BEFORE: Playing clean-up on some loose crime films before switching topics. This is one of the few Coen Brothers films that I have not seen. Linking from "30:Minutes or Less", Michael Peña was in "Buffalo Soldiers" with Ed Harris, who was also in "Pollock" with Marcia Gay Harden (last seen in "Meet Joe Black").
THE PLOT: An advisor to a Prohibition-era crime boss, tries to keep the peace between warring mobs but gets caught in divided loyalties.
AFTER: I'm sort of reminded of the beer-pairing dinner I had a couple nights ago - I was seated at a table with a guy who wasn't very talkative, which happens. Most times the conversation opens up after a few samples of beer, but I made a couple attempts to talk, and then left it alone. But I did overhear most of the conversation at the next table, which appeared to involve four chefs. I rarely get to hear one chef's opinion of another chef's meal - one in particular kept saying that the meal was too ambitious to be made in such a small kitchen, that the chef was "overreaching". I found the meal quite delicious and elegant, and tried to understand how someone could describe food in such a manner. He was probably taking things into account that I, as a non-chef, couldn't understand - perhaps food cost, time between courses, and the perceived pretentiousness of ingredients like celery root, steak tartare, and smoked eel aioli.
Something similar went on with this film - to some people, it may just be a tasty meal. But looking at the elements, and the way they're put together, it feels to me like someone was overreaching. Now, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, yada yada yada, but I have to judge a film on how enjoyable I found it on this particular day. Sure, other factors may be at work, this is always the case - but a good film should keep me interested and awake regardless, and I dozed off several times during this one.
There are some OK action sequences, particularly the attempted assassination of a crime-boss, but so much of this is cerebral (aka talky-talky) and concerned with criminals all trying to outwit each other, that I have to determine that there wasn't enough action. Too much tell, not enough show. Instead of talking about a fixed boxing match, why not film one? I'm just sayin'.
If anything, it reminds me of "The Usual Suspects", which I had to watch two or three times just to get a handle on it, and even then I wasn't exactly sure what I'd seen. I don't like it when I have to do most of the heavy lifting in piecing a plot together. Of course, I don't want to be spoon-fed all the plot elements either, so in-between there should be a healthy balance.
I guess this is supposed to be about the ethics of criminals, a variation on honor among thieves - but it takes place among a city's underworld where the loyalties are always shifting like quicksand. So how can anyone remain ethical when the alliances are always changing? Doesn't betrayal become part of the moral code, if it ends up happening so often? If you lie down with dogs, don't you wake up with fleas? Is it enough to out-think your competition when they've got bigger guns?
Also starring Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, John Turturro, Jon Polito, with cameos from Steve Buscemi, Mike Starr, Michael Jeter.
RATING: 5 out of 10 speakeasys
As this is one of perhaps a dozen or so American films made post-1980 that I've actually liked, I experienced something like a fragmentation of my sensibilities when I first read your review. I have to say that, though we evidently disagree, I do find your review very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI agree, the film does seem to me as well to be about "ethics". The film's main point is, in my view, the conflict between ethics that derive from convention, and ethics that derive from an innate understanding of good and evil. In other words, what is subjective and relative to a situation, and what is absolute. On a possibly even deeper level, it may be about the relationship between what the depth psychologists call "persona" — the mask we wear in everyday life that both conceals us and makes us understandable — and the self, the totality of who we are.
The historical background counts. It's not only Prohibition-era America, it's also a period immediately preceding the Second World War. In the popular view certain behaviours were criminalised, but they were not actually criminal — wrong, that is. This created a moment of ethical confusion: if the law could not guide you, then on what did you rely? Something similar was happening at the same time in Germany as the Nazis rose to power, and in Stalin's USSR.
It's from this that the core symbolism of the hat is drawn. The hat is at once about conformity, the daily uniform, yet it is also very personal. Is it the self or the persona? Are words the truth, or only a mask of lies? In the end, as Tom Reagan says when speaking of a dream he once had, the hat stays a hat. There is no way of resolving these conflicts, of transforming them. Knowing that, he also knows that retaliations are pointless — it's no accident that Reagan is Irish, the land that has suffered the most from pure, blind, meaningless retaliations.
What emerges in the end is a man who does follow a deeper ethics, not one allied to money, guns, booze or gambling. Yet he does so as much out of a sense of rebellion as anything else, simply because it is difficult, and he's a man who is only interested in difficult things.
It's something the Coen brothers do with every film they make. They take something that seems generic but then inject it with this touch of the absolute.