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Susan Sandler's script takes this same Old World view of urban feminism. Isabelle would be emotionally independent, but the movie knows better: she needs a man. Forced to choose between man the European snake and man the American sofa, Isabelle chooses domestic comfort. Crossing Delancey takes Sam's cozy tone too, when it should be screaming its way into black satire. If that's all there is for a modern woman -- or for an actress of Irving's sorceress smarts -- then she might as well curl up in bed with Henry James or Henry Miller and turn out the lights on life.
Daisy Miller, only shriller. That's how European filmmakers have often pictured the American woman. In Luc Besson's The Big Blue, Arquette has to whine, pout, plead, giggle, all to get the attention of an otherworldly deep- ( sea diver (Jean-Marc Barr). But he has eyes only for dolphins and, vagrantly, for his fiercest competitor (Jean Reno). Two men dive to the depths -- and, perhaps, the death -- while she stays behind and paints Barr's apartment. Arquette has always looked like the last wanton of Woodstock, taunting the zippered-up '80s with her lithe carnality. But here she's baggage: the petulant voice of logic in the ear of an innocent sea creature. "I'm here! I'm real! I exist!" she shouts to him, and he dips into the sea like Flipper. Why would an actress go to the Mediterranean to be insulted on film? For a paid vacation, perhaps. But in the midst of this Riviera holiday, Arquette was taken hostage to the bland emotional terrorism of a talented young director in over his head.
One European director, Costa-Gavras, came to America looking for terrorism, and found it. Well, maybe he and Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas invented it, at least in this fulsome form. Betrayed is the story of Cathy Weaver (Winger), an FBI agent sent into the farm belt to investigate an armed conspiracy of the crackpot right. She falls in with, and then in love with, Gary (Tom Berenger), the man of her darkest dreams. For such a paranoid gent, he is pretty quick to accept Cathy. Before you can say "George Lincoln Rockwell," he has invited her to a "coon hunt" -- ten white men having fatal sport with one innocent black. Before you can mutter "Zionist Occupation Government," he has taken her on dates to a paramilitary campground, a bank robbery and a political assassination. (Guess it beats dinner and a movie.) As Gary's angel-face seven-year-old daughter tells Cathy, "One day we're gonna kill all the dirty niggers and Jews, and everything's gonna be neat."
The film's conspiracy theory is neat, for sure. It manages to embody every institution liberals fear -- including the FBI, which keeps sending Cathy back to the bed of the man who would kill her. It makes for a familiar movie dilemma, harking as far back as Notorious (1946) and as recently as Married to the Mob (last week). And when these two loving enemies strike sparks, the picture comes briefly to coherent life. To a tough role, Winger brings all the gifts -- chameleon face, whiskey-and-chocolates voice, hoydenish energy, keen moral intelligence, fierce authenticity -- that make her a pleasure, an adventure, to watch. Pity they are in the service of a schizoid scenario that leaves this splendid actress in the same quandary as her screen sisters Irving % and Arquette: cross, blue, betrayed.