MacKinnon: A Simple Twist of Fate (1994)

After showing that he could handle a straight dramatic role with Grand Canyon, Steve Martin went out on a limb with A Simple Twist of Fate, a loose adaptation of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. In addition to playing the main role, Martin wrote, produced and all but directed what must be the most sombre, restrained moment in his career, a character study of a reclusive woodworker who finds his life turned upside down when a small girl is abandoned at his doorstep. As might be imagined, it’s a film that sets out to luxuriate in Martin at his most melancholy, which means luxuriating in Martin’s voice at its most melancholy. Yet Martin’s peculiar brand of melancholy was always directly proportionate to his wackiness – the funnier he was, the more a certain longing crept through, poignant precisely because it was perpetually surprising. So to see him play a straight tragic role is quite unusual, let alone a role that denudes his voice as much it does here. For the first half, Martin’s character hardly speaks or even interacts with anyone at all – we just see him alone, working in his cabin – while in the second half he largely restricts himself to his adopted daughter, who’s only old enough to speak back in the last few scenes, leaving the conversational burden to an ensemble cast that includes Stephen Baldwin, Catherine O’Hara, Gabriel Byrne, Laura Linney and Anne Heche. Writing his part more or less in monologue, Martin admittedly gives himself a few opportunities to renew some of his most familiar stand-up routines. But they’re pretty half-hearted and always absorbed back into a silence that moulds itself to his voice with such mysterious tactility that it’s as if he’s been to Twin Peaks, passed through the Black Lodge, tapped into the other side of his comic psyche. Bereft of his voice, his body language is transfigured, his poses and postures almost imperceptibly awry, as a very different kind of Steve Martin emerges, more identified with his hands than his words, collapsing himself into a character who seems to spend all his time sawing, planing, polishing and smoothing down planks of wood, for the sake of fondling, caressing and feeling his collection of coins. This is Steve Martin the banjo-player, the writer, the painter - and possibly the director, since you can’t help but feel his hand in the momentum and rhythm of these sweeping pans and tracking-shots, as they recarve George Eliot’s fairy tale out of some of the lushest, most mysterious textures of the 1990s.