Married to the Mob (1988)

Jonathan Demme said, if I recall, that the intention of his The Truth About Charlie was to remake Charade in the vein of the French New Wave, which had reached full bloom at around the time of the original Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film’s release. That is a fine idea, only sporadically successful at best (though I confess to not remembering the picture too well) but the real problem with Charlie may have been that Demme had already made his French New Wave pictures. Something Wild, a tonally disorienting tight-rope walk of a screwball comedy punctuated with violence that counts, plays like an American approximation of some of the French New Wave’s experiments with genre flexibility. Married to the Mob, while lacking a bit of the classic Something Wild’s pulse, is of the same key, and underappreciated.

There are few things more exhilarating in the movies than a picture impressing us with its creator’s amusement. I don’t mean glib post-modernism. I mean, as with some of Joe Dante’s pictures, a film that projects a sense of a talented, assured movie-maker recognizing the clichés and limitations of certain genres and casting them aside like the shackles they are, and racing for the moon of his id instead. If we had to continue to belabor the French New Wave comparison, Demme would probably be most in line with Truffaut, a director with an encyclopedic knowledge and love of movies who also happens to be a major humanist.

Something Wild is certainly a major film, a nearly peerless working of a good-bad-rowdy-party-boy-wish-fulfillment tone with three classic performances. Married to the Mob isn’t as much of a surprise; the most obvious reason being that Something Wild came first, so we were on to what Demme was up to by this point. Married to the Mob is also broader than Something Wild, riffing, as the title suggests, on the familiar Italian sitcom clichés. The broadness is part of the joke though-part of the picture’s absurdist surreality; and Demme is always aware of what his story could possibly devolve into. The redemptive factor of Married to the Mob is that it is legitimately gonzo kooky, a flakey comedy thriller that, occasionally, suggests the irreverent screwball wit and spirit of a picture that you might watch during the day on Turner Classic Movies with Ralph Bellamy or Don Ameche mated with something more undeniably in tune with the me-me-me-1980s.

Married to the Mob opens brilliantly. Two men, dressed in dowdy Wall Street-ish business apparel, wait for someone at a station as the train rolls in. We are consciously led to believe that this third man is a co-worker, a fellow cog in the traditional day to day tedium that is our working stiff lives. This third man, looking a bit like an upright egg on two legs, catches the train at just the right minute, and the two other men board behind him. The train passes through a tunnel, and one of the men shoots the egg man in the back of the head. In a typical bebop tonal corkscrew, an inappropriately romantic-somber song begins to play on the soundtrack-New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”.

The two men close the egg man’s eyes, wiping a bit of blood away, allowing him to appear to be just another morning traveler, exhausted with ennui, facing the next day of caged banality. The two men, who we can now confidently call hit-men (one of which is played by Alec Baldwin) wonder how anyone can do that to themselves day in day out, squished like sardines. The idiocy/cowardice of the modern working drone is voiced in nearly every crime movie we’ve seen, but it’s a testament to the scary-sad-funny power of this opening, that, for once, you think the hoods just might be on to something.

Demme never plays with his material this masterfully in Married to the Mob again, but there are many pleasures to be had-the first hour in particular radiates that Demme specialty-a hum of life and eccentric good humor that’s propelled by a self-consciously strange, fantastic, throbbing soundtrack. The “plot”, such as it is, doesn’t really intrude until the too busy, not-as-flip-as-it-thinks-it-is climax. The “plot” is an old standby. The Alec Baldwin character, called “Cucumber” Frank de Marco, returns home to his wife, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is clearly just as exhausted with her lifestyle as the train passengers in the opening moments. Angela is first glimpsed in a hair salon, getting her beautiful-intimidating red-brunette curls touched up (by the always welcome, familiar to Demme, Charles Napier), as the New Order song concludes. Angela’s a heroine with a traditional to the movies problem: she’s a siren oblivious to her powers, clouded by a feeling of claustrophobia. Her obligatory girlfriends hate her, perhaps because they rightly sense that Angela has checked out long ago (and secretly recognize that Angela is much more beautiful).

Something happens, and Angela finds herself getting what she wished for: freedom for herself and her young son from the mafia. The head of this picture’s mob, Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), has sexual designs on Angela, of course, and won’t let Angela stay as gone as she’d like. The FBI, represented, primarily, in this picture, by Mike (Mathew Modine) and Oliver Platt, believe Angela to be sleeping with Tony and follow her-hoping to implicate Tony in a murder. Tony’s wife, played by Mercedes Ruehl in the part that most actively courts cliché, is convinced that Tony and Angela are sleeping together too, and follows along as well.

Married to the Mob isn’t as labored as the above would lead you to believe, few Demme pictures are. The picture revels in incidental, possibly ad-libbed, moments of humanity, danger and high comedy: Tony nearly dying because his henchman forgets his onion rings; Platt and Mike’s exchanging of a high-five; Angela and Mike’s meet cute inside of a cramped elevator, with Mike pinned under Angela’s new street bought chair; Angela’s pleading for a job in a hair salon; Angela and Mike’s making out, after spending the platonic night together, the following morning. Angela and Mike don’t kiss in the boringly photogenic fashion of most movies, its full-bodied, hungry, emotionally needy and naked; and considerably more moving.

The performances are on par with Something Wild. Michelle Pfeiffer, having now committed the Hollywood sin of passing her fifth decade of existence on this planet, is now playing villains in films that I’ve mostly skipped. But Pfeiffer, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was one of our very strongest, most beautiful, most vulnerable, most interesting movie stars. Pfeiffer has a gift: otherworldly looks that can still somehow exude a feeling of Earthbound need: she sells you the familiar to the movies pabulum of her needing to be saved by a man without you feeling too guilty about it in the morning. It has something to do with Pfeiffer’s eyes; they’re stunning, but also just a bit bigger than they should be, a little not quite right. It’s fitting that Pfeiffer has worked with Tim Burton in probably the best female performance to grace his oeuvre; as her eyes conjure an image of a crazy Burtonian little girl frying ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. This wonderful, stylized, broad, movie-powered presence is ideal for a part such as Angela, which is a pure confection of genre anyway. Pfeiffer is a lead actress you feel you could actually successfully buy a drink, and that, in and of itself, would nearly be enough.

Mathew Modine appears to be on a different planet here, and that’s to the picture’s benefit. Modine’s Mike is an oddball, one who clearly also resents his job (the notion of discarding past things runs through the entire picture-though it never intrudes) and finds strange ways of his voicing his malcontent. Mike’s flip, usually intentionally unfunny remarks are occasionally allowed a greater edge than one would expect, and Modine seizes on the character’s wobbly mood swings; his line readings are appealingly helium contemptuous-he gets the manic tone of the entire picture. There’s a moment, mid-way, when Ruehl bursts in on Mike and Angela’s first date, expecting to find Angela with Tony. Ruehl asks Mike whose husband he is, and, Mike, not missing a beat, says, in perfect planet Jupiter-faux-good-humor “I don’t know, whose husband were you looking for?”

And there’s Dean Stockwell, a routinely wonderful character actor (he had the best moment in Blue Velvet, which is saying something). Ray Liotta was the heavy in Something Wild, and it’s among his strongest performances, but Stockwell, in his way, has an even more daunting assignment. Tony, the mafia chief, is the picture’s villain, but he’s also Mob’s comedic poker. The trick is to play the dangerous and the funny without canceling one or the other or both out and winding up with a performance of barely calibrated, miscalculated goo. Stockwell leans on his fey-menacing-macho qualities (Blue Velvet brought this out too) with the invention and dexterity of both a good actor and a natural comedian. Stockwell murders someone early in the picture, and tells them “You disappointed the shit out of me”, this line could’ve been a throwaway, but, in this picture, it’s the throwaways that linger and sting and tickle.

Married to the Mob isn’t without problems. One wishes that Demme had scaled back on the hyperbole of the violence. Something Wild became Something More, because the violence truly intruded on a genre with which it didn’t belong (few films manage this effectively). Married to the Mob never gathers that kind of surprising weight beyond isolated episodes, and it threatens to evaporate altogether before the end credits. The climax is well-staged but unrewarding; Demme not quite managing to totally elude the shackles of the genre after all. But Married to the Mob is still an unruly, loosey-goosey gem, a picture with spark and personality that feels authentically nourishing and good for you in a way that pure entertainments rarely do. And, of course, we lost Demme, as it seems we must usually lose our great filmmakers, to the boring Oscar machine-the ultimate train to conformity. Perhaps someone should stage a spiritual hit, or at least find a way to pipe “Bizarre Love Triangle” into Demme’s office. But that’s only the movies. Nothing in real life seems to trump change, our need in real life to move on from something already perfectly wonderful.

★★★

Posted on June 11th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 1988 | 9 Comments

They Live (1988)

No we haven’t, excluding the Allen picture, stumbled into another thirty days of horror, but They Live was on television the other night, and though it has been written about endlessly by other enthusiasts, I watch no questions asked when that picture is playing, regardless of what DVDs may be stacked in the corners of the room. I briefly mentioned the film over at Joe’s place the other day, but wasn’t going to write about it for fear that my readers think me possessed of some tunnel vision.

I’ll risk it. They Live may, along with Big Trouble in Little China, be John Carpenter’s most purely pleasurable picture, seemingly less interested in pressing its effect upon the audience than most of Carpenter’s work. The film is flakey and loose; wearing its frustration bluntly on its sleeve, blessed with a total absence of self-consciousness, effectively reflecting the personality that Carpenter exudes in his generally appealing, self-effacing interviews.

And this may be what the current political war pictures are missing, a feel for the everyday as well as a punk cover screw the critics outrage. Filmmakers concerning themselves with Iraq seem less interested in making a great Iraq movie than being the director of a great Iraq movie, ego divorcing them from any immediacy of feeling, we generally feel as if we’re just sitting through another disingenuous politician’s platform, and critics wonder why we skip the pictures! My readers have convinced me that I was probably too kind on Stop-Loss recently, I essentially reviewed the first act, only to shut my eyes and ears of everything that followed, but that picture signaled, in the beginning, a bit of hope for the current coming home movie. Peirce at least had conviction and, dare we get a little maudlin, heart which needn’t be encased in quotation marks.

If Stop-Loss has conviction, They Live has conviction in its lack of conviction, the thing has a flip despair. Carpenter’s pictures, with few exceptions, normally receive shitty notices, and this seems to free the director to take on a vaguely political B picture without any illusions as to how it will ultimately be received. The “message” is front and center, in your face, a gifted amateur’s outrage. Ridiculous looking skeletons have taken over Earth, aligned with the government, and are assuring our complacency through a solid middle class lifestyle, which is why it falls upon the bums on the edge of town to save the world, primarily because they haven’t been cut in on the deal; aided by a cheap pair of sunglasses that exposes the aliens, as well as their subliminal messages which include SLEEP, MARRY, and CONSUME, they seek to set matters straight.

The film has an undeniably quaint those were the good old days (in genre cinema) quality, but there is an inspired black joke that Carpenter should’ve further played up, that the difference between the aliens’ reign and our own is negligible, the stakes non-existent. Our heroes, Roddy Piper and Keith David, are intent to free the human race from enslavement, but we never understand why the victory matters, which is to say that it doesn’t matter, except to establish to which victor goes the spoils, which will never be Rowdy Roddy Piper or Keith David or anyone of their social standing anyway. Their plight is bitter, not particularly well-intentioned, and pointless. They Live captures American indifference in a more honest and memorable fashion than any five Jarheads.

Some have expressed disappointment in the stunt casting of Rowdy Roddy, but that’s essential to the film’s junk ennui vibe. Some have suggested that this would have been an ideal collaboration with Carpenter’s favorite leading man, Kurt Russell, and while I generally make it my practice to encourage casting Russell in anything, he would be too flexible, too commanding, too just plain good, of an actor for the part. They Live needs a square, clunky hero, with just enough self-awareness to be in on the joke, and that’s precisely what Piper supplies. His delivery of the film’s oft quoted “kick ass and chew bubble gum” line is labored, and perfect; a construction worker seizing the end of the world as ultimate opportunity to blow away bankers whom he (probably) would’ve killed even if they were human. Russell’s approach would’ve been too outright satirical (a bit like his funnier than the movie deserves role in Overboard) and would’ve elevated the film a bit too much out of the muck.

Casting Russell would’ve also denied us just a bit of the primal charge of the film’s most famous scene, where David and Piper beat the unholy shit out of each other, for no other reason than neither of them have anything else to do. Many have commented on the scene’s comic effect, that it goes on so long that it crosses the divide from funny to tedious to funny again (and I couldn’t help but notice parallels between it and Cronenberg’s vicious bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises, any college students reading are welcome to that term paper), but the scene also firmly belongs thematically, tapping into an emasculated poor beefy guy rage that Fight Club doesn’t satirize nearly as well as people claim. Carpenter’s picture has a Samuel Fuller outrage from the economical pits of pulp thing going on, and I bet if Fuller had made the exact same picture it would enjoy considerably higher critical regard.

The ending is broad, tasteless and perhaps the closest the picture comes to being legitimately brilliant. The world is saved, but you’re still left fucking an alien. The sunglasses revealed, more than anything, to be a pain in the ass.

★★★½

Posted on April 11th, 2008 in Reviews, Horror, 1988 | 12 Comments

Another Woman (1988)

An outstanding director’s misfire can be a bit like a relationship that has suddenly lost footing: everything you admire about that person becomes grating, an unintentional self-parody. As I watched a character casually expound on the latest Brecht production she caught over a glass of wine with long lost friends in Woody Allen’s Another Woman, I wondered, “Do people drink beer in Woody Allen movies?” Actually that’s unfair, a character drinks beer in that very scene, but do Woody Allen characters eat that pizza that supposed to be so good in New York? Do they shit? Do they screw? Do they read a, gulp, best seller, even behind doors that are safely locked so their friends couldn’t possibly uncover the truth? Maybe that’s why marriages are always disintegrating in Allen’s pictures: the people seek Brecht connoisseurs only to find that they’ve married Michael Crichton fans.

Another Woman aspires to address emotional cowardice, but it’s really about Allen’s ongoing fear of anything that could be interpreted as common or middle class, his occasional joyless atonement for making people laugh. The film concerns an intelligent, intimidating, successful upper crust intellectual named Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) who recently turned fifty, and, while renting a loft to start her latest book, begins to overhear the patients of the psychiatrist in the neighboring apartment. One patient in particular fires Marion’s imagination, a pregnant young lady called Hope (Mia Farrow) who speaks of her woes with a terror and confusion that has remained unknown to Marion her entire life. Marion is polished, urbane, never saying the wrong thing (depending upon your definition of wrong) and utterly miserable. Memories flood back to Marion, family members magically appear to essentially tell her they hate her and, for once, Marion finds herself vulnerable, regretful and human.

Many critics have compared Another Woman, positively, to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and, while that comparison is unavoidable, Allen wouldn’t really get his Wild Strawberries right for another ten years with the underrated Deconstructing Harry. Harry is alive, and profane, playing to Allen’s authentic inner torment and surreal wild comedy. Another Woman is insecure and self-conscious, hypocritical even, as terrified of anything messy as its protagonist. The picture desperately needs contrast, instead it has Allen’s relentless, one note plea for Major Artist status: control and contrivance masquerading as brilliance.

This film has its moments though, and the one misery after another hammering eventually wears you down. The casting was a canny move on Allen’s part, it’s jarring to see Rowlands, normally so sensual, embodying such a suffocating character, she’s terrific in an unsentimental, tightly coiled performance, we feel the waste of life. Gene Hackman, as a would be lover who got away, is too forceful of an actor to submit to the repression; the second to final scene of the film, revealing how Rowlands and Hackman became close, achieves the electric longing the entire picture has been laboring for. Sandy Dennis, as a friend who has always privately resented Marion, is even harder to forget, she’s bravely, embarrassingly raw.

As with most Allen films, the picture is beautiful and meticulously crafted (it was shot by Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist) but that only highlights the fact that we’re essentially stuck in an occasionally moving tour through a very pretty wax museum.

★★½

Posted on April 8th, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 1988 | 9 Comments

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