants it to last a long while. He makes them take side-trips to some quintessentially Midwestern weird and wonderful landmarks, like the world's largest ball of twine and the world's largest non-stick frying pan. He picks up women, gets into bar brawls, gets them all thrown into jail and then gets them out again when he sleeps with the female judge who turns out to be smitten with him. Along the way, he also reveals that his real mission this time on earth is to thaw Quinlan's hard heart and hook him up with Winters, who's been burned so often by men that she's sworn off love.
It's an interesting concept, this rude Christmas anti-angel plunked down into small-town-ville, paired with the seen-it-all-believe-none-of-it reporter, but that's as far as it gets — to the point of being an intriguing idea.
Part of the problem is that Quinlan's heart is not all that hard after all, and so there's little dramatic tension Although Michael tells Quinlan early on that he's there to battle the forces of darkness who want to own Quinlan's heart, there's never a battle. Although Quinlan starts out the journey vociferously proclaiming his skepticism and by being mean-spirited toward Winters, he softens by the midpoint, and softens as easily as if all he needed was a dash of Accent instant meat tenderizer: In prison, he insults Winters once again; Michael tells him to apologize to her. He does, and voila! He sees her as a wounded person who just needs some honest love, love that he can give her. The two become mutually smitten and, essentially the battle's over, without a shot being fired or a demon being cast down into eternal darkness The film throws in a late complication which drives the two apart, but the device seems transparently contrived, as if the screenwriters said, "Oh my gosh, the conflict's over and we still have 30 minute to go! We better do something."
Another problem is that the film never makes clear why Quinlan has such a hard heart; he mentions that he's bitter because he was fired from his last legitimate newspaper job working for the Chicago Tribune when, in a drunken tirade, he punched his managing editor, but we never learn why he took to drink: he's just disappointed in life because he's disappointed in life, period. He seems like little more than a spoiled and pouty child; rather than rooting for his salvation, we just want him sent to his room without dinner.
Throughout the film, Quinlan and his colleagues keep watching Michael to see if he's capable of performing miracles.
The answer, clearly, is no.
If he could have, he'd have conjured a better movie.
by Joe Schuster
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