Being Human

previously: Family style

Being Human is a 1994 dramedy (?) written and directed by Bill Forsyth. The film tells the story of five different men, all played by Robin Williams, spanning time and space, in different vignettes, linked together by a narrator who is telling us five stories in one.

We first see a short glimpse of Williams on a beach in the modern day, and in voiceover, we hear him talking to a woman, who wants to tell him a story. Williams quickly stops conversing with her, and it’s her narration alone we hear through the rest of the film.

The first vignette is Williams as a caveman with a partner and two small children. They’re happy until one day a group of marauders come. Williams and his family attempt to flee, but the men catch up and take his partner and children as Williams hides.

Before they can leave, Williams confronts them, despite being badly outnumbered. The men prepare to ritually sacrifice him, but they change their minds and show mercy. They still leave with his family, who they seem to be treating kindly. Their priest gifts him a talisman before they depart. Williams simply watches them leave as his children cry out for him. End of first vignette.

The second vignette takes place in Ancient Rome. Williams’s character now has a name, Hector. All of the men he plays from here on share this name. Hector is a slave to Lucinnius, played by John Turturro. Hector has a relationship with another slave and they often talk about going “home” together, even though they’re from different places.

Lucinnius is in financial trouble, and the only way his debt will be forgiven is if he dies. He opts to kill himself rather than be killed. He accepts these terms quite easily, and is actually sort of relieved to not have to worry about anything anymore. He and Hector are “friends” (“As close to friends as a master and slave can be,” the narrator tells us in a cheerful voice as I grit my teeth.) So Hector is troubled when Lucinnius tells him what has to happen and that he’ll have to help if Lucinnius can’t successfully kill himself. He’s even more troubled when Lucinnius tells him he panicked and implicated Hector in some crimes and now he’s wanted by the state, and he also expects Hector to be a good slave and die with him.

Hector seems to go along with this, but does ask Lucinnius, before they die, to make him free and put it in writing. He only wants to die a free man, he says. Lucinnius carelessly agrees and prepares to kill himself before freaking out and running with the knife, shrieking that he can’t do it as Hector timidly pursues his knife-wielding master. I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to watch Robin Williams and John Turturro do suicide pact schtick, but the filmmakers decided that was what the people wanted, apparently. Yee-ikes.

Lucinnius trips and falls on the knife, but it still takes him a minute to die. Hector holds him and reassures him. Once he’s dead, Hector quickly washes his hands, steals some of Lucinnius’s clothes, grabs his freedom paper, and flees the country with his girlfriend, whose official freedom did not matter to the plot apparently, but whatever. The last we see of them, they’re on a ship, going “home,” wherever that may be, together. End of second vignette.

The third vignette takes place in Europe (?) in medieval times (?). There’s a war going on. Hector is from Scotland (?). And he’s not involved with the war. He’s travelling with a small group, including his friend, who says he’s a priest but may not really be, but the injured and the dying soldiers all over the place need someone to comfort them. Also in their group is a young widow from Italy (?). She and Hector don’t speak the same language, but an attraction quickly develops between them. He learns bits and pieces of her language and they agree to leave the group and go “home” together, even though their homes are in different places. He seems confused by this concept but dutifully follows her.

When they arrive at her home, he’s surprised to find she has two children and her mother living with her. She expects him to put on her dead husband’s clothes and slot right into her life, but he can’t, realizing once he’s there that her home is not his after all. He leaves that same day, “walking out of her life forever,” according to the narrator. End of third vignette.

The fourth vignette opens with this new Hector dreaming about the end of the last vignette. This time he’s from Portugal, but has been recently shipwrecked with a large group of survivors, including his former lover and her new boyfriend. Awkward.

As everyone else scrambles for survival and maintaining a semblance of a society, Hector hoards food and obsesses over getting close to his ex again, even though she won’t even speak to him. He keeps offering her assistance, and her new boyfriend is friendly enough to Hector, but repeatedly asks him to just leave them alone. Hector refuses to accept this.

This is the vignette Ewan McGregor is in. He’s onscreen for approximately thirty seconds. A group of men steal some of the supplies and make a break for further inland, but two of them are caught. The group’s incompetent leader, Dom Paulo, played by Hector Elizondo, is wishy-washy about the men’s fate and decides to put it to a vote whether they live or die. Hector (the character) is a spineless coward and votes twice, both ways, his hand halfway up each time. Alvarez, played by Ewan McGregor, immediately shoots his hand up to put them to death, and that was honestly pretty funny. It’s decided that they’ll be executed by changing the giant cross being constructed from pieces of the ship into a gallows. (Symbolism!) Paulo asks for a volunteer executioner and follows that up by “volunteering” Hector. Hector stammers that he can barely tie his shoes, how’s he supposed to handle a noose, haha? Again, Alvarez immediately jumps in: “I’ll do it.” His casual but enthusiastic bloodlust is one of two things in this entire film that made me laugh out loud.

The next day, the men are led to their death. Before they go, they beg Hector, for some reason, to see to it that their bodies are taken care of. “Promise me, when we’re dead, you won’t let them eat us? They said they would last night.”

“Who said that?”

“It was a joke,” Alvarez says, laughing nervously, in a way that makes you think it was certainly not a joke. And that’s Ewan McGregor’s entire performance in his feature film debut. The best part of the movie, A++, no notes.

As they’re executing the men by hanging them from either arm of the cross, (again, SYMBOLISM!) two Black people appear at the top of one of the sand dunes. They watch the proceedings from a distance. The white survivors all turn to the one Black guy of the group and they’re like, “You, go talk to them!”

He’s like, “You know we don’t all speak the same language, right?”

And they point their weapons at him while also offering him an extra drink of water if he does it. I’ll be honest, the white people immediately asking/bribing/threatening the one Black survivor to go talk to the other Black people for them as he’s like “uh?” is the only other part of the film where I laughed out loud.

Well conveniently, he does speak their language, and they are flattered by the “sacrifice” on their behalf but say that no more will be necessary. They’re nomads, and they agree to come back with the rest of their group and take the survivors with them to water.

Hector’s ex-girlfriend, meanwhile, has fallen ill and is too sick to be moved. Her boyfriend won’t leave her. Hector, though, has decided to move on. Before he goes, she finally agrees to speak with him. He apologizes to her and then tells her that when he gets back to Lisbon, he’ll pray for her soul in the cathedral. She laughs. She, apparently, thought deep down he really did love her more than his own life like he always said and didn’t know this was his goodbye before he abandons her forever. She rolls over and refuses to speak to him anymore.

Her boyfriend asks Hector outside the tent if they made peace. Hector says he thinks so, and then he leaves with the rest of the group. End of fourth vignette.

The final vignette is Hector, the same man from the very beginning, in modern-day New York. He’s stuck in a bad business deal with his shady friend, William H. Macy, who’s the negligent landlord of an unsafe building. He’s not too worried about it, because he keeps putting Hector’s name on the paperwork.

That’s left unresolved when Hector’s girlfriend, Anna, played by Lorraine Bracco, comes to pick him up. He’s borrowing her car for a bit to take his estranged kids to the beach while his ex-wife and her new husband go on vacation.

The kids seem kind of prickly at first, but they very quickly warm up to him when he explains why he hasn’t been around for the past few years.

“Lots of people get divorced, it doesn’t mean they disappear,” his daughter tells him. (Mrs. Doubtfire came out the year before this, by the way, and its success was the only reason this much worse Robin Williams movie got a theatrical release.) Hector explains that he wasn’t Okay after the divorce and needed some time, and then he got in another bad business deal and ended up in prison for a bit. Surely that won’t happen again any time soon.

The film closes as he’s having a cookout on the beach with his kids. His daughter urges him to savor the moment, because “this is about as good as it gets,” and he hugs his son. The end.

I have to echo what a lot of critics said about this film at the time: The vignettes are all supposedly interconnected. Aside from Williams playing each main character across five different stories, they’re all variations on the same themes and there are also smaller moments that mirror each other. But there’s just no connective tissue. I honestly struggled to remember each vignette and their order for this summary. This film was actively leaving my brain as I was watching it. It feels more like an anthology piece than anything, but the running themes of family, loss, and freedom only end up muddying the waters rather than strengthening it.

It purports to be both a drama and a comedy, but it ends up sitting in this weird middle ground. It goes without saying that Williams was a talented actor whose primary strength was comedy, but he could also be genuinely dramatic and dark when called for. This films calls for nothing from him. He spends most of the movie, regardless of the vignette, as a stammering coward who never really has a character arc. The closest he comes to one is the Ancient Rome vignette, I think. And then there’s the very end where his daughter urges him to live in the moment and be happy. But that’s kind of it. It’s mostly just things happening to him that he never really learns a lesson about.

There are moments, like the one-sided suicide pact, where I’m sure it’s supposed to be dark humor, but it ends up just being awkward. When the group of African nomads meet the Portuguese shipwreck survivors, the translator tells them the Africans want to see their bellybuttons to prove they are “real men.” The stuffy Europeans solemnly unbutton the bottoms of their shirts to display their bellybuttons as the Africans observe carefully and smile and nod. And, like, it’s supposed to be funny. I know it is. It kind of sounds funny the way I’m describing it? But it’s not. The tone is just off, it’s weird, it falls flat, and again, it’s just awkward more than anything.

There are no real moments of drama either. There are no stakes, no real consequences. It just keeps floating on to the next scene, the next vignette. There’s no driving force or momentum behind anything, nor does it let you just sit with any of the darker moments. Moving on, but at a leisurely pace.

And then there’s the narrator. Narrators in movies are, in general, a pet peeve of mine. There have been cases when they’ve been employed well. But more often than not, it’s something that’s been introduced at the last minute because the filmmakers realized their story doesn’t make sense and the audience won’t be able to follow it, so they need to get someone in the booth to try to stitch everything together and hold the audience’s hand to help them jump over some leaps in logic. This movie is a textbook example of this. Apparently, after poor initial test screenings, the studio demanded re-edits, including the addition of narration, and boy can you tell this was a soulless studio afterthought. Bill Forsyth was not happy with the final version of the film himself.

The narrator sort of sounds like Lorraine Bracco, but Theresa Russell is credited as “The Storyteller.” She never appears onscreen. But if Lorraine Bracco’s character is meant to be the Storyteller, that wouldn’t really make sense either. Who is this woman, and why is she telling Hector this story in the first place?

I don’t necessarily blame Russell for this, but her readings absolutely drove me up the wall. It’s very simple, singsong-y, a detached veneer of cheerfulness regardless of what is happening onscreen, very “I’m reading a child a bedtime story,” and it does nothing for the already muddled, mushy tone of the film. Who is this movie for? What is it even trying to be?

Without the narrator, the film would still be kind of an incohesive mess, I think. But I would at least respect it a little more. When a narrator is employed in this manner, it feels like the filmmakers think I’m stupid and can’t figure out what they’re trying to do on my own. The slow, reciting-nursery-rhymes style of the narration does nothing to convince me I’m not being condescended to.

I know this film is trying to do variations on a theme, a big circle of life, people are alike all over, simultaneously intimate and epic kind of story. But it’s ultimately unoriginal and forgettable. It’s another film that’s the worst thing a film can be: Boring. I can already feel it leaving me, and in a week’s time, it’ll be like I never saw it at all.

Coming up next: Shallow Grave