The Harrison Ford movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “A film of obvious and shallow contrivance”
Harrison Ford might not be the sort of actor who you would expect to turn out Oscar-worthy performances in every movie, but he has proven himself to be a huge box office draw for the past four-plus decades, and many of his films are crowd-pleasers, even for snobby critics. Roger Ebert wasn’t exactly the stereotypical snob, though. He had wide-ranging tastes in movies and often championed films that others would turn their noses up at.
Over the years, he was complimentary of Ford. He adored the Star Wars movies, gave the actor rave reviews in his many pulse-pounding thrillers, including Presumed Innocent and The Fugitive, and even defended some of the films that very few people – even Ford’s die-hard fans – would single out. For example, he loved the 1995 Sabrina remake and was willing to defend (with passion) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
However, Ebert did draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere was Regarding Henry. The 1991 drama had an unusual pedigree. Written by future Lost and Star Wars auteur JJ Abrams and directed by Mike Nichols, the legendary filmmaker behind Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, the movie stars Ford as an arrogant New York City lawyer who is humbled when he is shot in the head during a botched robbery and suffers brain damage, including amnesia.
As that description suggests, it has a highly questionable morality arc and is pretty manipulative from start to finish. Ebert was usually fairly susceptible to having his heartstrings tugged, but in this case, he flatly refused to fall under the movie’s effortful spell. “This is a film of obvious and shallow contrivance, which aims without apology for easy emotional payoffs and tries to manipulate the audience with plot twists that belong in a sitcom,” he wrote in his review.
He also pointed out how shallowly the film deals with its extremely upsetting premise. Getting shot is not a simple plot contrivance in the real world that leads to glowing self-discovery. It is a harrowing experience that, if you are very lucky, leads to nothing more than extreme post-traumatic stress disorder. In the film, it is a miraculous cure for Henry’s money-grubbing, amoral approach to life. It is, in short, a gift.
For Ebert, those factors alone were enough to condemn it, but he also noted that the film is disjointed and seems unwilling to answer obvious questions like how Annette Bening, as Henry’s money-obsessed wife, would actually feel about their rapid change in fortunes or how the couple would navigate the physical ramifications of his injury.
It is a strange movie for both Nichols and Abrams, but it helped them correct their course. By the early 2000s, Abrams migrated toward thrillers and science fiction with Lost and the Mission: Impossible franchise. Meanwhile, Nichols went in the opposite direction, returning to his roots in comedy with 1996’s The Birdcage and bringing his directorial career full circle with Closer, a film about the pain of romantic relationships that was even more harrowing than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
