Following up Peter Weir's most overrated film with his most underrated one, Green Card is a nice, gentle, sweet, and ultimately touching little romantic comedy. It's not top tier Weir, but it is a sweet little film about love which ends up contrasting interestingly with Weir's earlier films filled with passion like The Year of Living Dangerously. I never got the sense that Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver's characters would last long in a relationship at the end of that film, but I feel quite differently about the main characters in Green Card.
Bronte Parrish (Andie MacDowell) starts the film by committing immigration fraud, agreeing to marry Georges Faure (Gerard Depardieu), shake hands, and then never meet again. Her being married will help her with the deciding committee at an apartment complex where they have a flat available with a solarium, and he gets American residency. They don't need each other beyond the filling out of the piece of paper for that, and it helps Bronte make the decision since she's told that Georges is a composer. Complications arise, of course. She discovers that Georges might be a composer, but he's making his living as a waiter when he waits at her table with her friends. She needs his presence to help prove her marriage to the complex people so that she can keep her solarium, plants being her work and her life, along with her boyfriend Phil (Gregg Edelman) who has no idea that Bronte has gone through with the scheme.
So, we get our meet cute where Georges and Bronte have to move in together to prove their marriage real to both Bronte's neighbors but also the pair of immigration officers who come to interview them. They must make like they know each other, like they love each other, and that's the setup for two very different people with two very different ways of life and ways of looking at life to fall in love.
I think Weir has a very strong sense of the difference between passion and love, and I find it interesting that Bronte and Georges almost never even touch in their few days together. Instead, they just talk about who they are, where they came from, and what they want. Their relationship becomes incredibly intimate as they have to reveal who they really are to each other, and this bond is much more than heightened passions at an emotional moment. This is something that could be more. They see the tenderness in each other and begin to feel it themselves.
This all gets accentuated by small scenes with Bronte's friends and family. Chiefly, her best friend Lauren (Bebe Neuwirth) who brings Georges along to a high society dinner that Bronte is attending in an effort to secure funding for her charitable organization dedicated to greening up New York. It's the scene where Bronte first discovers that Georges is more than just a boorish Frenchman crashing on her couch since he has both a brash sense of humor and can also play the piano quite well while obviously having listened to her describe her motivations and desires from her charitable work. There's also the visit from her parents (Lois Smith and Conrad McLaren) where her father, a writer hence her name, quickly figures out the situation on a general level. It's not that he figures out that she's committed immigration fraud and is covering it up, but it's that she's falling in love with this man and is trying to hide it while he's falling for her at the same time.
The situation escalates to their immigration interviews where they are taken into separate rooms and interviewed concurrently. Georges, though, feeling the pressure and getting a minor question wrong (would immigration have figured it all out if he got her face cream wrong? I've been married to my wife for more than a decade, and I couldn't tell you her brand of face cream), but the important thing is that Georges feels like he can't go on anymore with the lie, and he gives himself up.
As I've gotten deeper into Weir's body of work, I've dug out an underlying theme that pops up again and again, and Green Card ends up fitting it quite nicely: human connection in the face of a larger, uncaring systems. That the human connection here is an intimate romance without resorting to the torridness of passion is interesting, giving us this nice little look at two people, somewhat isolated from everyone around them, finding each other in an unusual way.
Is this top-tier work from Weir? Not really. It feels more like a ditty like The Plumber, but in a very different genre. I don't know where Weir was mentally when he cooked up this story. It doesn't feel like the sort of thing that would impassion him to work through all the pre-production issues, including large delays for a variety of reasons, delays that led to him taking on Dead Poets Society to fill in the gap in his schedule, but it did, especially since he not only directed but also wrote and produced the film. Still, it's a nice little and sedate romantic comedy, anchored by a pair of winning performances and Weir's solid direction once more.
Bronte Parrish (Andie MacDowell) starts the film by committing immigration fraud, agreeing to marry Georges Faure (Gerard Depardieu), shake hands, and then never meet again. Her being married will help her with the deciding committee at an apartment complex where they have a flat available with a solarium, and he gets American residency. They don't need each other beyond the filling out of the piece of paper for that, and it helps Bronte make the decision since she's told that Georges is a composer. Complications arise, of course. She discovers that Georges might be a composer, but he's making his living as a waiter when he waits at her table with her friends. She needs his presence to help prove her marriage to the complex people so that she can keep her solarium, plants being her work and her life, along with her boyfriend Phil (Gregg Edelman) who has no idea that Bronte has gone through with the scheme.
So, we get our meet cute where Georges and Bronte have to move in together to prove their marriage real to both Bronte's neighbors but also the pair of immigration officers who come to interview them. They must make like they know each other, like they love each other, and that's the setup for two very different people with two very different ways of life and ways of looking at life to fall in love.
I think Weir has a very strong sense of the difference between passion and love, and I find it interesting that Bronte and Georges almost never even touch in their few days together. Instead, they just talk about who they are, where they came from, and what they want. Their relationship becomes incredibly intimate as they have to reveal who they really are to each other, and this bond is much more than heightened passions at an emotional moment. This is something that could be more. They see the tenderness in each other and begin to feel it themselves.
This all gets accentuated by small scenes with Bronte's friends and family. Chiefly, her best friend Lauren (Bebe Neuwirth) who brings Georges along to a high society dinner that Bronte is attending in an effort to secure funding for her charitable organization dedicated to greening up New York. It's the scene where Bronte first discovers that Georges is more than just a boorish Frenchman crashing on her couch since he has both a brash sense of humor and can also play the piano quite well while obviously having listened to her describe her motivations and desires from her charitable work. There's also the visit from her parents (Lois Smith and Conrad McLaren) where her father, a writer hence her name, quickly figures out the situation on a general level. It's not that he figures out that she's committed immigration fraud and is covering it up, but it's that she's falling in love with this man and is trying to hide it while he's falling for her at the same time.
The situation escalates to their immigration interviews where they are taken into separate rooms and interviewed concurrently. Georges, though, feeling the pressure and getting a minor question wrong (would immigration have figured it all out if he got her face cream wrong? I've been married to my wife for more than a decade, and I couldn't tell you her brand of face cream), but the important thing is that Georges feels like he can't go on anymore with the lie, and he gives himself up.
As I've gotten deeper into Weir's body of work, I've dug out an underlying theme that pops up again and again, and Green Card ends up fitting it quite nicely: human connection in the face of a larger, uncaring systems. That the human connection here is an intimate romance without resorting to the torridness of passion is interesting, giving us this nice little look at two people, somewhat isolated from everyone around them, finding each other in an unusual way.
Is this top-tier work from Weir? Not really. It feels more like a ditty like The Plumber, but in a very different genre. I don't know where Weir was mentally when he cooked up this story. It doesn't feel like the sort of thing that would impassion him to work through all the pre-production issues, including large delays for a variety of reasons, delays that led to him taking on Dead Poets Society to fill in the gap in his schedule, but it did, especially since he not only directed but also wrote and produced the film. Still, it's a nice little and sedate romantic comedy, anchored by a pair of winning performances and Weir's solid direction once more.