Regarding Henry movie review & film summary (1991)
The wife and daughter are his props. Parts of Bening's character seem to have been lopped away in the editing, so that she asks questions that are never answered. Try to follow, if you can, her thoughts about her family's financial situation, as Henry eventually loses his income and the family moves to a smaller (but by no means shabby) home. There are all sorts of little scenes scattered through the movie that seem intended to make the financial situation into an important subplot, but there's never a payoff. It's dropped.
Ask yourself, too, exactly what goes on in the physical life between husband and wife, and you'll find another thread that's hard to untangle. A little easy romance glosses over what should have been scenes of awkward rediscovery. Bening and Ford work hard during their more intimate scenes together, but they haven't been given the dialogue of truth and tentative exploration that they need to work with.
The screenplay by Jeffrey Abrams, in fact, constantly goes for the laugh over the possible reality. It has an annoying trick of teaching Henry a new word and then having him proudly trot it out to wrap up a complicated scene. The way the movie makes a connection between Ritz Crackers and the Ritz-Carlton hotel is especially annoying, combining cheap sentiment with a cheap laugh - and cheap product placement.
I was not very moved, either, by the process of Henry's physical and mental rehabilitation, during which a physical therapist (Bill Nunn) uses Pavlovian techniques to restore Henry's powers of speech. (He can't say anything? Put a lot of Tabasco on his eggs - that'll get him to talk!) Compared to the real-life experiences of gunshot victims like James Brady, Henry's experiences belong in a sitcom. All of the stages of his recovery correspond neatly to the requirements of the plot.
The ending of the film shows Nichols reaching back to the barn-burning formula that paid off for him in "The Graduate," where Benjamin disrupted the wedding ceremony with his cry of anguished hope and love. Again this time, the ritual of a staid public ritual is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a seeker after truth. But it's so neat, so formula, so contrived, I was thinking about "The Graduate" instead of about characters I had spent two hours with. So, I suspect, was Nichols.
