Shy People Movie Review

Andrei Konchalovsky strikes out with Shy People, a witless film about Cosmopolitan writer Jill Clayburgh, who drags teenage daughter Martha Plimpton off to the backwoods to visit their cousins for the purpose of a magazine article about families. The cousins are presided over by Barbara Hershey, whose husband is an omnipresent ghost, whose sons are violent and strange, and whose pregnant daughter-in-law (Mare Winningham, wasted again) wants a battery-operated television set. There's a Biblical quote from Revelations to “explain” all the nonsense onscreen, only it doesn't. Before that, the married son nearly rapes Plimpton while Hershey is away shooting the hand of a man who hit her son in the head. She shoots him in the strip joint operated by yet another son who later chats with Clayburgh. Inexplicably, Clayburgh has left her daughter alone with the other three boys while she “helps” Hershey, and Winningham, too, of course. (Remember the television set?) Well, when Clayburgh finds out what happened to Plimpton, she goes looking for her with the help of the ghost and then Hershey explains that even though her dead husband pistol whipped her while she was pregnant, he still helped the family survive. Clayburgh learns the appropriate lesson and tells Plimpton that she's going to be a stricter mother to her in the future. The strip joint owner returns to the fold and breaks the television set right away, which must be yet another lesson on something or other. If Shy People represents the clash between urban and rural values in America to Soviet writer/director Konchalovsky, then perhaps some time away from the Cannon group might provide him with fresh understanding of the people about whom he will be making films in the future. His next three projects (Homer and Eddie, Tango and Cash, and The Inner Circle) were far from acclaimed for any startling insights into these films’ characters.

1987 (R) 119m/C Jill Clayburgh, Barbara Hershey, Martha Plimpton, Mare Winningham, Merritt Butrick, John Philbin, Don Swayze, Pruitt Taylor Vince; D: Andrei Konchalovsky; W: Gerard Brach, Marjorie David; C: Chris Menges; M: Tangerine Dream. Cannes Film Festival ‘87: Best Actress (Hershey). VHS, LV, Closed Caption