The Good, The Bad and The Silly
by Chris Dashiell

THE LIMEY is a nice surprise. One of the oldest movie themes - man seeking revenge - is made new by means of a singular style. An aging English tough guy named Wilson (Terence Stamp) has finished his prison term and comes to Los Angeles to find the man who caused his daughter's death and make him pay. It seems she'd hooked up with a big shot record producer named Valentine (Peter Fonda) who was involved in some shady deals. Wilson enlists the help of a couple of his daughter's friends, and begins to circle his prey, biding his time. But Valentine's security chief, played by an impressively menacing Barry Newman, is aware of the threat and takes steps to have Wilson eliminated.

It all sounds very by-the-numbers, but director Steven Soderbergh makes it anything but. He uses an unusual technique - frequent cutting to different angles within the same scene along with cuts to other scenes in different time periods give the film a jagged, subjective quality. The drama takes place in Wilson's head - his intense searching for answers, his mournful reveries on his past life, the boiling up of his anger - all take shape on the screen side by side in Soderbergh's ever-shifting montage. It's one of the least straightforward ways he could have told the story (it even takes some getting used to at first) but it creates a unique mood of tension and, in the end, produces a deeper understanding that was only possible through this style. Stamp is in fine form, with his steely eyes and his sense of barely suppressed emotion. Even as we see him so intimately from the inside, he appears to the rest of the characters as the Other - one of the recurring jokes is that nobody can understand what the limey is saying. Fonda was the perfect choice as a man whose power was founded on co-opting the counterculture of the 60s - not a villain but a strangely attractive evocation of a lost time. The picture is suffused with a wistful, ironic feeling for the 60s and early 70s - Fonda's character, the music, Wilson's flashbacks (taken from Ken Loach's 1967 film Poor Cow) all beautifully convey the deceptive pull of memory from that era. Among other things, the movie explores, with a light touch, the question: what went wrong?

Steven Soderbergh is becoming a sort of creative hero. He is always trying something different, experimenting with new themes or breaking new ground in old genres. Even when he doesn't quite succeed - as in Kafka, for instance - I have to tip my hat to him for making the attempt. Last year he showed, with Out of Sight, that he could make a mainstream Hollywood film that is stylish and intelligent. The Limey is another success - the approach to the material is so different that I didn't notice how unremarkable the story really is until long after the film was over. It's as if the plot was just a pretext for Soderbergh to extract a secret from his heart.

I look forward to every new film by Martin Scorsese with some excitement since I consider him to be one of the great directors. I don't bother reading any reviews first - I just go to his pictures because I admire him tremendously. But in fairness to him, or to any artist, I must stop short of idolatry, and not expect him to hit the mark every time. He's slipped up before and, in BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, he's slipped up again.

It seemed promising. Script by Paul Schrader, New York location, a life-and-death story about an Emergency Medical tech (Nicolas Cage) who is haunted by the ghosts of people he couldn't save. The pacing is frenetic, the photography and editing are first-rate, there are some hilarious bits of business, and some other sequences that are genuinely tense and scary, but, as a whole, the film just doesn't add up. For one thing, the script starts with the premise of the guilt-haunted man and then doesn't know where to go with it. Cage just continues to be freaked out, on three successive nights on duty, with no deepening of the theme or dramatic development. He keeps seeing the face of a young woman named Rose, one of the people he couldn't save, and this device is repeated over and over. Cage's voice-over attempts to be poetic and disturbing - more often it is tired and cliched, along the lines of "this city will kill you." (Perhaps this fault can be traced to the Joe Connelly novel on which the film is based.) A relationship of sorts between Cage's character and a woman played by Patricia Arquette has no life to it - no chemistry between the stars, nothing in the script to interest us in them, and Arquette's performance is wooden. It's a harrowing film. Each of Cage's partners on successive nights (John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore) is crazier than the last. There is a sense of the misery and degradation of the poor, the insanity of life in the city. This sense is poured on without much of a break. I felt like I'd been through a lot of stress after seeing it, but, unfortunately, the stress was without point or catharsis. There's enough Catholic imagery in the movie to base a master's thesis on - references to heaven and hell, the virgin birth, the Rose character (think Dante) and more. I can see that Scorsese was trying to infuse the material with meaning, but the script can't support it and the film turns out to be an exhausting mess. Well, a Scorsese failure is still more worth seeing than most popular successes, but I'm sorry to report that this is his weakest effort in quite some time. I'm sure he'll rebound.

If you wanted to make a comedy that was very funny and very strange, and you wanted to have fun with ideas about consciousness and identity, and celebrity and low self-worth, and you wanted to be as silly as possible but still be clever and smart - well, those are all big ifs, but one thing you would have to forget about was making your story believable. Once you abandoned any attempt at being realistic, you would be well on your way (provided you were director Spike Jonz and writer Charlie Kaufman, newcomers who don't know any better) to creating a film called BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.

Realism is abandoned gradually enough so that the audience is well prepared. When the unemployed puppeteer, Craig, (John Cusack) applies for a job as a file clerk, and it turns out that the business is on the 7 1/2 floor of an office building, which you get to by stopping the elevator between floors and opening the door with a crowbar, and, of course, the ceilings are so low that you have to stoop, and a training film explains that the floor was created in order to accommodate the midget wife of the building's original owner ... well, then you're ready to accept just about anything the movie throws at you, even a hidden portal discovered by Craig which, if you crawl into it, leads to fifteen minutes inside the head of John Malkovich, after which you fall out of the sky and land next to the New Jersey Turnpike.

And that's just the beginning. Being John Malkovich is fun because it takes its absurd premise and runs with it as far as it can go, in as many directions as possible, and does so without winking at us or congratulating itself on how wacky it is. The film has ideas - the novelty is that they're treated not as underlying themes but as toys for the characters (and us) to play with. If the film has a flaw, it is that Jonz and Kaufman get too involved in the mechanics of their plot, and this drags the film on longer than it should. Craig has a wife, played by Cameron Diaz, made to look frumpy, perhaps so that she won't look better than Catherine Keener, who plays a bitch from hell named Maxine with whom Craig is in love. After Diaz gets to be Malkovich, she becomes obsessed with being a man, then falls for Maxine too, and the gender-reversal idea is played to the hilt. The reason I think this goes on too long is simply - who really cares about the fates of these people? The point is in the wild conceit of the film's ideas, not in the characters. In a way, this is the film's limitation - even the best cartoons can get tiresome, and this is the kind of movie that seeing once is quite enough. On the other hand, it doesn't have any pretensions. The title itself says "ephemeral." One other thing works in this movie's favor. I mean John Malkovich. He's wonderful, and I think it took guts for him to agree to do the project. It's one thing to play yourself in a cameo - but it takes a real lack of vanity to play the repository of other people's fantasies in a film with your real name in the title.

There are lots of funny scenes. There is one in particular featuring ... no, never mind. Just go see it.