WHEN Hollywood movie stars tackle "serious issues", the results are distinctly variable. The three-part abortion drama If These Walls Could Talk, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, had Demi Moore on board as one of its stars and executive producers, and Cher, who features in the third episode, also directed that segment. The film will be screened six times next month on the American cable television channel HBO (Home Box Office), beginning on October 13th.
Each of the three episodes of If These Walls Could Talk takes place in the same house and deals with a young woman considering an abortion, and there are 22-year gaps between the settings of the three stories so that the film can look at changing attitudes and access to abortion in the United States over the past half-century.
The first segment is set in 1952 and features Demi Moore as Claire, a young widow who finds herself pregnant after a single sexual encounter with her brother-in-law. It is just six months after the death of her husband and she dreads the reaction of his socially-conscious family should they learn of her pregnancy. Even though Claire is a hospital nurse, she finds it extremely difficult to find out how to go about getting an abortion.
For the second episode the film moves to 1974, when John and Barbara Burrows are living in the house with their four children. Barbara, played by Sissy Spacek, has taken up a university course now that her children are growing up, and she is taken aback to learn that her pregnancy test is positive. Her police officer husband assumes she will have the child while Barbara has to rely on her feminist teenage daughter for information about an abortion option.
The final segment is set in the present when the house is shared by a number of students, one of whom, Christine (Anne Heche), finds herself pregnant by her university professor (Craig T. Nelson) who is married and gives her the money to have an abortion. Her room-mate (Jana Pinkett) is morally opposed to abortion and tries to dissuade her from visiting a family planning clinic run by a doctor played by Cher. The clinic is picketed by an anti-abortion prayer group who also try to change Christine's course of action.
When Demi Moore and Cher met the media in Toronto after the screening of If These Walls Could Talk, their star power deflected from their film's serious content. The room for their press conference could not accommodate all the journalists who turned up and the two stars arrived wearing dark glasses and over half-an-hour late.
Being from different generations, they contrasted their own experiences. Demi Moore has three daughters with the actor Bruce Willis and Cher has two grown-up children from her former marriage to Sonny Bono.
"For my generation," commented Moore, who is 28, "not only has abortion been available legally, but also support systems, education and counselling that's not necessarily pro-abortion. The issue became more of a political than a personal one as I grew older, and the film tries to take back that external aspect of it and put it back inside the human being."
Cher, who is 50, said that as she entered her teenage years she was aware of a "huge stigma" about abortion. "People didn't want to talk about it," she said. "I was married when I was 16, so it didn't affect me personally, and by the time I was divorced, it was legal. I hope this film keeps people from being statistics and allows them to be women. Some guy in Washington can't tell us women what to do about having children."
Moore said she also saw the film as a very personal communication to access the human side of the issue and to take it out of the political arena. "It's too individual," she said, "and nobody's business but their own, for people to come up with a general answer to it. More and more I'm shocked at how puritanical American society is and that's something very difficult to overcome - the fear and control, the fear of the body and the way they just want to shut down any kind of discussion on any kind of sexual level in the US."
Cher concurred: "America is very much a marriage of idealists and hypocrites. We're so polarised. We've the biggest belief in marriage and the highest divorce rate."
Demi Moore insisted that their film was "not specifically pro-choice". She said: "We tried, regardless of what our personal opinions are, to make this film reflect both sides of the issue and in that way allow people to make their own decision. If it happens to affect things on a bigger level, that would be wonderful."
How do they resolve the issues raised in the individual episodes of If These Walls Could Talk? Even though it suffers from so much dramatic compression that it borders on soap opera, the first episode, set in 1952, is the most credible in terms of establishing the character's dilemma and ways of dealing with it. It is also the most unsettling, in a sequence in which Claire, the pregnant nurse, clumsily attempts to abort herself with a knitting needle. Finally, she makes contact with a back-street abortionist and has the termination.
The second episode is, like the first, directed by Nancy Savoca, who worked on the scripts of all three segments. It registers as more facile in its set-up, and the feminist daughter speaks like a student advice manual. In the end Barbara, the pregnant mother who says she thought she was finished having babies, decides to have the child.
The final story, directed by Cher, is the most uneven and unconvincing. Halfway through, it shifts the emphasis from the pregnant student, Christine, on to the doctor (played by Cher) who is carrying out her abortion. On the day Christine arrives at the clinic, she is confronted by a raucous, angry mob inside, immediately after the abortion has been completed, the movie turns wildly melodramatic as a young man connives his way into the clinic and shoots the doctor several times.
Although there have been cases of doctors murdered in America by anti-abortion zealots, the incident borders on the risible here as Christine struggles off the operating table and cradles the blood-stained Dr Cher in her ants. Cher's directing of herself becomes an over-the-top exercise in self-indulgence and undermines the entire film. The results continue to be distinctly variable when Hollywood movie stars tackle "serious issues".