Review of Cocoon (1995) by Cai C — 01 May 2013

Why Shouldn't Women Be Explorers, Too?

I have no real opinion about whether or not Don Ameche should have won Best Supporting Actor given the slate of nominees he was up against. Of the five movies in the category for 1985, I have seen three, though I don't really remember having seen [i]Jagged Edge[/i]. (It seems I thought the performances were the best part but that Peter Coyote was better than Robert Loggia, the actual nominee.) I haven't seen [i]Prizzi's Honor[/i] or [i]Runaway Train[/i], though obviously it won't be much longer on [i]Prizzi's Honor[/i]. However, having now seen three of the five, I think perhaps it was a weak year for the category. Don Ameche wasn't bad, but he didn't have much to do in this. I realize the Academy liked [i]Out of Africa[/i] a lot better than I did, but still. And apparently, [i]Jagged Edge[/i] as a whole is just that forgettable. I mean, couldn't they have found someone else?

A bunch of old men routinely trespass on the property next door to the old folks' home where they live to swim in the pool, figuring no one will care. No one has lived in there for years anyway. Only now, a group of people have rented it, not to mention Steve Guttenberg's boat, for mysterious purposes. And now, the old men swimming in the pool have started to feel great, and Steve Guttenberg is in love, or at least lust, with the girl (Tahnee Welch). The old men find out that their hosts are aliens. They freak out. The police get involved, and since there's no proof that the neighbours are aliens, the old men get a warning for trespassing. But Ben Luckett (Wilford Brimley) arranges a deal with "Walter" (Brian Dennehy), and the old men--and now their wives--are allowed to go on swimming in the pool, provided they keep secret about the whole thing. Only, being human, they can't. And the title cocoons are suspended animation pods, and having too many people draw on their energy kills the aliens in them.

I can't help wondering what the actors in this movie thought about the characters they were playing. We know that they discussed whether they would take the aliens up on their offer (which you know, because it's in all the commercials, but which I think would have been better kept secret), and we know that not all of them would have. Maureen Stapleton, for example, said she wouldn't. However, that's not really what I'm thinking about. I talked yesterday about the music that shaped me, and I guess that's part of what I'm thinking about here. We see the effects of the rejuvenation they get from the pool--instead of going ballroom dancing to the big band sounds of their youth, they go to the clubs young people are going to these days. However, that doesn't ring true to me. I think they'd still like the same old music, and while they might be up for some jitterbugging, they wouldn't be interested in break dancing. These are, in short, Magical Old People, and that bothers me.

I suppose it doesn't help that two of the actors in this movie have certain cultural legacies that could not have been foreseen in 1985. The most obvious is Wilford Brimley, who does a fine job in this movie. However, I would say that the average person who didn't grow up on [i]The Waltons[/i] or whatever looks at him and thinks of either Quaker Oats' being the right thing or else "diabetus." I'm not completely sure I've seen any of the commercials about the latter, but I know he did a bunch of them. As for Steve Guttenberg, he may have been riding the success of those first two [i]Police Academy[/i] movies at the time (and we will [i]not[/i] be getting to those!), but whenever I see him, I get the Stonecutters theme stuck in my head. ("Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?/We do!") Not, I think, that the [i]Police Academy[/i] legacy is an unalloyed good, as evidenced by how determined I am never to bother with one of them despite my fondness for The Guy Who Played Rizzo on [i]M*A*S*H[/i].

I suppose, in the end, the answer is whether death is something to be feared or not. I find the scene where Bernie (Jack Gilford), who has always distrusted the pool, tries to revive Rose (Herta Ware) a touching one, but it means that I completely understand the reason he doesn't want to go. Live forever without Rose? We're supposed to have admired Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn) for saying that he wouldn't want to live forever without Alma (Cronyn's actual wife, Jessica Tandy), and I presume the argument here is that Bernie will be living without Rose either way. That's certainly true. However, Bernie is old and isn't going to live very long. That means his time without Rose will be relatively short. Yes, it's partially that he's lived his whole life in fear of one thing or another, but the fear of grieving for all eternity sounds like a pretty reasonable one to me under the circumstances. And who knows--just because we only see Mary (Stapleton) and Ben's kids doesn't mean Bernie and Rose didn't have any, right?