Odd Jobs by John Updike Page B

voted for nature over nurture, for love over social position. In this it confirms us in our wishes, and assures us of the soundness of our instincts.
Overboard
is about bad nurture: Russell, in being wifeless and permissive, is a bad father, and Hawn’s mother a bad mother in raising a little rich bitch. This mother—a New Yorker shown in her outrageously posh apartment surrounded by pillows and dog manicurists—figures not so much in the plot as in the moral equation. For raising her daughter poorly, she must be punished, albeit lightly; twice she is shown being thrown out of bed by the swervings of the yacht as the plot zigzags toward resolution. The husband, on the other hand, has his punishment foreordained, in the loss of his star of a wife; therefore he must be established as deserving punishment. So we see him decline to rescue her on the day after she fell overboard, and instead embark on months of floating orgy with some Los Angeles tarts. He deserves to be left, the mother deserves her lumps, the boys deserve a mother, the lovers deserve each other, and we the audience deserve to congratulate ourselves for feeling so pleased about it all.
    All this moral rigor would be merely mechanical, of course, if Hawn and, to a lesser extent, Russell, who in
real
life lives with her, did not bring warmth to the acting, and give their educations—their transformation into loving adults—a rounded-out, on-screen reality. In
Broadcast News
, by contrast, the educations of the romantic principals feel incomplete, and we are frustrated by the heroine’s inability to find happiness with either man. In
My Life as a Dog
, the boy’s education or maturation is anticipated but never arrives through the odd muddle of a dying, receding mother and repeated sexual assaults by too many pubescent girls. Instead of becoming human, he becomes a dog, barking crazily.
    Moonstruck
balances its accounts and gives us our way, but with its tongue in its cheek; it is a consciously old-fashioned—charmingly so—movie.
Overboard
, for all of its slapstick, takes itself more seriously, and moves us without a wink, especially at the moment when the heroine,suddenly faced with two husbands and two lives, tries to puzzle her way to the truth of who she is. We allow confusion-of-identity plots their implausibilities because they bring to life, in a world that tends to lock us in, the possibilities of reversal and renewal. Like
The Last Emperor, Overboard
deals with the poignant mystery of being oneself: a puzzled tot thrust into the condition of emperor and buffeted by post-imperial history, and a young woman born into blood-curdling privilege and then dumped for her salvation into the lower middle class. We are so persuaded, in
Overboard
, of the moral and sexual superiority of beer over champagne that it comes as a shock, at the end, to learn that the money belongs to Goldie Hawn’s Cinderella, and that she will bestow it upon her carpenter-prince. How will he avoid, then, becoming as fatuous and effete as the former husband? Already, one of his sons is heard demanding a Porsche. This final fillip, perhaps intended as a casual sop to our notorious Eighties greed, disturbs the fable so nicely constructed. How can she, now knowing herself to be rich, slip back into the healthy rigors of wifely servitude? Money is the root of all evil in
Overboard
, and its final overthrow needs a Nineties sequel, in which the money goes overboard.
    * Why not name them, nearly three decades down the road? Howard Lindsay, Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, and William K. Zinsser. Only Zinsser and I still live.
    †
The Witches of Eastwick
, concerning which I wrote the agent responsible for the deal, on July 10, 1987, “I have seen the movie and after surviving the bursts of grossness in the beginning, and the echoes of my own dialogue, I settled into the incoherent fantasy of it all and especially admired the skating around in pink balloons and the very vivid pomegranate