Ragtime

Ben Shahn's canvases are the model, at the service of Voltaire's joke on history as gossip. Tournant du siècle newsreels, real and staged, the barrelhouse pianist (Howard Rollins Jr.) provides accompaniment. "What kind of music do you play?" "Anything they ask me to, and then I play ragtime." Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern) between Stanford White (Norman Mailer) and Harry Kendall Thaw (Robert Joy), she cashes in as one is shot through the skull and the other declared legally insane. She enjoys a fling with a New Rochelle suburbanite (Brad Dourif), whose sister (Mary Steenburgen) and brother-in-law (James Olson) discover the musician's foundling in their garden. So it goes, the daisy-chain of Americana unfolding in tandem with the medium itself, from flip book to "photoplay" courtesy of the Lower East Side artist (Mandy Patinkin). ("And now we make pictures from the light," his toast earns a roll of the eyes from the vapid Muse.) E.L. Doctorow's satirical panorama, more earnest but more humane in Milos Forman's streamlined adaptation. The Melting Pot cracked, a land of idealism and opportunism, the Model T of progress stained by the horseshit of prejudice. Victim to terrorist to martyr, a Black man's path for redress. "You think this revenge will restore your damaged pride?" "I wouldn't be here if I didn't think so." The comedy of the amoral belle haggling in the buff is not lost on Forman, whose fondness encompasses a Donald O'Connor musical number and a Bessie Love cameo among Keystone Cops. And there's James Cagney as Rhinelander Waldo, the most kinetic of actors stationary and puffy yet radiating sage melancholy as the commissioner gazes down at the Pierpont Morgan Library siege. "Fireworks, bombs... It's the same thing." Houdini's closing trick adduces a pregnant note from Makavejev's Innocence Unprotected. With Pat O'Brien, Moses Gunn, Kenneth McMillan, Debbie Allen, Jeff Daniels, Jeffrey DeMunn, Fran Drescher, Michael Jeter, and Samuel L. Jackson.