Show i d e s t P pC p- p P C ft I CD J u ii Co C CJ J E CE o E Ea ca ca Q a Queen Latifah brings her charm to her latest role r Last 1 nothing tb los e a lot to like r l-r Stephen Hunter r The Washington Post I now let me see if I l have this right Queen Latifah is in the Alec Guinness role That's exactly what happens in Last Holiday and its it's surprising how well it works After all Latifah isn't dragooned into playing either Guinness's great Obi- Obi Wan or his even eyen greater Colonel Nicholson the mad British officer who built the bridge on the River Kwai Latifah plays Georgia Byrd as Guinness way Guinness way back in 1950 and arid working from a screenplay from the once- once famous British writer JB played Priestley George Bird In both cases of course the situation is the same A somewhat mousy unprepossessing but definitely unfulfilled person is diagnosed with a to soon-to-be-fatal illness Wanting a last fling the doomed one cashes in inthe inthe inthe the life savings and takes off for an exotic spot But as ashe ashe ashe he or she mingles with the rich of such a milieu imminent death liberates him or her from a sense of social inferiority Suddenly ud e y George and Georgia blossom as never before charisma wisdom wisdom wis wis- dom dam savoir-faire savoir courage and grace grate They may be dying but they're definitely on the road to self- self improvement I i Indeed ed underneath it all in both its iterations Last Holiday decodes as a variant on JM B Barries Barrie's e brilliant play The Admirable Crichton which arue argued that in ina a a state of nature either a desert island of ran an inhibition inhibition- destroying fatal diagnosis a natu natural aristocracy rist cracy of talent talent talent tal tal- tal- tal ent and sense would come to assert itself over at were simply class T Thus while Last Last Holiday is hardly a a. a godsend or ev even n a or a good its it's a heart good ed and spirited kind-spirited if mild pleasure It begins with Latifah tifa proving once again the w weird rd parallels between rap stardom and movie stardom m Both formats I seem to be about a magical something called presence and L Latifah even in a down dialed-down quiet role like this one has it as did for th the record the great Guinness who could do more with less than nearly any actor alive Ive I've just seen re-seen his fabulous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 in which he quietly dominates dorm domi domi- nat nates s a whole menagerie of showoffs t I tAs As this version of the Priestley screenplay has it Georgia Byrd works in cookware in Kragen's department department department depart depart- ment store in New Orleans the background of pre- pre flooded New Orleans bright and vibrant gives the movie an incidental melancholy She's the best salesclerk salesclerk salesclerk sales- sales clerk the most beloved the most organized professional and humane of yet course the least rec rec- Her boss a prig is abusive her romantic ardor dor for a young man LL Cool o l J 1 goes largely unno- unno j The death sentence is IS courtesy of a CAT scan scan that Last Holiday 10 Cont on 10 J Page tAl y WMS a l 1 If t 0 oJ Last Holiday Cont from Page 8 suggests she has three weeks left She quits cashes in and heads towell towell towell to- to well I liked this touch even if I cant can't for the life of me figure out how filmmaker Wayne Wang the it Czech picked Republic actually to the spa ski-and-spa town of Vary where here she puts in at a star five-star joint that looks like likey it was built in Anno Domini I XIII by one of Octavians Octavian's flounder engineers The old resort with its liveried staff its sense of Old World elegance and decorum its insistence on pro pro- I I viding nine forks with every dish certainly feels fresh as a movie background when of course most of us were expecting banalities like Paris or London or St St. Tropez Amid the splendors Georgias Georgia's fundamental decency and good sense soon wins converts among the rich and famous including senators and congressmen and most pungently the very same Matthew Kragen her erstwhile employer and around all-around snoot shoot and twerp This unpleasant fellow fellow fel fel- fel low is played aggressively by Timothy Hutt Hutton n who is usually cast in nice-guy nice roles He seems to relish the guy bad-guy thing but Memo to Tim Drink a milkshake milkshake milkshake milk milk- shake bud The guy couldn't weigh pounds Meg Ryan could clean his clock and the oversize Latifah could gobble him like an hors d'oeuvre in a nanosecond Of surprises there arc few of reversals there are none of expectations they are low The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency Its It's never cither either terribly funny finny or terribly dramatic but Latifah's quiet solidity and common common common com com- mon sense root it in ways that larger louder pictures never achieve |