Mask

At the 1986 Oscars, Cher was so bitter about not getting nominated for her role in Mask that she wore that insane Bob Mackie outfit with the feathered headdress to present an award to someone else while making it all about herself. Of course, she had her revenge two years later, winning Best Actress for Moonstruck, but when Mask came out, it was only her third major movie and, more importantly, the movie is some of the most schmaltzy, sappy, unwatchable bullshit you’ll ever see. I’m guessing the Academy voters got to main character Rocky’s ridiculously dumb poem and turned that shit right off:

“These things are good: ice cream and cake, a ride on a Harley, seeing monkeys on a tree, the rain on my tongue, and the sun shining on my face. These things are a drag: dust in my hair, holes in my shoes, no money in my pocket, and the sun shining on my face.”

Mask is about Rusty, played by Cher, and her son Rocky, played by Eric Stoltz. Rocky has lionitis, a condition that causes calcium to keep growing on his skull, giving him a huge, freaky-looking face. Each scene falls into one of three categories.

The first category is people who are mean to Rocky, then shape up after being intimidated by bikers. Despite being a 9th grader, Rocky is constantly surrounded by one, two, or dozens of adult bikers who don’t let anyone get away with giving guff to Rocky–not students, not school principals, not carnies.

The second category is about how wonderful Rocky is. Most people he meets don’t need to be growled at by bikers because they instantly fall in love with him. On his first day of school, students switch from staring at him to laughing with him after he makes a sarcastic comment. He befriends a popular guy by memorizing his school locker combination along with his own. He gives an answer in history class so good, his entire class claps for him. Feeling sorry for Rocky after he complains that no girls like him, Rusty bizarrely decides to get him a prostitute. But instead of sleeping with her, Rocky stays up talking to her, giving her the trite advice, “When something bad happens to you, you gotta remember something good that’s happened,” which seems to inspire her to improve her life. Rocky falls in love with a blind Laura Dern and teaches her what colors are like by handing her rocks at different temperature, which opens her mind. They kiss and fall in love.

The third category of scenes, which are about Rusty’s drug addiction, almost make this movie watchable because they aren’t drenched in syrupy sweetness. Cher is gorgeous and compelling as Rusty, the single mother, biker, and drug addict who loves her son fiercely. She’s in a vicious cycle of numbing her intense feelings about her doomed son with drugs, which make her more prone to pick fights with him, making her feel awful, and tempting her to deal with her feelings with more drugs.

Rocky tells her he got an A on his poem and reads it to her, but she’s not very interested (I wasn’t either). So Rocky gets mad at her for always being wasted, she rips up one of his baseball cards, he says he hates her, and she slaps him. Later that night, Rocky has one of his severe headaches, and she cuddles him while reminding him to repeat his mantra, “Make myself well.” After another huge fight, Rocky gets some space from her by spending the summer as a camp counselor. When Rusty and the other bikers pick him up at the end of the summer, she announces that she’s given up drugs for good. It’s a good story and well acted by Cher, but it’s stuck between all that other dull, sweetsy stuff.

In the end, like we all saw coming, Rocky dies in his sleep, and Cher does a beautiful job expressing Rusty’s grief. We see some bikers put flowers and baseball cards on his grave and then are forced to hear him read his terrible poem again while watching clips of the movie we just sat through, and the credits mercifully roll.

Unfortunately, the true story is sadder than the movie version, which omits a big detail: Rusty had two sons and after the death of Rocky, she sold his life story for $15,000 to help pay the medical bills of her older son Joshua, who was dying of AIDS. It’s such a shitty and unfair life that I’m not surprised these filmmakers wanted to portray Rusty and Rocky in the best way possible. But, reading about the real Rusty, I wonder if they glorified her a little too much, making her less interesting than she really is.

In the movie we see Rusty hugging Rocky while he had his severe headaches, but in real life, she would send him to his room alone and say, “Don’t come out until you have made yourself well.” And then, when her other son was dying of AIDS in the mid-’80s, she maintained the same delusional belief in self-healing, claiming that he was healthier than ever while he was covered in skin lesions. That’s a far more complex character than the angelic woman and her perfect, suffering son portrayed in this movie. I wish I’d watched the true story.

VERDICT: GUILTY