Made (2001)

Friendship is one of those intangibles of life that most movies are destined to cheapen or over-explain or just plain get wrong. The movies, due to their mostly Point A yields Point B yields Point C yields Climactic Revelation structure, generally don’t allow that friendship, like love (and this is a problem of many romances too) usually, for better, for worse, for neither, just is. Made, Jon Favreau’s first and, so far, best picture, is a buddy movie, small in scale and ambition, but it transcends that condescending description because it embraces both the “small” and the “buddy” to their fullest. The smallness of the picture reveals a humble generosity of spirit that has remained, to a certain extent, in even the bigger Favreau pictures, such as this year’s Iron Man. The buddy (and the miracle) of this picture is that we actually believe that the two protagonists, Ricky Slade (Vince Vaughn) and Bobby Ricigliano (Favreau) are life-long friends, destined to forever screw one another over and bail one another out at the last minute.

Made was Favreau’s first picture as both writer and director, but he also, as we know, wrote and co-starred in Swingers, directed by Doug Liman, a few years prior. If memory serves, Made was considered by many to be a weaker sauce follow-up, a similarly themed picture that lacked the startling break-out-new-thing energy of the prior film. This is unavoidably true, to a certain extent, and I admit that I fell into that MORE! NEWER! MORE! NEWER! trap upon seeing Made the first time. But time has evened the playing field, revealing Swingers to be what it always was: a likeable, well-meaning, calling card for a talented group of men. Made is a more confident, shaggier picture, the jokes subtler and less readily announcing of their struggling screenwriter cleverness.

Ricky and Bobby are struggling boxers, though Ricky, it is immediately apparent, is only along for as long as Bobby sees fit to take the vocation seriously. Both are financed (vaguely) by the underworld, represented here by Peter Falk in a scary, profane, more vicious than is immediately apparent kind of performance that never gets awards consideration, but should. Falk finds seemingly innocuous lines, such as (paraphrasing a little), “I don’t mean to interrupt your little dream-fantasy whatever” and imbues them with a hilarious matter of fact old man’s no bullshit danger. Columbo as the crank you always suspected he was.

Ricky, normally the more divorced from reality of the pair, recognizes the boxing ambition for the joke that it is, and attempts to hammer this through to Bobby in the opening scene as they slug away at one other in the ring: two amateur friends too inexperienced, timid (and affectionate towards one another) to do anything besides stage a fight that elicits boos from even the sort of people who would attend such a match in the middle of the day. Ricky wants Bobby to cash in his goodwill with Falk and get them both started as criminal underlings. Bobby wants to stay legitimate, working slightly more innocent (and considerably lower paying) jobs such as driving around his own stripper girlfriend (Famke Janssen). That is a volatile arrangement, and it soon gets Bobby in a situation in which he can no longer resist Falk’s needling to get further in. Stuck, Bobby vouches for Ricky too, and the two are sent to act as gophers for a money drop in New York.

The above could be taken from a more action driven comedic thriller, Midnight Run perhaps, but I’m making Made sound more plot oriented than it actually is. Favreau sets his story in motion succinctly, gracefully, and uses it as a framework to stage virtually every imaginable scenario in which two very good friends can drive one another bat-shit with over familiarity. Onscreen, Favreau is a rarity: a legitimately interesting straight man who can upstage more stylized performers with a defeated, slumped, sharper than you expect verbal dexterity that calls attention to itself precisely because it doesn’t call attention to itself. Favreau has an unerring feel for desperation and defeat; and it shades his jokes of awkwardness and embarrassment in a way that shows such as the hellishly redundant American version of The Office repeatedly fail to understand.

Vince Vaughn is a stylized performer himself, of course, especially in this picture, and one that even Favreau can’t trump with his matter of fact under-acting. It’s no mystery why Vaughn has become a star; the mystery is that he hasn’t become an even bigger star. The tragedy is that either degree of stardom invariably leads to more lucrative and forgettable work. Vaughn is a delirious tight-rope walker here though; he and Favreau take that wonderful final scene in Swingers, in which Trent is revealed to be the deluded child we always suspected he was, and push that for the entire running time here. It’s aggressive, absorbing, brave, dangerous work: the sort of work that begs to become tiresome or self-amusing, but never does; because Vaughn and Favreau never lose track of the character’s damaged sense of humanity: his need to assert his existence and importance, regardless of how much it may increase his chances of getting himself and his friend killed in the process.

Ricky’s giddy, reckless, nearly surreal self-absorption and entitlement (watch the scene on the airplane or in the hotel with Sam Rockwell), particularly when stacked next to Bobby’s struggling to put things together wannabe family man, drives the central question of Made: why the hell does Bobby continually suffer this egomaniac? Favreau manages something tricky here: he answers that mystery, striving for pathos near the end, without compromising the picture’s unencumbered, airy tone. By the end we feel as if we’ve witnessed a true, fair (Bobby is ultimately just as naïve, in a less obnoxious though equally self-damaging way) exploration of two friends; two people who punch one another out so they can eat pizza together that night. For that alone, Made is an accomplishment, an authentically human movie.

★★★½

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 2001 |

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