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‘Hero’
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 02, 1992
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John Bubber, the baby-faced drifter who comes forward as "the Angel of Flight 104" in Stephen Frears's hilariously sophisticated satire "Hero," is an Everyman saint in the great tradition of John Doe and Longfellow Deeds. His provenance is pure '30s, most obviously in the populist hymns of Frank Capra, and pure sentiment; he's the democratic ideal, the average man in the street who, though he may be sleeping in his car, can never lose his personal integrity and innate sense of goodness and fair play. A man who, though he shuns the spotlight, nonetheless takes to it like a natural, becoming a kind of folk hero by virtue of his basic common decency.The problem with John Bubber is that he's a fake. Played with beatific serenity by Andy Garcia, Bubber has good luck fall in his lap when he picks up a hitchhiking Bernard LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman), who, quite by accident, has just finished risking his life to rescue a group of passengers trapped in a crashed airliner. A hustler and petty crook, LaPlante is hardly a glory guy; his motto is "Keep a low profile," and so, after he performs his heroic deed, he slinks away into the night without taking credit (just a purloined pocketbook stashed under his arm), losing a size 10B Florsheim in the process. This lost loafer becomes a Cinderella's slipper of sorts when Gale Gayley (Geena Davis), a star TV reporter who was among the rescued passengers, offers a $1 million reward for its mate, which LaPlante unthinkingly left with Bubber -- who subsequently materializes to claim the reward. As complicated as this might already seem, rest assured it's only the beginning. If "Hero" steps a trifle tentatively in its early moments, it kicks into high gear with Bubber's emergence as a symbol of good. What Bubber never imagined is that he would become the idol of millions, a point of light, a hero. He thought maybe he'd get the price of a meal; instead, he's healing the sick and ministering to the needy, all of it with the skillful humility of a visiting cardinal. There's great skill, too, in the way that Frears has applied twin currents of the '30s spirit -- the optimistic and the cynical -- to our current economic crisis to create his own modern-day variety of Depression-era farce. The result is unique and up to the moment; both sendup and homage, it's like a combination of "Mr. Deeds Comes to Town," "Nothing Sacred" and "His Girl Friday." With a little "Hail the Conquering Hero" thrown in, to boot. In other words, it's the sort of film Capra might have made if he'd had an honest bone in his body. By making Bubber the fraud and LaPlante the hero, Frears ("Dangerous Liaisons," "The Grifters") and screenwriter David Webb Peoples ("Unforgiven") turn the whole concept of heroism on its head. A Buster Keatonish figure with a shuffling walk and dim blinking eyes, LaPlante bumbles into performing a courageous act in the same way he bumbles through the rest of his life. Hoffman has used his little man's beleaguered trot before to win an audience's sympathy, but he has never seemed as scrawny and Job-like as he does here. LaPlante is God's favorite victim and the perfect schlemiel, but by getting up every time he's knocked down, Hoffman makes us like him despite our reservations. He's down, but never out. Frears already has demonstrated the wonders he can accomplish with an ensemble cast, and the performances he gets here, both from his three stars and the oddball collection of supporting players, are blissfully playful and loose. Davis, who with her birthday-bow mouth embodies an entire generation of screwball heroines, is a Lois Lane for the '90s: smart, accomplished and a little daffy. Gale Gayley is 100 percent newspaper woman; even while she's being carried away from the burning plane, she screams out that this is "her" story. Still, she's grown disillusioned with the coarse opportunism of the media. And because Garcia's quietly modulated Bubber, who has begun laying hands on the blind, seems to represent human decency, she falls head over heels for him. All this pressure, though, is too much for Bubber, who has taken on the look of a panicked simpleton, and who, overcome with guilt, wanders out onto the ledge of his hotel to end it all. The dexterity with which Frears executes this final twist sends this story of winning losers rocketing toward its enormously satisfying resolution. With "Hero," Frears has contributed a critique of the all-American humanism of Capra that also manages some uplift and optimism of its own. It's cagey, funny and vivaciously smart. It may also be one of the worldliest fairy tales ever made, and that rarest of all things, a family film with real meat on its bones.
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