What would happen if a Hollywood studio made a John Sayles movie?
It wouldn't be a John Sayles movie anymore.The independent filmmaker, who assembles his personal movies on shoestring budgets, has followed last year's urban corruption tale "City of Hope" with the new drama "Passion Fish." Sayles wrote, directed and edited the story of a bossy, paraplegic soap-opera star May-Alice (Mary McDonnell) and her troubled, live-in nurse, Chantelle (Alfre Woodard).
Unlike most studio fare, this movie makes no predigested proclamations about heroes and villains. Instead of heartbreaking epiphanies, "Passion Fish" favors subtle change. Where there might be car crashes and love scenes, here exist verbal clashes and wistful looks.
Because the movie does not follow a paint-by-the-numbers template, moviegoers reared on Hollywood pap may feel all wet watching "Passion Fish."
That's part of the point.
"If you look at mainstream movies in the last 10 years, they've been getting more simplistic," said Sayles, whose films include "Eight Men Out," "Matewan," "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" and "Baby It's You."
"But it's good to be ambivalent. I think what has marginalized my movies more than anything else . . . is that they're complex, and the characters are complex.
"A lot happens (in the movie), actually. But it's such slow change, and there's so much back and forth in it. The movies that I tend to like are the ones where I don't know what's going to happen next, and I care what's going to happen next."
May-Alice is en route to a leg-waxing appointment when struck by an automobile. A self-admitted "bitch on wheels," she's the kind of accident victim who bitterly complains to one frazzled nurse: "It's important that we have clean walls. I'll be climbing them soon."
Content with bottles of wine and magnums of daytime television, May-Alice marches through a series of caretakers until Chantelle arrives in May-Alice's Louisiana home.
The drug addiction Chantelle is fleeing herself - "I already had enough fun to last a lifetime," she says - is matched by May-Alice's determined lack of determination. Giving her a dumbbell, Chantelle tells May-Alice, "I want to see what you can do."
May-Alice immediately drops the weight into the grass. "That's what I can do," she complacently responds.
Explained Sayles: "They're basically both spoiled upper-, middle-class women whose lives haven't turned out the way they thought they would. And they're angry about it and aren't happy to be where they are."
The film co-stars David Strathairn as Rennie, a Cajun swamper who was May-Alice's childhood flame, and Vondie Curtis-Hall as Sugar Le Doux, a blacksmith hoping to rope Chantelle.
Sayles, 42, first considered the story two decades ago. He said it was inspired both by Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" and real-life experiences.
"I had it in my head for about 20 years," Sayles said. "I was an orderly in hospitals quite a lot while I was in high school, college vacations and after I got out of college for a year."
Ten years ago, Sayles' back went out. There he was, in queue for X-rays. There was a "parking lot," he recalled, of people in wheelchairs, many of them women, many accompanied by nurses.
"And a lot of them were really bored with each other and not especially nice to each other. And these are people who spend at least eight hours a day together - sometimes 24 - and they may have nothing in common. So I just started thinking about that relationship."
Furthermore, since his last three movies involved Home Video - and the financial cooperation of cast and crew - Sayles made the movie for about $3 million. The typical studio films costs $26 million.
"I don't think it's an appropriate movie for a studio," Sayles said, because of the story's gentle rhythms and modest framework. "The first thing a studio would say is, `Where's the conflict? We need more to happen!' "
The bargain-basement route is Sayles' favorite path. The former meat packer wrote screenplays for low-budget titles such as "Piranha," "The Lady in Red," "Battle Beyond Stars," "The Howling" and "Alligator."
With $60,000 earned from these discount movies, Sayles wrote, directed and starred in 1980's "The Return of the Secaucus Seven," considered one of the best independent films made. More recently, Sayles scripted the television movie "Unnatural Causes," created the series "Shannon's Deal" and wrote the novel "Los Gusanos."
His next film will be an Irish children's tale based on the book "Secret of Ron Mor Skerry." Sayles said it, too, will try to propel audiences forward and not offer the same sugary mix of film formula.
"People at McDonald's don't say, `How do we make our hamburgers taste better?' What they say is, `How do we get people to eat more of our hamburgers?'
"I don't think (bland movies) increase the appetite at all. I think what happens is people get turned off to going to the movies."