Video Commentary

Boomer Bust

The postwar generation has passed its prime, and judging from ''The Hand That Rocks the Cradle'' and ''Grand Canyon,'' new on home video, this set isn't aging well

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By Ty Burr

Ty Burr

Ty Burr is a writer at large for EW and is no relation to Raymond or Aaron

As baby boomers hit the fortysomething years and careen into a mass mid-life crisis, so too do the movies. Saddled with mortgages and alimony, with age and arthritis creeping up like muggers, the kids aren't all right anymore. They're pretty scared, in fact, and Hollywood has been reflecting that fear by subsuming it into jive pop thrillers like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and, more rarely, by trying to confront it head-on, as in Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. If you're in a perverse frame of mind, these two make a great home-video double bill. And the order in which you watch them — whether you choose Cradle's pretestes to ease the realistic jolts of Grand Canyon or prefer Canyon to chase down Cradle's safe-as-milk formula — may say more about what you ask from movies than you care to know.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was an immense hit because, as the title suggests, it works like a fairy tale, pouring personal insecurities into an external bogeyman who can then be vanquished. Here the fears belong to Claire Bartel (Jungle Fever's Annabella Sciorra), and the threat is the au pair from hell, Peyton Mott (Rebecca De Mornay). Like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights, De Mornay is meant to be the outsider who upsets the domestic yuppie applecart, but Cradle is even more calculatingly aimed at women than those two films: It's like a Hitchcock film with production design by Laura Ashley.

Really. Unlike most horror movies, Cradle is filmed in soft, pastel colors, and the blood spilling is kept to a minimum. Peyton's misdeeds are mostly ones of manipulation, aimed at destroying Claire's self-esteem and ultimately her identity: She undercuts Claire's relationship with her young daughter (oooh ). She rips up a grant proposal Claire was supposed to mail for her husband (dear God, no ). Peyton's worst crime, in fact, is that she breast-feeds the Bartels' infant, and when the baby rejects Claire's milk (gasp!), the horror music kicks in, setting the stage for a climactic mama-a-mama battle (it's no accident that the husband, played by Matt McCoy, barely registers with the viewer). The moral is so blatant that no one needs to spell it out — yet one character does anyway: ''Never let an attractive woman take a power position in your home.''

If only the movie weren't so schematic. Or the lead characters so bland, the dialogue so dull, and, other than De Mornay's ice-fire performance, the surprises so few. That may be why it was a box office success (a roller coaster can be more fun if you know the track) while Grand Canyon, with ambitions that dwarf Kasdan's 1983 look at his generation, The Big Chill, was sneered at by the hip-oisie and generally ignored in movie houses. Canyon should find a bigger audience on video, though, if only because reality has caught up with its earnest, panicked view of modern L.A. life — and with the notion that we have to start fixing things somewhere.

But the L.A. riots have also underscored Canyon's essentially upscale shallowness. The director and his cowriter (and wife), Meg Kasdan, round up a fine ensemble cast to represent the black, white, male, and female points of view, but the movie finally sees everything from the Beverly Hills side of the street — the Kasdans' side. The shootings, the earthquakes, the heart attacks — all the things-fall-apart drama that happens to Mack (Kevin Kline), his wife (Mary McDonnell), his crass producer friend (Steve Martin), and tow-truck operator Simon (Danny Glover) — represent assaults from the outside world, more upsets of the applecart. Nothing's quite their fault, and the suggestion that it can all be patched up by a symbolic trip to the Grand Canyon is good only for a horselaugh.

Yet for all Canyon's blinkered vision, you have to give the Kasdans credit for at least trying to think like grown-ups. Truth be told, I'll take Canyon's jittery worry over the smugly entertaining navel gazing of The Big Chill any day. It beats the tasteful, divisive schlock of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, too. The Kasdans deserve to keep at it, and maybe in 30 years, when the latest plastic hit thriller concerns a maniac nurse who stalks a retirement community, they'll still be fretting away with their ensemble dramas. And cutting more deeply. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: C-; Grand Canyon: B