The Travolta/Cage Project #22 Basements (1987)

Get a load of these dummies! I can’t wait to see what kind of antics they get into!

There are some actors who are so inherently, inextricably American that watching them play non-Americans engenders intense cognitive dissonance despite the very nature of acting involving actors and actresses pretending to be people that they are not, sometimes from other countries.

I suspect a big part of the reason The Terminal flopped is because the very idea that Tom Hanks might be something other than someone born and raised in God’s own United States was insulting to the American people. 

On a similar note, it is damn near impossible to buy Englewood New Jersey’s own John Travolta as a Cockney hitman with a dark secret and a bad mullet in “The Dumb Waiter”, one of two Harold Pinter one act plays directed by Robert Altman for the 1987 television movie Basements. 

Part of that is attributable to Travolta’s distractingly abysmal, unconvincing accent, as well as the intensely, even punishingly nature of Pinter’s dialogue and sensibility. It does not help that Travolta shares the screen with Tom Conti, who is not only an authentic Englishman, but extremely, even excessively British. 

Travolta is an actor, of course, but more than that he is a goddamn entertainer. He sings! He dances! He melts hearts with that mega-watt smile! He oozes movie star charisma! The bone-dry, achingly theatrical nature of “The Dumb Waiter”, however, strips Travolta of his usual crutches and lays bare his shortcomings and weaknesses as a serious dramatic actor. 

Basements and Time to Kill, the films we’re pairing for the eleventh episode of the Travolta/Cage podcast find our stars in foreign territory, literally and figuratively, in that they were made in countries other than the United States AND they find the future Face/Off costars straying far from the kind of roles and material that made them famous and beloved. 

In “The Dumb Waiter”, for example, Travolta does not sing, or dance, or charm beautiful women with that radiant smile but he DOES spend a lot of time arguing about semantics, namely whether or not the phrase for making tea is “put on the kettle” or “light the kettle.” 

This is the only time in this project, and outside of it, that I found myself thinking that Michael Caine would have been a much better choice for a role than John Travolta. As the bizarrely obscure television movie’s title suggests, “The Dumb Waiter” takes place in a depressing, grim basement whose most distinctive feature is a dumb waiter, or a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food, if I might borrow Wikipedia’s definition. 

There is no restaurant in this basement; there’s barely a stove to make tea with but that somehow does not keep people from sending down requests for food, which lends the proceedings an occasional air of surrealism and dark humor. 

As “The Dumb Waiter” begins, hitmen Ben (Travolta) and Gus (Tom Conti) are going mad with boredom waiting for their boss to tell them who to kill. Ben tries to pass the interminable hours by re-reading the newspaper while Gus jibber-jabbers endlessly, irritating his colleague in murder in the process. 

With his Hitler mustache and little boy haircut and non-stop stream of banter, Conti cuts a pitiable as well as annoying figure here. There’s something unmistakably poignant about his infernal nattering; he epitomizes the everyday tragicomedy of talking for the sake of talking, or to put off the uncertainty and uneasiness of silence for as long as possible. 

You know a filmmaker has a distinctive style when their last name becomes an adjective. We all what Lynchian means just as the phrase Altmanesque conjures up not just masterpieces like The Long Goodbye, Nashville, California Split, Short Cuts and Gosford Park but the filmmaker’s well-worn stylistic signatures: improvised, naturalistic, sometimes overlapping dialogue, intense, rewarding collaboration between the director and his actors, elegant camera movements seemingly from the perspective of a curious and indulgent God, social commentary and dark humor. 

Catchy title, eh, Mark?

Through he came from the world of television, Altman was a FILMMAKER in the truest sense. So it’s a little perverse that Altman spent much of the lost decade of the 1980s adapting plays for television and movies, even if this extended detour occasionally led to transcendent work like his masterful adaptation of the one man show Secret Honor, which introduced audiences to a brilliant but unknown theater actor named Phillip Baker Hall. 

“The Dumb Waiter” and Basements are among the least overtly Altmanesque films the master made by design. It lacks many, if not most of the director’s hallmarks, visual and otherwise. Instead of roaring with life and energy and empathy it’s deliberately clipped and elliptical, theatrical and dry. 

Many filmmakers try to open plays up, to render inherently stage-bound productions cinematic and visually dynamic. Altman takes an opposite approach here. Instead of trying to hide or mask the play’s theatrical origins, he plays it up, embracing the punishing claustrophobia of two men stuck by malevolent fate and their equally sinister employers in a basement that feels like a prison or a dungeon, if not a circle of hell. 

Altman doesn’t seem particularly concerned with putting his own stamp on Pinter’s work; instead his direction serves the material and Pinter’s paranoid and grim worldview. Pinter’s writing is elliptical and tense. He does not make things easy on audiences, theatrical or otherwise; viewers need to pay close attention just to figure out what’s happening. 

I am not going to lie or put on airs. Watching Basements made me feel like a goddamn philistine, like a vulgar American with no appreciation or understanding of highbrow art or the subtleties and nuances of THEATER. I don’t know whether I was bored to the point of lethargy because the film was full or because I lack the intellect and frame of reference to properly appreciate a writer like Pinter.

Travolta played a hitman who banters with his partner in crime in a dark comedy that would bring Travolta back in a big way in Pulp Fiction a mere five years after his next big comeback vehicle, 1989’s Look Who’s Talking, a film as shamelessly entertaining as “The Dumb Waiter” is cerebral and bone-dry. It’s easy to see why one of those films will be synonymous with Travolta until his dying day and then afterwards while the other is an obscurity even to huge fans of Travolta and Altman like myself. 

Linda Hunt takes center stage in “The Room”, the other Pinter one-act Altman adapted for Basements, with a script by Pinter himself. The diminutive Oscar winner is haunting and sad as Rose, a lower-class woman who clings desperately to a shabby sense of propriety and the roles society has given her or that she has carved out herself as a wife and tenant because they’re the only things she has. 

Like Gus in “The Dumb Waiter” she talks for the sake of talking, and because silence would open the door for unwanted sadness or self-reflection. Her miserable yet strangely cozy existence is shaken up by the arrival of mysterious visitors in the form of Mr. Sands (Julian Sands) and his compatriot Mrs. Sands (Annie Lennox).

Lennox is of course the lead singer of the Eurhythmics and I was hoping she’d liven up the proceedings with a rousing rendition of one of hits, maybe “Would I Lie to You” or “Walking on Broken Glass”, or maybe even a spunky medley of Eurhythmics favorites. That is not to be, alas, but Lennox acquits herself nicely in a rare acting role and Sands lends an intriguingly malevolent, sneeringly punk energy to his character. 

Rose is overwhelmingly concerned with keeping up appearances but her fragile grasp on reality begins to shatter when she receives an uninvited guest in the form of a blind black man who engenders her rage and hatred for reasons that are not entirely apparent. It only takes a few unexpected guests with enigmatic intentions for her orderly, tiny little world to unravel.  

Basements came very near the end of Altman’s prolific and protected theater phase, as he turned his attention to adapting, for the big and little screen a wide array of plays and playwrights. During this time the Nashville iconoclast adapted, in 1982 alone Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dead, Jimmy Dean for the big screen and Rattlesnake in a Cooler and Precious Blood for television. The following year he adapted David Rabe’s Streamers for film, then Secret Honor in 1984, Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love in 1985 and then 1987 brought Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy on the big screen and Basements on the small screen. 

This stage of Altman’s career ended in 1988 with a television adaptation of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Looking back, it almost feels like the great director was a veteran pitcher who went down to the minor leagues for a few months to work on his curveball and came back to the big leagues as strong as ever with Vincent & Theo, Tanner 88, The Player and then an impressive string of films throughout the 90s and aughts. 

In that respect, Basements is a modest, non-commercial effort even by the lenient standards of Altman’s theater years. Nothing in it amused me half as much as the VHS cover for “The Dumb Waiter” that I discovered while researching the TV movie, a crude illustration of Travolta and Conti as, you guessed it, dumb waiters carrying a tray full of money and a gun respectively. It would be hard to imagine a less appropriate image for this decidedly non-wacky, exceedingly dry look at the cruelty of fate and the inevitability of betrayal. 

Truth be told, I’d rather watch the stupid comedy promised by this insultingly idiotic, wildly inappropriate and misleading image than the high-minded snooze Altman and Pinter actually delivered but then I will be the first to concede that on a fundamental level I do not understand Pinter, so the problem lies with me as much as with Basements. 

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