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Movie Interview
Girls school rules
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[05/17/00]

Movie Review
"Center Stage"
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[05/16/00]

Movie Review
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"
A restored version of Luis Buñuel's Academy Award-winning black satire takes aim at the Spanish director's most cherished old hates.
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[05/16/00]

Television
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With "Millionaire," one of the most successful TV shows ever, ABC threatens to crush its bewildered competition during the crucial May sweeps for advertising dollars.
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[05/15/00]

Movie Review
"Hamlet"
There's something rotten in Denmark, but not in this darkly glittering update of Shakespeare's great tragedy.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[05/12/00]

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In the eardrum-shattering piece of Manichean bombast that is "Battlefield Earth," Travolta carries on like a refugee from the "Outer Limits'" Ivy League who can't believe that he landed such a grungy, low-prestige job as chief security officer on Earth -- and is nonetheless determined to bring it off with impeccable hauteur.

Travolta was doubtless patterning himself on imperious movie villains from war films and espionage flicks, but what comes out is more like a New Jersey boy's playground impression of a New England snob. Yet in this cushy phase of his career, when he can carry even a screeching turkey like "The General's Daughter" to box-office success, Travolta operates with the press like an alien diva himself. He jetted into San Francisco, where his people arranged 15- or 20-minute group-grope interviews for him.

Also "Battlefield Earth" L. Ron Hubbard's pulp sci-fi classic comes incomprehensibly to the screen starring Scientologist John Travolta. By Andrew O'Hehir Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Midway through my session, which included eight or nine Internet and radio reporters -- someone asked the crucial question. He wondered whether the actor, producer and prime mover for the film version of L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi novel, "Battlefield Earth," was upset by widespread rumors that the film would turn out to be propaganda for Hubbard's Scientology belief system.

Travolta responded that he found such advance buzz "funny, because it's so not what it is. Fortunately there are a lot of literate people in the world who know the difference between science fiction and philosophy, and clearly separate the two." He said he actually enjoyed some of the way-out conjectures, especially the one that the film would contain "subliminal" messages. "It didn't work for Pepsi," he quipped.

At the same time, he didn't want to limit people's perceptions. He called "Battlefield Earth" an "entertainment piece," with "no particular message, other than how big is your popcorn or your candy bar." But then he said, "That's what good movies do, they provoke thinking of some sort," and compared the questions audiences might have after seeing "Battlefield Earth" to those they had when they wondered what was in the briefcase or under Ving Rhames' Band-Aid in "Pulp Fiction."

In my personal minute in Travolta's spotlight, I asked whether he'd worked on the script for "Battlefield Earth." He said he didn't need to. "[Screenwriter] Corey Mandell loved this book -- we finally found the right writer. He really adapted it well. All the great points of the book he got down. I don't think I altered anything of his. That for me is completely unusual. I'm [usually] like, 'Oh, he wouldn't say this ...' I'm like all over it. In this particular case, I wasn't; it was like, 'Oh, this is great.'"

Was it fun, I ventured, playing the most educated character of his career? "He's educated in his own mind; he's a legend in his own mind," he said. "I love when he's at the table with his senior [officer] and he's like, 'Aren't you aware of my academic achievements?' He's so full of himself it's just delicious."

And did his experience in Hollywood make him enjoy the concept of his alien character always trying to gain some kind of dirty political "leverage?" "[That applies to] Hollywood, Washington -- that's why I think it's so much fun, it's so identifiable. The whole leverage background was hilarious."

As he shook hands with everyone and flashed a flood-lamp smile on each questioner, you got a sense of the piercing sweetness that first made Travolta a star. He was genuinely thrilled that the packed house the night before had given this film hearty applause. (Of course, it had also cheered for Hubbard.) After breaking the ice, there was little time to do anything more than churn up the shallows.

A Travolta fan since "Carrie" and TV's "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (both 1976) and "Saturday Night Fever" (1977), I worried that this now-beefy, always-beaming baby boomer, who hasn't given a great performance since "Get Shorty" six years ago, had fallen into the same syndrome that plagued him in the early '80s, when he said, "I got fat on success." Some actors, like Orson Welles, come into their own as performers when they let everything hang out. But with the bulkier Travolta, as with the even bulkier Gerard Depardieu, I think an air of self-indulgence gets between the audience and the robust sensitivity that used to be his gift.

You couldn't conceive of "Saturday Night Fever" without Travolta, and he was the heart and soul of Brian De Palma's masterpiece, "Blow Out." His career, like De Palma's, might have been richer if "Blow Out" had been a hit. He relaxed into the role of a limited technician with unlimited feelings and found more screen depth than at any time before or since. By contrast, his comeback role as a hit man in "Pulp Fiction" had an aura of camp, and the joke behind his sensational turn in "Get Shorty" was that he played a hit man like a movie star.

Maybe at this stage in his life and career, it's easier for him to draw on movie-bred experience. He did respectable but dull work in "A Civil Action," and from "Broken Arrow" to "Battlefield Earth," he's gone further and further into absurd stylization. All you can say about his performance here is that it gives the movie the only oomph it has.

Next page | "The get-up invited me to have a blast, to get Shakespearean"