Autumn in New York Movie Trailer. Watching Autumn In New York made me realise how long it’s been since anyone made a really good movie about a doomed hat-maker. Back in the golden age of Hollywood, hardly a week went by without the release of a tearjerker involving a tubercular tailor, a menaced milliner, or a fated fedora-fashioner. One can only hope that Winona Ryder’s winning turn as a quirky Gotham hat-maker will breathe new life into this otherwise moribund genre.
Autumn In New York stars the reliable Richard Gere as an obscenely glamorous New York restaurateur named Will who has a long tradition of treating women badly. Into his life steps the winsome Charlotte (Ryder), who is fast achieving municipal fame with her line of futuristic chapeaux (they actually look more like lamps or cake ornaments than serviceable headgear, but no matter). Gere is right in his element as the elegant epicure. Imbued with a middle-aged hunkiness rarely seen outside of David Bowie’s neighbourhood, Will exudes such suaveness that merely chatting with him about contemporary hat design gives Charlotte an attack of the hiccups.
Ryder, who has always had a prim, homespun quality, is less ideally cast in the role of the trendy downtown hat-maker; she brings to the part a demureness and innocence one tends to associate more closely with rural seamstresses. But this does not really matter because the character she plays is dying of an extremely rare heart disease, and once she has revealed this to her newfound beau, she stops making hats for the rest of the movie anyway.
When the womanising Will first meets Charlotte, he is clearly interested in little more than a roll in the feathers. Once he has bedded her, he announces that he has no interest in a long-term relationship, warning her that the pair “have no future.” To his amazement, Charlotte agrees, flooring him with the completely unexpected disclosure that she has a bum ticker and could drop dead at any minute.
“She’s the perfect woman: young, beautiful and on her way out,” wisecracks Anthony LaPaglia, who plays Will’s maitre d’ and confidant. But Will is not so sure. After all, he is not only old enough to be Charlotte’s father; he used to date her mother. Indeed, Will’s commitment problems seem to date from this earlier liaison, for immediately after Charlotte’s mother had declared that she loved him, he went out and seduced her best friend, and made sure everyone in town knew about it.
Now, true to form, he has sex with an old girlfriend (Jill Hennessy) on the roof of La Paglia’s house while the slightly daft Charlotte is downstairs reciting fairy tales to the maitre d’s children. This is Will’s way of telling Charlotte that if she is looking for Mr Goodbar, she is looking in the wrong place.
The pair briefly break up. But after a tearful, heartfelt apology, Charlotte takes him back. Then she starts falling down a lot. Panicking, Will begins a frantic search for a heart surgeon capable of performing the dangerous surgery that might save her life. Assisting him in his research is a beautiful young museum curator who happens to be his pregnant, long-lost daughter.
Seemingly the result of a long-forgotten one-night stand, the young woman is not nearly as vindictive as one might expect her to be. Moreover, she has excellent computer skills. I will not spoil things for prospective moviegoers by revealing the ending, but let’s just say that things work out better for Will than they do for Charlotte.
Although I am overjoyed that comely hat-makers have returned to the silver screen after too long an absence, Autumn In New York is not an unqualified success. Joan Chen is the type of ham-fisted director who incessantly uses falling leaves as a symbol of Charlotte’s physical decline; the closer she comes to death, the greater the amount of decaying golden foliage that cascades to the ground, though mercifully Ryder never turns completely yellow herself. Chen also seems unaware that Will is a complete pig who deserves to be strung up in one of the barren trees the pair incessantly stroll under throughout the movie.
Moreover, Ryder occasionally veers toward the goofy, sometimes talking as if she has food in her mouth. She also has a propensity for saying things like, “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” to which Gere ripostes: “Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.” Obviously, each of these assertions is open to debate. But things could have been worse; during one tender moment, Will tells Charlotte that her mother was the kind of calculating patrician who regularly ate ice cream with a fork, hummed all the time, stole garnishing from waiters and adored the sound of Stephen Stills’ voice. Good thing she wasn’t in the movie.
Still, for all its failings, Autumn In New York has many compensating virtues. For one, it brings together two of the greatest squinters in the history of motion pictures. Gere, who has squinted his way through films like Pretty Woman and An Officer And A Gentleman, seamlessly meshes his trademark facial tic with his equally captivating smile. But Ryder is more than up to the challenge, effortlessly interspersing girlish squints with perky eye-rolling and a barrage of barely audible giggles. Not since Helen Hunt faced off against Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets has the cinema seen such a masterful display of lower forehead duelling. My hat’s off to both of them.
Autumn in New York (2000)
Directed by: Joan Chen
Starring: Richard Gere, Winona Ryder, Anthony LaPaglia, Elaine Stritch, Vera Farmiga, Sherry Stringfield, Jill Hennessy, Mary Beth Hurt, Kali Rocha, Steven Randazzo
Screenplay by: Allison Burnett
Production Design by: Mark Friedberg
Filmography by: Changwei Gu
Film Editing by: Ruby Yang
Costume Design by: Carol Oditz
Set Decoration by: Catherine Davis
Music by: Gabriel Yared
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, (USA and Canada), Columbia Pictures (International)
Release Date: August 11, 2000
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