"Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"

Cameron Diaz, Calista Flockhart, Glenn Close -- why didn't we get to see this finely crafted, intimate star vehicle on a movie screen?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Mar 9, 2001 | The world of movies that never get a theatrical release is littered with cheapo teen horror pictures and action movies that look as if they cost a dime to shoot. But what does it say when a picture like Rodrigo Garcia's lovingly detailed "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," which won the first-time writer-director a prize at Cannes last year, doesn't make it to theaters in this country? (The picture makes its debut on Showtime Sunday at 8 p.m.)

"Things You Can Tell" was shown to critics last year, many of whom loved it. John Powers, for one, raved about it in a lead review for Vogue. But MGM/UA decided not to release the picture theatrically. An MGM/UA spokeswoman explained that although the picture is small and "great," the studio felt that it wouldn't be able to draw an audience in theaters and would have a much better chance of being seen on Showtime.

The irony is, she's right -- at least in the way the major studios sell their products, deeming certain pictures unworthy of the time and money it would take to market them. But if a movie like "Things You Can Tell" were properly sold -- for example, opened in art houses or specialty theater chains instead of just dumped into multiplexes, with its prestigious stars emphasized -- there's no reason it couldn't find at least a respectably sized audience. (By comparison, a similarly well-written and -directed picture, Kenneth Lonergan's "You Can Count on Me," gained a great deal of critical respect and audience affection, without any of the star power this movie has. It may not have made a fortune, but then, it didn't cost a fortune to make.)

The small bit of good news is that at last people will have a chance see "Things You Can Tell" for themselves, albeit on a much smaller screen than it deserves. Garcia's debut as a writer and director (the son of writer Gabriel García Márquez, he's well established as a cinematographer, having shot pictures like "Danzon" and "Mi Vida Loca") is one of those finely crafted, intimate pictures that are often characterized, by studio publicists, critics and audiences alike, as "small." It is small, but it also has plenty of weight and heft. It's loaded, like a raindrop.

"Things You Can Tell" consists of five gently interlocking vignettes, all set in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, an environment that encompasses cozy, if sprawling, suburbia and coolly efficient office parks, places where loneliness breeds even in bright sun. There are no elaborate plot machinations in "Things You Can Tell." Almost all the action springs directly from the performers; the beautifully conceived script gives them plenty to work with.

The women's stories are discrete elements, overlapping only in subtle ways -- their narratives don't rely on contrivances or coincidences to make them interesting. Dr. Elaine Keener (Glenn Close) is a successful middle-aged physician, the type of person who'll never admit to herself or anyone else that she's lonely; she has been pursuing a recent crush at her workplace, but he won't return her phone calls. Rebecca (Holly Hunter) is a 39-year-old bank manager who discovers she's pregnant by her married lover (Gregory Hines).

Rose (Kathy Baker), an author of children's books and a divorced mother of a teenage boy, thinks about romance for the first time in years when a handsome, poised, charismatic hospital accountant (Danny Woodburn), who also happens to be a dwarf, moves into the house across the street from hers. Christine (Calista Flockhart), a tarot-card reader, recalls how she and her dying lover (Valeria Golino) got together in the first place, reinforcing the seams of a relationship that the two of them know will soon be severed by death. And Kathy (Amy Brenneman) is a single police detective who dates much less frequently than her alluring and sexually confident sister, Carol (Cameron Diaz), who happens to be blind; Kathy takes the timid step of going out with a colleague (Miguel Sandoval), while Carol deals with her own disappointments, never succumbing to self-pity.

It's crucial to point out here that these aren't just sensitive little fables wrapped around the perennially popular subject of women's feelings, the peculiar manifestations of women's power that are so often dangled in front of men like dainty sticks of dynamite. This is hardly the stuff of those plodding women's dramas you see on the Lifetime network, things that attempt to deal with "real" women and their "real" problems but only end up mixing dishwater dreariness with sugary hopes and dreams to come up with something that feels about as lively as mud.

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