BEFORE: This is another classic example of a film that came out years ago (1994) and somehow slipped through the cracks for me - probably several times. For whatever reason, I didn't watch this when it came out, maybe I was busy, and then just never made it a priority over the years. Probably it's a case where I can envision where the whole story's going to go after the first 5 minutes, but we'll see.
Ann Dowd carries over from "Norman".
THE PLOT: A police officer offers to share his lottery ticket with a waitress in lieu of a tip.
AFTER: Well, clearly the loose theme for this week is something about doing the "right thing", whatever that seems to be at the moment. Is it the right thing to push a button and kill somebody if that grants you one million dollars? Is it the right thing to lie in court about an interracial relationship if you feel your life is in danger? Is it the right thing to borrow your sister's shoes without telling her, or buy a pair of shoes for an Israeli politician? What are the implications of these things, a few days or a few weeks later? And tonight - if you can't leave a tip for a waitress, is it OK to say you'll split your lottery winnings with her? What then happens if you win the jackpot?
I'll admit it's another good hook, it's not as good as the one in "The Box", but it's fascinating enough to lead to another full set of questions. For honest cop Charlie Lang, who prides himself in being fair and honest, that means he's got to split the winnings with her, even though that puts him on the outs with his wife, who's got dollar signs in her eyes, but of course down the road you can figure that there's probably some karmic silver lining for doing the right thing.
In many ways this is a film from a simpler time, a New York before the internet, when people still got their information from newspapers like The New York Post (the lower-class New Yorkers, anyway) and reporters still felt it was newsworthy if the Lotto jackpot was over $60 million - these days, the PowerBall's got to be up past $200 million for the news to even mention it at all. (Also, back then you could still smoke in a restaurant or drink beer in public and the government wasn't trying to legislate away your sugary soda or snacks with trans-fats.)
There's some confusion here about just how the lottery works - when it's revealed that the winning numbers were also picked by a 9-member bowling league, there's a dispute over whether that means each member gets a share of the jackpot, when it should have been blatantly obvious that they only had ONE winning ticket, so they all split ONE share, duh. I think the movie eventually made this clear, but I'm not 100% sure. For the money won by the cop and his wife, splitting the money with the waitress (who just HAPPENED to file for bankruptcy the same day she was offered half of the ticket) means they only get half of $4 million, or $2 million. Wait, how did we get from $64 million down to $4 million? Was there one other winner, eight other winners or sixteen other winners?
And there's not one mention of taxes at any time, which is a huge NITPICK POINT for me. We all know that the jackpot amount is deceptive, because it's before taxes - and since winning an amount like this automatically puts someone into the 50% tax bracket, I think it's customary for them to take the taxes out before-hand, because if they don't, and someone then spends the WHOLE jackpot right off, they'll be left at tax time in a worse financial situation than they were in before. Remember a few years back, when Oprah was giving out cars to her (carefully selected) studio audience members, or ABC had that show (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) where they found deserving families and built a new, mansion-sized house for them? Well, those things ended up causing more problems than they solved, because the recipients had to pay taxes on the cars (legally, they were regarded as income) or super-huge real estate taxes on those new houses, which some families couldn't afford to do. "Hey, congratulations, here's your new dream house, built to accommodate your five adopted special-needs kids, and you'll probably have to sell the house just to pay the tax bill you're going to get in six months." Considering how unskilled the volunteer builders were, the recipients were probably better off getting rid of it.
So if the cop shares his lottery winnings with the waitress, who gets the tax bill? Does the lottery office recognize them both as co-owners of the ticket, and splits their part of the jackpot, and withholds tax in both of their names, or can the payment and tax liability be made only in one name? And a $4 million dollar payout is already $2 million after you take out the taxes, and then are they splitting the gross, or the net? Because now we're down to just $1 million for the cop and his wife, and $1 million for the waitress, and while that's still nothing to sneeze at, it's not much compared to the $64 million jackpot, is it? Even though this is $1 million in 1994 dollars - I think these days if somebody won a million, that would be great for a few years, but you just can't live the rest of your life on a cool million any more. Not in New York City, anyway. In Queens, it might last a little longer than in Manhattan, but still, don't go nuts and quit your job or anything.
But we learn that what defines a "good person" here is how they act when they suddenly have money - Lang's wife wants to renovate and redecorate the whole house, and then go on party cruises with other millionaires (I think the weekly "Millionaire Cruise around Manhattan" stopped selling tickets back in 2003, too many Trump-like people were falsifying their assets just to get a veal dinner and some cocktails...) while Yvonne buys the diner she was working in and maintains a table for anyone who walks in off the street but can't afford a meal. She and Charlie also go roller-blading and decide to hand out subway tokens (remember those?) to strangers, so there's a tip-off that they're somehow meant to be together, even though Charlie's married and she probably still hasn't gotten around to getting divorced. (Stanley Tucci is criminally under-used here as the deadbeat actor husband who ran up her credit card bill before splitting, and comes back to hit her up for money to start his own theater troupe.)
There was a real-life incident that this was based on, however many details of the story were changed in order to turn it into a movie - in real life both the cop and the waitress were happily married to other people, and stayed that way after splitting the lottery winnings. Also this took place in a pizza place in Yonkers, not a diner in Queens. Also, in that case the waitress and cop chose the numbers together, which is a sticking point in the court case seen in the movie - since those were technically the wife's regular numbers, only the cop made a mistake and picked one number wrong, which turned out to be the right move. I'd hate to be on that jury, this is really a thorny legal issue.
But I think this is another case where this was a great IDEA for a movie, but then once the money is divided, they really had no place to go except to highlight the differences between the cop and his wife, while forcing a romance story on to the cop and waitress. It's extremely unlikely that they both would show up at the SAME expensive hotel on the same night, especially considering how many hotels there are in New York City - N.P. #3. And while I'm at it, Charlie takes a bunch of kids from Woodside, Queens out for a day at Yankee Stadium - but why not Shea Stadium? Statistically they were much more likely to be Mets fans if they lived in that neighborhood. Maybe the Mets were playing that day, but then why not take them to a real game? Or was Yankee Stadium the only place that the film crew could arrange to shoot in? N.P. #4.
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Bridget Fonda (last seen in "Doc Hollywood"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Wendell Pierce (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Isaac Hayes (last seen in "Shaft"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The Core"), Richard Jenkins (ditto), Victor Rojas, Seymour Cassel (last seen in "The Crew"), J.E. Freeman, Red Buttons (last seen in "The Story of Us"), Charles Busch, Beatrice Winde, Willie Colon, Frank Pellegrino (last seen in "Angie"), Ginny Yang, Lim Kay Tong, Merwin Goldsmith, Ranjit Chowhdry, with cameos from Vincent Pastore (last seen in "Riding in Cars With Boys"), Emily Deschanel (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), Peter Jacobson (last seen in "Failure to Launch"), Jack Cafferty and archive footage of Annie Potts (last seen in "Ghostbusters").
RATING: 5 out of 10 macadamia nuts
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