Better Than Nothing

There’s only so much to be gained from spending a lot of time thinking about the past, but this attitude can be a problem when writing about movies released long ago. For one thing, Steven Soderbergh is a director who seems to have very clear feelings about each of his films and how they’ve turned out. Based on multiple interviews with him, he seems to have a firm handle on what he’s tried to do throughout his career and is aware of which films may have gone astray for whatever reason. You get the feeling that he’s perfectly happy to talk about these things, but he doesn’t continually obsess over them either. His mind has been made up. The films he’s made recently have all the confidence of a director who has nothing left to prove while still wanting to try new things but is maybe more interested in just enjoying himself. The shipboard drama LET THEM ALL TALK and Covid-era thriller KIMI feel like they’re among the best of this recent batch, two films with very different goals and the only real criticism I have of them is how much they’ve been allowed to basically disappear into streaming unless you know where to look—presumably they’re still where they’re supposed to be, but who can remember these things. Looking over his filmography, there are a few projects I still need to get to, especially some TV stuff, but it gets easy to lose track when streaming is part of it all. His career seems divided into multiple stages now—the acclaim at the start and the fallout, the rebuilding that led to his Oscar, the studio heights of the OCEAN’S series and the George Clooney partnership, the move into digital, his own rumblings on possible retirement and the return from that decision leading into the streaming era. There is a thread that can be found in each of these and it’s almost like by this point I can recognize a scene directed by Steven Soderbergh just by the font usage and naturalism of the room tone but his films also have that controlled sense of genre and the way they present people trying to understand just who can really be trusted, a theme which turns up in a number of his films as he explores the basic idea from all sorts of different angles.

But to use the example of one film in particular, the director has also somewhat famously been dismissive of THE UNDERNEATH, his remake of the noir classic CRISS CROSS, saying that he decided the film was basically DOA in the middle of production even though he had no choice but to proceed forward. Released in the spring of 1995 (Happy 30th!) to a mixed response and little box office, the experience caused Soderbergh to immediately regroup so he could put together what became SCHIZOPOLIS, a no-budget piece of absurdism that he also starred in. Getting his mojo back from that experience led to the run of OUT OF SIGHT, THE LIMEY, ERIN BROCKOVICH, his Best Director Oscar for TRAFFIC and beyond. And much as I like each of these films, I would still willingly tell him that I also like THE UNDERNEATH, really I do, and would do this knowing he’d never agree but the movie still offers a mix of personal style and suspense that remains effective in a way that still feels like it could only have come from him. I can understand feeling that it’s too sleepy, too constrictive, but as a noir story crossed with the aimless mood in the air of what I remember from the mid-90s something about it still clicks for me, the awareness of fucking up in the past which leads to the realization that the only thing left to do is fuck up again. Coming from someone who still worries about doing that sort of thing, it does make a lot of sense. And it even anticipates films by the director he had yet to make so however he feels, it goes perfectly with his body of work that was still to come.

Several years after fleeing Austin due to gambling debts, Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher) returns to see his mother (Anjanette Comer) and be there for her new marriage to Ed (Paul Dooley), a friendly sort who works for an armored car company where he soon gets Michael a job. Michael’s brother David (Adam Trese) is openly hostile to him but even worse is when he tracks down his ex-wife Rachel (Allison Elliott) who he left behind and is now attached to Tommy (William Fichtner), a nightclub owner with some criminal activity on the side. Michael goes after Rachel again but when they’re caught by Tommy, Michael offers him a plan to rob one of the armored cars, figuring this will be exactly what he needs.

Writing the script for SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE which became his breakthrough along with how he starred in SCHIZOPOLIS with ex-wife Betsy Brantley soon after their marriage ended makes the films directed by Steven Soderbergh sound more personal than maybe the majority of them are, films that maybe explore similar ideas in a way that isn’t always apparent when the focus feels more on genre. THE UNDERNEATH is officially based on the novel “Criss Cross” by Don Tracy but still feels like it’s returning to themes explored in the earlier film, the idea of a man who screwed up big time returning to a place he once knew to sort out what was left behind. And though he wrote the script for THE UNDERNEATH, Writers Guild arbitration dictated sharing the co-screenwriting credit with Daniel Fuchs, screenwriter on the original film of CRISS CROSS back in 1949, which led to Soderbergh ultimately using the pseudonym “Sam Lowry”. It’s a name many will recognize as the main character in BRAZIL, likely a comment on the bureaucracy involved with the decision and that winds up feeling about as personal as anything else in the film. But there is more to THE UNDERNEATH which delivers a very controlled tone all the way through mixing character study in the heist plotline along with the Austin vibe in the air so at the time it felt like the film was nailing something of the feel of the time. It still does even now, at least in the club scenes or maybe the cool indie tone to it all just feels like the time in general but it’s a meshing together of genre and character drama looking to find a personal connection in the material. SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE opens with shots of a road taken from a car in motion and THE UNDERNEATH begins with its main character driving as well, but in the first film it feels all about possibilities while in this one, a film where the very first moment starts its non-linear narrative structure already in the middle before going back, the route has already been planned but the endpoint isn’t leading anywhere good.

And THE UNDERNEATH does feel personal, not just as partly a fatalistic neo-noir redo of SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE in addition to the film it’s an actual remake of but it also anticipates the setup of his own OCEAN’S ELEVEN remake six years later, a film made with much more of a commercial goal in mind but still a heist movie which is ultimately about getting an ex-wife back more than the job in question, the personal crossed with the interest in genre, an issue of motivation that THE UNDERNEATH chooses to be a little murkier about. The obliqueness of the plotting is a big part of it, like how Michael and Rachel were apparently married but if it wasn’t for the presence of a wedding ring we’d never know, not to mention just the simple idea of motivation as well as just who is playing who at any point. If I’m counting right Soderbergh has directed four official remakes in his career, not including a few others that he wrote or produced, and it almost gives the impression of trying to recreate films he has encountered with his own goals in mind, whether this is all coincidence or his own version of auteurism as criticism. But it’s really a film with a focus on one character and his connection to the people close to him, the guilt that comes with that and the easy ways to screw up all those second chances, mixed in with a welcome number of small laughs coming from the clever dialogue for what mostly feels like a quiet, morose film while always aided by the moody Cliff Martinez score. Something about the approach even feels like the nineties or at least my memory of the nineties or maybe it’s the dream of those nineties films when they played in art houses back then, felt in the nightclub scenes which have the vibe of all those people in the moment responding to the music, those days when you don’t know where you’re going, don’t know why you’re there, don’t know why you’re calling someone, with much less to worry about than you realize until you create all those problems for yourself.

In that noir tradition, it’s also a film about refusing to let go of things that you’ve already run away from, trying to move forward but still holding onto what you once had. “I don’t know if getting back with you is a moment of strength or a moment of weakness,” Rachel tells him, unable to decide. Gallagher exudes a sort of cocky intelligence as Michael but one that’s always looking for a short cut, seen reading multiple self-help books in search of the magic answer. But nobody has that answer and no one can let go of those resentments of the past or the dream of that big lottery win which you keep telling yourself is going to come eventually and it really is a film populated by people looking for the winning lottery ticket so they can get that easy money, particularly in the flashbacks of Michael gambling and buying a huge, stupid satellite dish to watch all the games he’s betting on. Rachel is looking to be an actress in the flashbacks, or maybe just the winning lottery ticket of being an actress, but the only big audition we see her preparing for is to be the girl who hosts the nightly number pick. Even Michael’s mother wants her lottery scratch-offs as her wedding day approaches, just in case that big win could still happen. The most decent person in the entire film has the healthiest attitude about the way things turn out in life and even his own big dream is still a modest one. Maybe the second most decent person in the entire film also has a regular job and is smart enough to know that she’s the girl in second place but that’s the way things go sometimes. In the noir tradition, the film really is about wanting more which is always the easiest way to screw things up.

The tone through it all is set by how careful the direction always is down to the framing of every single shot which at least partly seems to be what Soderbergh disliked in his own film the most, looking to ultimately break free from all the constrictions. This is all filtered through his visual and storytelling tricks via a non-linear narrative that jumps from the present tense to flashbacks and flashforwards that detail Michael’s movements on the day of the robbery all done in a way that, helped by film stock and the presence of a beard, feels so assured that it never becomes confusing. If Robert Siodmak’s visual style in CRISS CROSS is a product of German expressionism, then what Soderbergh does here is more like American indie Expressionism, at least it felt that way until PULP FICTION changed everything about how to approach crime dramas then, but here it’s at least doing something with the frame that keeps it always active through a cutting style equally careful about keeping your focus on what’s right there. It’s a reminder of how much of this purely visual approach was still possible when all this was being done on film, not that I want to turn this into a film vs. digital debate, but something really was lost when Soderbergh abandoned the former for the latter and his aesthetic was altered which he seems ok with anyway. But the look he achieved back in the ‘90s is stunning and it’s a gorgeous looking film, shot by Eliot Davis who would do the same on OUT OF SIGHT a few years later, and it almost feels like part of the point of the whole thing was to make it gorgeous looking even if this look became something that kept it distancing. It’s a visual style that pushes the use of colors and the anamorphic frame all through, to make every single image stand out if it can, with enough split diopter shots all through that it feels like Soderbergh was having fun making this film, I just have to take him on his word that he wasn’t. But that kind of framing does give certain moments the classic De Palma feel, along with the diopter-heavy look to an early dinner table conversation that I’m guessing took its inspiration from the framing of the mashed potato scene in Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Even a vendor number spotted in giant close-up that figures into the plot is likely an obvious George Lucas reference. And the way the film basically stops dead, in a very effective way, in the aftermath of the big heist with the multiple timelines finally converging during the final third with part of it directly from Michael’s queasy POV which offers no escape, a destination that can only be a dead end with nowhere else to go.

But along with all this is that feeling of a low hum through the entire thing which plays as correctly noir for the nineties, a very different era than the post-war heyday of the genre but people are still trying to find the easiest way to get the payout. “So beneath the apathetic exterior there was actually a raging indifference,” Rachel says to Michael about his behavior which is one way to look at character motivation and the tone of the entire film as well. The harshness of the dialogue that veers into jokiness since people like this are going to make those jokes anyway. “You’re not very present tense,” Michael is also told and the non-linear plotting feels appropriate for a main character who is so unmoored, along with how so much of the film seems to be in the desperation seen in the eyes of various characters who can’t seem to smile unless they know how to fake it. Fittingly, it’s a film with a main character who’s never as cool as he thinks he is, not when he’s placing his bets, not when he’s trying to get Rachel’s attention via cocktail napkin placed under a drink and certainly not when he comes up with the entire stupid plan to begin with. It also feels cynical enough that what happens to the main character barely seems to matter at the end and you could hardly blame someone for not even remembering when he’s last seen since the final moment since the film shortly after moves on to someone else shortly after and then the very end raises a few other questions entirely. The similarities to OCEAN’S ELEVEN are there—we still need to keep straight exactly what is a remake of what here—but to compare the two it’s like with THE UNDERNEATH he was making a mood piece/character study/art film and with OCEAN’S, along with its sequels and a few others he’s made, he wanted to make a movie and that’s where the fun of these things comes from. Maybe it was also the chance to do something like this over again and not only make it more commercial but more human, not so ice cold and fatalistic. It’s a fantasy version of trying to do that sort of thing over to make everything right and the OCEAN’S films certainly have nothing to do with reality but maybe he decided that type of escape is one of the reasons we go to the movies in the first place. With THE UNDERNEATH and its combination of character study of a fuckup and noir thriller to explore how well the genres can mesh it still works and feels like a movie about the possibilities always in front of us, it all just gets screwed up when we can’t get out of our own way. When it comes to these things, there’s no point in going back. You’ll just be fucked over again. Whether it’s by yourself or the person you went back for, it doesn’t make any difference.

Maybe part of it is that overall sense of coolness from the performances which they need to be, where every single smile in the film could be like someone putting on an act. Peter Gallagher (seen recently playing a future version of John Mulaney on his Netflix talk show) lets his eyes do a lot of the work to go with the steadiness in his voice, a man trying to stay focused and convinced that the next bet will finally pay off with Alison Elliott who brings a harsh cool girl vibe to someone keeping her distance from everyone else no matter how close they want to think she is to them. William Fichtner plays the live wire, ready to snap at any moment and he even gets a nervous laugh at one point out of the tiniest head nod. The effectiveness of the supporting cast adds the humanity that isn’t felt as much from the leads including Paul Dooley who is just as warm and welcoming as you want him to be, the total resentment that comes off Adam Trese as the brother, the way Anjanette Comer as the mother always seems to be holding back what she’s really thinking and Joe Chrest as the mysterious Mr. Rodman in the hospital. Elisabeth Shue, months before her Oscar-nominated role in LEAVING LAS VEGAS was seen, is ideally cast as an also-ran girl who we can’t imagine why Michael doesn’t go with her since she seems so right, sensible and charming but never dull. This should be the girl. But that’s not the film the main character chooses to be in. Harry Goaz of TWIN PEAKS is one of the other drivers at the armored truck company, Mike Malone who featured prominently in SCHIZOPOLIS is seen hitting on Alison Elliott, Richard Linklater is the doorman at the club and Shelley Duvall, one of two Altman alums in this along with Dooley, is the nurse in the hospital in a scene which likely took no more than a day to film. There’s also the recently departed Joe Don Baker, RIP, wearing a bolo tie in a key role as the boss at the armored car company that isn’t much more than an extended cameo but his few moments onscreen do give us his cagey presence and smile, reassuring us more than anyone else does which in this film of course means there’s no reason to trust him. I like Baker here more than I like the way his final scene raises more questions than it answers but right now it’s just nice to see him get the very last moment in a film like this. After all, Joe Don Baker getting the last moment in a film is sometimes what cinema is all about.

“Anything’s better than nothing,” Michael says as a reason for doing anything with anybody. It’s one thing to tell yourself when you don’t have any other ideas and that speaks to the malaise felt when there are no better ideas. Looking for more thoughts on the film from Soderbergh, I picked up my copy of “Getting Away With It”, his book consisting of half interviews with Richard Lester/half diary of his activities around 1996, leading up to the beginnings of his involvement with OUT OF SIGHT, only to discover that he barely mentions THE UNDERNEATH at all aside from his horror at having to sit through it at a festival screening in France. It seems obvious that he had already moved on from the film by that point and there wasn’t even anything to say about it anymore. We should all have such a strong work ethic. One of the ways to see the movie has been its inclusion on the Criterion Blu-ray of his 1993 film KING OF THE HILL, which he thinks a little more highly of, making THE UNDERNEATH a literal B-side although the film by itself has since gotten a non-Criterion release on Blu as well. Thinking about all this makes me think about my few brief encounters with Soderbergh through the years one of which was a brief conversation with him at CNN when he was promoting KAFKA but it hasn’t happened anywhere since standing in the popcorn line behind him at the Chinese on opening weekend of THE DEPARTED. All this is in the past, of course. If I ever meet him again, I have a couple of very geeky OCEAN’S questions about those films which I hope he would have the good humor to answer. As of this writing, he’s had two films released in 2025, the horror film PRESENCE (I’ll see it, I swear) and BLACK BAG (minor and enjoyable) with another in the can still to come. As for THE UNDERNEATH, returning to the film again now reminds me of back then, it reminds me of the mistakes I made, it reminds me of the mistakes I could make. But if it’s up to me then I’ll just choose not to live in the sort of noir film that will just lead to more wrong choices. It’s still possible. It’s always possible to change things if you feel that strongly about the direction you’re heading in. Even if you’ve made a film that I’ll be willing to defend as much as THE UNDERNEATH.

It Doesn't Know The Words

There are times when nothing is as important in a film as the person in the frame. Some might disagree. Some might say that a film needs epic scale, giant action scenes or big special effects. But sometimes all that matters can be a scene about two people facing off against each other, every shot of someone’s face giving us another chance to study what is going on inside of them, revealing something unknown about who they are and what they want. The chance to study a face can result in imagery that feels more purely cinematic than anything else imaginable. Some directors, maybe the very best directors, understand this. To use a non-film example, it isn’t a stretch to call THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, now and forever a blisteringly funny look behind the scenes of a late-night talk show, one of the best TV shows of all time while also being one of the most no frills. The sets are simple, the way scenes are shot is simple as it moves between the film look for the office scenes and video for the show, even the credits are simple. All that matters is the continued desperation of the people in the frame with star Garry Shandling and the other regulars continually doing brilliant, fearless work delving further into the depths of their character’s bitter neuroses even as the plastic smile remains frozen on Larry’s face whenever the camera is on. Running for six seasons on HBO in the ‘90s, the show even looks borderline cheap much of the time, but it was so consistently good that this never mattered and my complete DVD box set will always be close by. SANDERS is mostly remembered now by people who were there back then, fully attuned to the look at the showbiz world it was displaying with the bitterness and insecurity found in the characterizations that remain completely authentic even as the world it’s set in now feels mostly archaic, a memory of a Hollywood that doesn’t quite exist in this way anymore. In comparison, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?, the one Garry Shandling movie vehicle ever made, directed by Mike Nichols and released in March 2000 less than two years after the finale of LARRY SANDERS, is totally forgotten now. The only way it seems to be remembered is through the pages that cover it in the extraordinary biography of Nichols written by Mark Harris which describe in detail what a disaster the production was, how much the director and star clashed and that there was nothing to do about this once filming was underway.

For Mike Nichols, this film came off a run of big movie star vehicles in the ‘90s which included the well-regarded POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, the not as well-regarded REGARDING HENRY, the very expensive WOLF, the smash hit THE BIRDCAGE plus the somewhat forgotten film version of PRIMARY COLORS, a run that is of varying quality but the films all have an air of respectability. In this context, everything about WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? feels like it’s intentionally disreputable in comparison, a silly sex comedy focused on the eternal conflict between men and women so you wonder just what attracted him to the material beyond an initial interest in Shandling, although it does mark the second time he directed a film with a question mark in the title in case you ever want to play this on a double bill with WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Which doesn’t sound like a bad idea, come to think of it. The film also cost much more than THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW ever did and it feels like more of an oddity now than the trainwreck its reputation indicates but it also feels like a very expensive oddity, much more than it needs to be. In truth, the film actually does make me laugh enough that it’s the sort which makes me look around carefully before whispering, “I actually kind of like that movie,” even as I know that it doesn’t quite gel, a film with a sense that it has something to say but never finds a consistent tone that a film, any film, should have. There are laughs and it also contains a degree of intelligence, along with the growing awareness that it's trying to explore a particular aspect of what develops in a relationship between a man and a woman but this is mixed in with humor that seems to go all over the place. The result can’t be called uninteresting but it’s possible the things about it which seem the most intriguing weren’t what the makers hoped anyone would focus on, even if it does possess a certain unique comic tone. In one SANDERS episode, Larry waves at an offscreen Mike Ovitz in a restaurant while saying, “He could get me a movie.” “Do you want a movie?” his companion wonders. “No, but it would be nice to be asked,” he replies. Anyway, this is the movie.

On a distant planet populated solely by genetically created men, one of them is assigned by the planet’s leader Graydon (Ben Kingsley) to travel to earth with the intent to impregnate a woman then bring the baby back to the planet to begin repopulation and eventually take over the universe. In the guise of an earthling named Harold Anderson (Garry Shandling) he arrives in Phoenix to take a job in charge of commercial and home loans at a bank to find a woman although the loud humming noise the penis that was attached to him makes when aroused proves to make this difficult. After being shown around town by co-worker Perry (Greg Kinnear) who is always looking to cheat on his wife Helen Linday Fiorentino), Harold soon meets recovering alcoholic Susan Hart (Annette Bening) who shows an interest but insists that she won’t sleep with anyone until she gets married which Harold quickly agrees to and quickly starts working to get her pregnant as fast as possible. Meanwhile, FAA investigator Roland Jones (John Goodman) is looking into the strange occurrence on the plane when Harold first arrived and begins closing in on him.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? is basically a dick joke, but one that’s in the guise of being a more introspective, satirical look at how men see themselves in the world and what can get them to finally settle down and try to understand women, who don’t always have the best answers either. But it’s still a dick joke, specifically a running dick joke involving the loud humming noise made by Harold’s penis that has been installed on his alien body and for a conceit that so much of the film is based around the joke never becomes as funny as the movie wants it to be, not at first and not every other time it happens. The very idea of the R-rated comedy aimed at adults is not a new concept for Mike Nichols but this never seems like enough of an idea to base so much it around, as if the concept of the film came out of awareness of the 90s bestseller “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”, then asking what if the two sexes really were from different planets and how that would affect things, figuring out a way to fit all this around the basic Shandling character in a way that Albert Brooks did with his films. It’s not a bad idea plus the character he created and played on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW certainly made it seem like he could carry a film but the problem is that that it never feels clear if this is meant to be a goof or a real movie, an actual performance or a stand-up routine, maybe a reminder of what Jerry Seinfeld, knowing what he was good at, never tried doing when his own show ended.

There is a definite intelligence to the humor in the script (story by Garry Shandling & Michael Leeson, screenplay by Shandling & Leeson and Ed Solomon and Peter Tolan) particularly in the specifics of tiny interactions like the way Harold has been instructed to always reply “Uh huh” when a woman is talking so there are comic moments that connect but the tone never seems fully decided on, just that it wants to get some serious ideas across in the silliest way possible. No married couple in the film is happy, practically the first person who Harold meets when he arrives is a woman who just had a fight with her husband and even the couples being shown houses by real estate agent Susan are always seen fighting. It’s always about conflict and deception when men and women are involved, like one scene involving four people where three of them know all too well that the fourth is lying to his wife and it feels like there’s a concept somewhere in all this but it never quite balances the two halves, the ideas haven’t all been correctly organized for the points to be made.

Part of this has to do with approach and if the film had been designed with a more stylized low-budget look along the lines of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH or even the somewhat grounded afterlife of Albert Brooks’ DEFENDING YOUR LIFE that might have helped but the film never feels like it’s being made by someone who has interesting ideas for shooting any of this this outside of a focus on the giant special effects throughout when he feels the scene calls for it. The effects aren’t badly done at all, they just don’t matter and there’s still plenty of them throughout involving the distant planet and arriving on earth via transporting to an airplane but that’s not what the movie’s about, or at least it’s not what it should be about, and the humor of the script makes it all feel unnecessary. There’s a fair amount of effects work in some of Nichols’ other ‘90s films particularly WOLF as well as the opening shot of THE BIRDCAGE which began with an extensive helicopter shot that eventually went right into the nightclub of the title so it almost feels like he’d gotten so used to making films that were this expensive he never stopped to think if making it so elaborate was absolutely necessary to what the film needed to be instead of paying attention to the words. It’s a film that would have been helped by being smaller and quirkier so the ideas that feel important get overwhelmed by the scale, as if simply there to give Columbia Pictures another big budget MEN IN BLACK-type sci-fi comedy and the emphasis on the wrong things feels like a misunderstanding of the material.

The approach to the comedy wants to be more hopeful than the outright misanthropic feel of LARRY SANDERS while still at least attempting to be about character much of the time and, leaving out that he’s an alien, showing a man who has nothing to worry about but his overly active penis, meeting a woman desperately looking for stability in her life who grabs onto the most unstable relationship imaginable. And even without trying, he helps her see what’s out there and brings instant clarity to things more than any other way she’s tried to do it while she gets him to find a level of humanity that he never even considered might be there. All of this is fine and breaking down the plot helps to see it as a satirical look at a man understanding what he should be in the world and what he should care about. In some ways, the premise could even be the idea for an extended Nichols-May sketch but that’s not the personality of the writing so since the project originated with Shandling and writers connected to him, bringing in Elaine May for a polish likely wasn’t going to happen but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

Either way, it’s about a man and a woman getting to know each other but needing to get past whatever the sex is to that relationship at first and maybe I’m really digging to find stuff in here but the arguments they have are at least more interesting than the film playing Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” over shots of the Bellagio Fountain in Vegas during the honeymoon sex marathon. The sequence does give us Susan saying, “We even did it while we ate. If I’d known we were going to do that, I wouldn’t have ordered the soup” which is one of the better lines and the script does find some truth in the sort of arguments that happen when you’re starting to wonder just who the person you’re suddenly in a relationship with really is. The ideas are in there but too many of them are muddled and at times there’s the feeling that Nichols is more interested in finding those performances than where the laughs are going to come from which means that some of the humor, like Harold getting more consumed by his job than he expected and the head of the planet getting more exasperated when he complains about all his marriage issues, doesn’t feel fully developed so it simply comes off as random. And there’s still the issue of how much of all this should be a joke, how much of it should be taken seriously as a movie plot. Even the most visually interesting element of the film, the mid-century modernistic vibe of the Phoenix Financial Center location where the bank is set, feels incidental but it does give the movie a certain retro feel so it seems like the version of this that might have been made in the sixties when they might have set it in Phoenix because the production didn’t want to go too far from L.A. Along with the location work and interiors set in Phoenix that emphasize the ‘southwest’ aspect there’s also the sets on the alien homeworld which are stark but not particularly memorable and also seem more elaborate than the film ever needs.

It's been twenty-five years since this film was released and one unexpected thing that jumps out about it now is how it’s about a planet of sexless men—incels, to use the current parlance of our time—with a main character forced to interact with women and is totally baffled by them, no idea what the relationship is supposed to be once the sex is taken care of so he resorts to watching whatever game is on and telling her, “Maybe I haven’t touched you as much as I used to but that’s no reason to destroy the remote” is the natural endpoint to that. A version made in 2025 exploring the same basic idea would probably be much darker, more hostile and maybe not much of a romantic comedy but in this film the problem isn’t anger, it’s not having the slightest idea how the communication is supposed to work, just interested in sex or something else entirely and the main character has no idea how to take any responsibility with the baby he’s been so insistent on having. The best moments bring out the laughs in this, but too much doesn’t seem fully thought out and too much effort seems put into the mechanics of the third act return to the alien planet for plot and chases along with a Carter Burwell score that works harder than it should need to. When things are resolved it’s quick and almost absurdist, which in a smaller film would get the right sort of laughs but here it winds up feeling like it’s not always clear if the serious moments matter as much as the comic ones or if it’s all just meant to be a big goof.

There’s still enough cleverness to the dialogue and interactions along with how Mike Nichols knows that the scenes which really matter are the ones with the two lead characters trying to understand each other, in a film about how the goal is not so much to understand each other but to come to the realization that you’re both confused about it all and some kind of genuine understanding can come out of that almost without even realizing it. When Bening emerges to sing “High Hopes” to Shandling before breaking the big news of her pregnancy it’s an amazing moment and maybe the best in the entire film, all the happiness and terror and desperation felt in this woman, hoping that all will be right in this very strange relationship she’s suddenly found herself in and all of this has nothing to do with aliens or special effects or even at attempt at making a joke. Just the sort of character interaction that the people involved could excel in at their very best. In that moment is an idea for a movie. And it’s at least something.

The thing is that it’s like Garry Shandling and the film itself doesn’t seem to know if he should play this as an actual performance or as a Jack Benny-type (or, more specifically, Shandling himself on his earlier IT’S GARRY SHANDLING’S SHOW) starring in his own film as his own basic character and it never becomes either. The emotional moments he needs to play in close-up don’t feel earned and a few comical asides wind up feeling like they come from a Shandling adlib more than the character so it doesn’t connect, no matter how much his very presence can easily get a smile out of me. On THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW he was a person with no idea how to connect with someone when he wasn’t on television and here he’s a person (or alien) trying to do figure out how to do the opposite but he doesn’t have the acting muscles for that. Just about his best moment comes at the very end when he says something dismissive about Susan’s friends and the bickering between the two of them comes off as totally natural, unlike all the moments searching for emotion when you can feel the effort. The issue with Shandling onscreen makes me wonder who else was around in those days that might have been a better fit even if it was designed as a vehicle for him but considering who the female lead is it suddenly makes me think of Warren Beatty in the role saying these lines and nailing the jokes so now that’s the version I want to see—he was doing TOWN & COUNTRY, also with Shandling, around this time instead. But the grounded nature that Annette Bening brings to her character here helps the film more than it almost seems possible and it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that she gives a legitimately great performance in this film. Even if some of what’s here recalls parts Bening had already played—a real estate agent like in AMERICAN BEAUTY, addressing an AA meeting like in MARS ATTACKS!—what she does brings such a degree of genuine humanity that it becomes a better film more able to focus on the satirical goal and when her character first appears it feels totally genuine almost as if she’s a person I’ve known. I won’t go as far as to say that this is one of Annette Bening’s best films and based on her quotes in the Nichols bio it doesn’t seem like a subject she would want to talk about for very long but I will say that her performance here is one that reminds me how good she really is, how much she holds the drama here together as well as the comedy almost solely by the weight she brings to even the most unexpected moments.

There’s also strong work by the entire supporting cast, sometimes from people who are only in one scene. John Goodman finds the right sort of humor in getting obsessed with this case more than his wife can ever understand and Greg Kinnear brings the needed clean-cut smarm to Perry, Harold’s rival at the bank, playing a man who always looks for every possible way to get out of admitting what he’s really doing. Ben Kingsley earns his paycheck as the leader of the planet, saying ‘penis’ more than a few times and expressing just the right amount of annoyance. Linda Fiorentino, close to her last film to open in theaters (the forgotten WHERE THE MONEY IS, which she stars in with Paul Newman, came out about a month after this) and it still makes me sad how she vanished, nails every broodingly sexy line she has in her few scenes as Perry’s wife Helen. Judy Greer gets several memorable moments as a flight attendant who meets Harold again later on, Richard Jenkins is his boss at the bank, Caroline Aaron (one of the secretaries in WORKING GIRL, along with multiple Woody Allen/Nora Ephron appearances) is also borderline great as Goodman’s wife, an uncredited Jeaneane Garafolo is on the plane when Harold arrives, Stacey Travis is a woman he approaches at the Phoenix airport, Octavia Spencer has a bit part as a nurse and Nora Dunn as one of Susan’s best friends gets what is probably the best line in the film during a restaurant scene, which is something that could easily have been cut but turns out to be just the sort of random laugh the film is looking for in its nitpicky humor but doesn’t always find.

Even if WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? is sometimes called the worst film Mike Nichols ever made, I’ve already expressed some fondness for it so this means I can’t go that far. To mention a few others, the oddball comedy THE FORTUNE feels even more paper thin, THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN is just perplexing and even BILOXI BLUES, the only Neil Simon adaptation he ever directed and a sizable hit at the time, feels like just a basic filming of that play and not very interesting. More than those films, at least WHAT PLANET offers a deadpan fun to its satire even if it doesn’t always come through. With a reported budget of over $50 million, the film made only $6.2 million in total, possibly less than anything in the year 2000 which opened in as many theaters as this one did. The immediate fallout of the film’s release included Columbia Pictures pulling the plug on OTTOMAN EMPIRE, already announced to be directed by Andrew Bergman and star Keanu Reeves playing a furniture salesman revealed to be a former porn star who catches the attention of the first lady which was set to start shooting soon with Variety speculating that the studio was balking at “another pricey sex comedy”. I still want to see that film. And, of course, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? did not make its lead actor/co-writer a movie star. But I still love Garry Shandling and miss him. In the very best episodes of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, he somehow made the desperation, the insecurity, the self-loathing you feel, whether in Hollywood or not, always relatable. And in those years after this film when he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything at all, it was just nice to know that he was out there. It was a very sad day when news of his passing hit, already nine years ago now, but remembering him helps. Even this film helps me remember and at least this film attempted to say something about the desperation which you can never totally leave behind, no matter what planet you're on.

One Of The State

Among the many things these days that remind me how we used to be a proper country, one of them is the realization that Walter Hill films were once a regular thing. We really should be grateful for what we had. At their very best they make up some of the most memorable and unique action films around so while they may not all work and my love for some is stronger than others, I’m still thankful for what we got. It’s a body of work that includes his directorial efforts along with several early memorable screenplays not to mention his close involvement with the ALIEN franchise and so much of it still contains a power in the way they combine his stripped down storytelling techniques with an unabashed comic book style, a harsh kind of pulp that offers both action and edgy comedy in a heavily stylized vein, a mashing up of Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah but also a third element which was his own unique point of view. There’s a sincerity always felt in each film which is one of their greatest strengths and Hill doesn’t deconstruct the genre he’s working in so much as construct what he wants an action movie created by him to be. He makes films that have no time for any bullshit. Some might simply call them modern day westerns but there’s more to it than that and the approach is always completely no-nonsense, delivered by a man who doesn’t fuck around with clear-cut plotting crossed with total filmmaking confidence. Not to mention how in plenty of photos showing him directing he’s wearing sunglasses, which always seemed very cool. And these days nothing seems to say as much about his sense of pure storytelling economy like the fact that he’s never directed anything with a running time over two hours. The film begins, makes its statement and he walks away. That’s a Walter Hill film.

The very best of his work displays the beauty found in his no-nonsense yet still stylized approach whether it’s THE DRIVER, THE WARRIORS, THE LONG RIDERS and of course the smash hit that was 48 HRS. which could easily be called one of the most influential movies of the ‘80s. Among some of the others, STREETS OF FIRE may be the most Walter Hill film of all, the purest expression of the way he sees the world, and it’s the one with the devoted following now but speaking as one of the biggest JOHNNY HANDSOME defenders out there I’m still waiting for that cult to emerge. And even if I’ve never been one to make a big case for his lone comedy BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, for example, or maybe LAST MAN STANDING, his western/gangster YOJIMBO/FISTFUL OF DOLLARS hybrid starring Bruce Willis which didn’t work for me much at all even if there are times when I can appreciate the purity revealed in his approach. But 1995’s vastly underappreciated WILD BILL is close to being great and I also remember having a blast seeing his 2002 prison boxing film UNDISPUTED in a nearly empty theater. Then there are those times when his films really do feel like Walter Hill trying to make what he thinks people want from a Walter Hill film, like how the 1988 buddy cop movie RED HEAT is in some ways pure Walter Hill but it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s favorite Walter Hill.

The pieces of RED HEAT are all there and the thing plays but the film never fully catches fire so instead it cruises along, hitting all the beats you expect it to as the bullets fly and bodies crash through windows, with lots of broken glass everywhere. It crosses the basic idea of Don Siegel’s COOGAN’S BLUFF about a cop from elsewhere coming to the big city with what can easily be called an unabashed redo of the basic 48 HRS. formula, going back to the buddy cop setup of clashing personalities in his previous hit which is fine since redoing ideas seemed to work out for Howard Hawks more than a few times. It just feels like the bones of the story are all there in RED HEAT without giving enough of the meat, even though the film tries its best to make it seem like there’s plenty to chew on. Opening in June 1988, just one week after Peter Hyams’ THE PRESIDIO which was another cop film that in the context of summer releases could be called underachieving, this was all roughly a month before the entire formula would be upended by the arrival of DIE HARD, a hit that no one saw coming at this point. Walter Hill wasn’t really the type of director to make the sort of action extravaganza designed to build to the biggest explosion imaginable, but his films still have a certain energy much of the time. RED HEAT does too, at least partly. Of course, if you’re going to rank all the films made by a certain director then something is going to have to fall in the middle. Maybe that’s where RED HEAT lands.

When Moscow police captain Ivan Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes after mobster Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross) his partner is killed and Viktor flees to the U.S., specifically Chicago, where he is soon arrested on a minor charge. Danko is sent to retrieve Viktor and bring him back, with specific instructions not to let the Americans know the full scope of his crimes. Once there he is met by Chicago police detective Art Riznik (James Belushi) but an attempt to transfer Rostavili to the airport for the flight home results in Riznik’s own partner being killed and Viktor on the run so the two men are soon forced to team up to capture him with Danko determined to keep the Americans from learning the real reason for him tracking Viktor down.

On the surface RED HEAT is the star vehicle it’s meant to be, with lots of continuous action along with a pairing of two disparate personalities designed to clash as they make their way through a plot that is continually attempting to seem busier than it needs to be as if trying to distract the audience from realizing all this has been done before. This is, after all, a film where the partners of both lead characters are killed before the inevitable team-up, not to mention one of them killing the bad guy’s brother, as if the film couldn’t think of anything else bad that might happen to get things going. The plot (story by Hill, screenplay by Harry Kleiner and Hill & Troy Kennedy Martin) hits all the necessary beats but in a way that makes the movie feel like it cruises along as opposed to breaking out from the formula and doing anything even slightly unexpected. The Walter Hill style means no fat and because of this the film never feels like it’s wasting any time, even if the nature of the plotting means it takes a little longer for the two leads to team up than we’d prefer. As much as it’s a part of the buddy cop formula, what sets this one apart is a more grounded, low-key approach to things although whether anyone goes to a movie like this for actual serious issues is debatable.

It’s an ‘80s Walter Hill film with all the expected elements from him—lots of neon, barking police captains, sharp girls, snarky waitresses, a city at night which seems to be all scuzzy hotel rooms and parking garages. The attention-grabbing opening set in a Russian bathhouse filled with naked men weightlifting, plus a few women scattered in there, does feel like a more heightened, comic-strip approach as if part of what now feels like Film Twitter-approved ridiculousness coming from the introduction of an almost-naked Schwarzenegger, panning up his entire body in a moment that seems perfectly designed for the star's reveal leading to a fight in the snow complete with ultra-loud punches to the face. This all builds to the discovery a few scenes later of a stash of cocaine hidden in an artificial leg he breaks off and the film never quite becomes this much fun again, even as the action kicks off so when the plot settles down in Chicago it becomes more about the neo-noirish Walter Hill world, maybe a little scuzzier than usual. Some of this is interesting, with what feels like an endless night focusing on the moodiness and crummy, aimless lives the characters lead, the way Danko doesn’t seem to have much at all beyond his work and pet parakeet he has an alarm set for feeding and the way Riznik’s captain talks about him he’s apparently close to being fired or suspended or something. Neither one of them seems to have anybody of substance in their lives, no girlfriend for either of them to call on the phone and yell at. Even the dancer played by Gina Gershon who has a secret connection to Viktor has her own depressing reasons for getting involved with all this. Peter Boyle’s police captain with an office that has a fish tank and recordings of calming sounds playing seems to have the only idea for how to deal with everything around him but even he suspects it might all be futile. This makes for a grounded, somewhat serious vibe even with the occasional wisecrack with cops going up against the lower classes that can’t get ahead and no one particularly happy about it which makes RED HEAT more interesting than it might have been but not as fun or crazy in a way that might have helped make it truly memorable. The film always seems intent on getting to the necessary action beats but doesn’t seem to spend much time figuring out a way to do something with them that would be genuinely surprising.

For Schwarzenegger, this film comes during that stretch between the release of the first two TERMINATORs where his career was in an interesting place, already a superstar yet not quite in the stratosphere he would reach in the ‘90s where it felt like each of his action films was an attempt to make the biggest movie of its kind ever. Ivan Reitman’s TWINS, the very definition of a formulaic ‘80s comedy, was a big hit at the end of 1988 but it feels like his most rewatchable films during this period are the ones that successfully make the tone of the film as giant as his screen presence, namely the two he did for producer Joel Silver, COMMANDO and PREDATOR, then later in TOTAL RECALL for Paul Verhoeven. John Irvin’s RAW DEAL from 1986 is the one that never got much attention but it doesn’t play all that bad now and is maybe the only Arnold movie during this stretch that, R rating or no, doesn’t feel pitched towards kids at all. RED HEAT falls somewhere in between all this and one of the most interesting things about it is the way it presents him in the frame, first in uniform then later in the blue-green suit that Riznik says makes him look like Gumby. In some ways it’s an alternate, more vulnerable version of his stoicism in the first TERMINATOR, made more interesting when learning how Hill recommended Arnold closely study the Greta Garbo performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s NINOTCHKA where she plays a Soviet officer arriving in the West for the first time, so if Garbo ever had a scene set in a crappy hotel with a coin-operated TV that plays porno, Arnold’s reaction is likely similar to what hers would have been. This makes me wish there were more Lubitsch to the film which allows him to approach the role with a subtlety that he didn’t always get to do elsewhere and the result feels like he’s really playing a character here.

The sequences set in Russia were mostly filmed in Hungary and Austria with some footage actually grabbed in Red Square, the first such Hollywood production to be given permission to do so (“…but why?” asked Leonard Maltin in his star-and-a-half capsule review) and this film happened not too long before the wall came down so looking at it now years later the portrayal of Russia as filled with organized crime does have some added interest and by having the Georgian bad guy Viktor team up with a gang of black militants whose leader is behind bars, the film seems to be drawing a line between the underclasses of the two countries. When Danko is challenged to hold onto steaming hot rock just removed from the first being told, “If you work with steel, you should be used to the heat,” it’s pretty much the first line in the films as if saying right off the bat how this world is divided between the people struggling as much as anyone and those who refuse to acknowledge the differences. Each character in the movie seems to be just trying to get by, up against all the faceless higher ups in charge. Even the most powerful crime lord in the movie is already in jail. There’s no kingpin here, just the Russians trying to keep the influence of America, in the form of the drugs Viktor wants to bring over, from getting there for as long as possible as if fully aware that the end of the USSR is approaching fast which has more to it than the outright cartoon that was ROCKY IV. Even Garbo became seduced by the west in NINOTCHKA, something that never comes close to happening for Ivan Danko.

Walter Hill always did know how to stage action. If you want a shootout in a stairwell, he’s your guy, he knows how to present these things with clarity which is refreshing now in an old school way along with two stars who always seem up for it physically even if not much about all the action feels particularly unique until the intensity of the bus chase climax. All of which makes me think that RED HEAT is… (Jack Donaghy voice) fine. It’s a little too much of the 48 HRS. formula and then ANOTHER 48 HRS. which came two years later feels a little too much like a continuation of this along with the McGuffin in the form of a locker key that never becomes very interesting even though the film seems to try awfully hard to convince us that it takes a lot of legwork to track down where it fits. The film is never dull but also never very distinctive while being a little too nasty and not fun enough with maybe a few too many sacrificial lambs, to the point that when one person turns up alive after it seemed likely they were dispensed with the appearance almost feels like a studio note along the lines of, “We can’t kill off EVERY minor character in this movie!” The James Horner score opens and closes in a classical style inspired by, if not just lifted from, Prokofiev then everything in the middle is basically the same sort of orchestral licks with lots of sax, flutes, electronics and steel drums he previously used in things like 48 HRS, GORKY PARK and COMMANDO as the composer tended to do during that decade. It’s fair to say that few things provide the feel of ‘80s urban action as what James Horner planted in our brains with this sound, music that always drives the movie with lots of forward momentum and it’s fun to listen to but is still another element that makes the film seem like something that’s been done before.

The film has the right pieces but doesn’t do as much with them as it could so the overall effect doesn’t stick in the brain as much, not always knowing what it needs to spend time with just like a few late plot points that get rushed through, as if the film has decided it just wants to get to the climax quicker. Nothing wrong with wanting to tighten the pace but it does make some things feel a little abrupt. There’s a review on Letterboxd which simply reads “Needed more Gina Gershon,” and I can’t disagree with that. One other piece the movie doesn’t have is any sort of equivalent of the country-western bar scene with Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS. that helped turn him into an immediate superstar. I’m not sure what that scene would be here, or even which star that would focus on, but it is an indication that the movie is missing that one unique element people would remember, a scene, a moment, a laugh that makes everything else flow together and without that it just isn’t as special. A film like this needs the plot, the action and the characters but it also needs those moments that make the characters memorable, the moments you remember more than anything else and without them the movie doesn’t stick.

That’s the thing. There needs to be more. More surprising action, more edgy comedy, more tension, something different for Arnold to do, something that could have done even more with Belushi, something to help this stand out and be unique. Looking up a few things, it turns out before Belushi hands over a Magnum .45 to him (“That’s the most powerful handgun in the world. Why do you think Dirty Harry uses it?” “Who is Dirty Harry?”) that the Soviet-made gun Arnold uses is fictional, go figure, but maybe something even more different than that. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy were at each other’s throats all through 48 HRS. Nolte growled, Eddie was raw and the tension between the two of them made it explode. That movie is on fire. In comparison, Schwarzenegger and Belushi go well together although it is done in a much more low-key style and even when they start yelling at each other it never quite feels like they would come to blows. Having said that, the scene in a diner where they get to know each other and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the film, each of them displaying their vulnerability in a way that feels completely natural and Belushi’s protest to the waitress about how he’s gotten his coffee the perfect color is the sort of thing I’ve thought of more than a few times while pouring coffee for myself over the years. In the middle of all this, the quiet in this one scene is a welcome moment of reflection. A few jokes throughout click, some more than others, but it feels like Hill didn’t want the film to be funnier or more cartoony even if that sort of thing might have stuck in the head a little more. There’s a slight recurring exchange, too subtle to be called a running gag, of Arnold occasionally saying, “Thank you,” followed by a “You’re welcome,” coming from Belushi, which is nice and the two of them underplay the moments well, but also says something about how much the film keeps things restrained. The climactic bus chase through Chicago is fun and executed well but still not that different, although it does manage to get the job done. The film also knows not to waste time at the very end when wrapping things up, which at least feels appropriate since all it needs is one last moment with the leads to show us who they are. People are fixed in their ways. Danko doesn’t change, Riznik doesn’t change and the best that can happen is a moment of acknowledged connection as they cross paths before moving on.

Calling this performance Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Garbo because of the NINOTCHKA inspiration might be a stretch, but when he crushes a bug crawling on the registry in that hotel and silently looks up at the clerk it feels like this performance is about Arnold figuring out how little he needed to do at least until the climax when the character lets his full Russian ferocity be heard. So much of a Schwarzenegger performance is found in the way a film figures out how to use him and Hill is clearly always searching for the balance between letting other actors respond to him and the quiet vulnerability they’re willing to show peeking through. I always did like James Belushi (to this day, I think ‘Jim’ sounds better) and I like him here, even if the film never quite allows him to go crazy in a way that would balance against the stoicism of his co-star. Belushi plays the character rather than the high concept of the movie and it feels like he’s more of an actor than a star which lends it credibility but maybe also adds to the muted effect it all has, even as he knows how to play certain quieter moments for the right sort of sly humor.

Ed O’Ross (who got another big part in ANOTHER 48 HRS. a few years later plus, among other things, a recurring role on SIX FEET UNDER) as Viktor works the close-ups he’s given well and has the right intensity but there’s only so much to do with this bad guy. Peter Boyle gets a great intro then doesn’t do much outside of being annoyed at everything and barking orders at people. Gina Gershon, the very epitome of a tough and sultry Walter Hill girl, at least gives the movie a different kind of energy when she turns up and I wish she was around longer—she’s the one girl in the picture with a substantial role and the number of official stills with her indicates they wanted to make it seem like she had a bigger part than she does. Brent Jennings, who also later had a much bigger role in ANOTHER 48 HRS, is the kingpin behind bars, Brion James from both 48 HRS. has one scene as a snitch, Pruitt Taylor Vince is the desk clerk at the scuzzy hotel and Richard Bright, Al Neri in all three GODFATHERs, is Belushi’s partner. Maybe the best performance in the entire film is Larry, not yet Laurence, Fishburne in a part that isn’t showy enough to say he steals the film but whenever he walks into a scene his very presence shifts the focus of things, bringing a sly and completely unexpected rhythm to what he does, taking a part that doesn't appear to be very much on the page and making the movie better just by being there.

At the very least, it’s probably better than THE PRESIDIO but if someone has a strong opinion on this in defense of Peter Hyams I’m willing to listen. If RED HEAT had been a bigger hit ($34 million, which was better than THE PRESIDIO but not as good as THE DEAD POOL which came a few weeks later) then maybe there would have been a sequel but in the ending it does have the two main characters seem to know they’ll never see each other again and that’s what sticks with me much more than any sort of muted triumph felt. As for when I saw this, my memory is that it was on opening night with some friends at the White Plains Galleria but barely have any memory of it beyond that. And now this is just one more movie on Blu-ray that I picked up used for some reason which contains several typos in the subtitles during one scene with Russian dialogue, but what are you gonna do. All these years later, I’m at least still thinking about the films of Walter Hill, even if this isn’t one of the first that comes to mind. For that matter, I still haven’t seen his most recent, the 2022 western DEAD FOR A DOLLAR, and I can’t even explain this. Maybe it’s just nice to know that there’s still one more out there. But the final moment of this film, as James Belushi watches Arnold Schwarzenegger leave is, it should be said, a beautiful piece of staging and cutting, maybe of the kind that only a director like Walter Hill knows how to do, saying everything that the two characters didn’t know how to express. You are who you are, no matter how much the world changes around you. That doesn’t stop. Life goes on.

They Think It's Normal

New York is the past for me now. I don’t know what goes on there anymore. Maybe it’s worse, which seems possible based on the headlines and other things I’ve heard, but I probably shouldn’t speculate. The New York that I knew felt exciting, it felt alive, it felt like anything was possible. I went all around that city when I could. There were days when I walked down more streets than I ever thought was possible. There were late nights when I walked down dark streets that I shouldn’t have. There were times I’ll never forget that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. There were glorious movie theaters. Back then it felt like the world. It was also the one where the film version of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES was made and even though the New York portrayed in it wasn’t one that I really knew, being sheltered up in Scarsdale and all much of the time, something about it still seemed familiar. The novel by Tom Wolfe which I read a few years earlier seemed like an ultra-sophisticated and darkly funny look at a world I simply assumed was out there. Maybe the book isn’t as good as it seemed to me then but as far as the film goes, the book matters and it also doesn’t. I have no idea what happened to my old copy anyway and I’m not about to start digging for it but some of the book still lingers in the mind to go with that nagging feeling of how much the film is missing the mark. It doesn’t feel like a book that has lasted, maybe because what it was about was so much a product of the moment, but even taken on its own the film suffers from trying to squeeze so much plot that came from roughly 700 pages into just over two hours at the expense of what was so memorable about the source although even this is hardly its only problem. There are definite issues of tone along with trying to make its story relatable, as well as understandable, to anyone who doesn’t know New York instead of addressing the characters for who they really are. It’s a big budget movie star movie that tries to make the people in it likable simply because they’re being played by movie stars and this is simply the wrong film to try to pull that off.

Now going on thirty-five years old, the Brian De Palma adaptation of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES remains a legend in the history of massive flops, a reputation helped by the publication a year later of the book “The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco” written by Julie Salamon which documented the film’s production and the calamitous response when it was released in immaculate detail. Devouring the book at the time remains a vivid memory—I recall staying up to the early morning hours to finish it before Salamon came in the next day for an interview on the show where I worked—and reading some of that very same copy of the book again all these years later, I can’t help but have sympathy for De Palma who is a director I normally revere but simply miscalculated here in what felt like an attempt to please everyone although I’m willing to allow that he of course tried his best. I’ve seen the film multiple times over the years beginning with opening weekend right before Christmas Day 1990 and have never been able to stretch as far as actually calling it good but as wrongheaded as the film remains, by now I’ve developed a certain amount of affection for what it attempts, partly because the style De Palma brings to the material is evident, partly because no one attempts to make a film like this anymore. If someone did try—if anyone were crazy enough to attempt to remake the material, that is—it would likely be a multi-part series for streaming and it might be technically ‘good’, whatever that means, but I probably would get bored by the end of episode two and never go back, like a few streaming shows these days that I can think of. Everything else aside, at least the film is interesting and the older I get, the more I realize that counts for something. No one, after all, needs a more smoothly polite version of anything, certainly not THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. And the film that did get made may not be entirely polite about what it sets out to do but it never seems to find the right sort of alternative.

New York bond trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a massive success and sees his entire being as a “Master of the Universe” closing deals for hundreds of millions of dollars like it’s nothing at all. He has a wife named Judy (Kim Cattrall), a daughter, a huge Park Avenue apartment and a mistress in the form of Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) who he picks up at the airport one night for their latest rendezvous. But on the way back into the city Sherman misses their exit off the expressway and soon they wind up deep in the South Bronx totally lost. While finding an on ramp they encounter two young black men who may or may not be there to help and as they attempt to flee one of the kids is struck by the car. Safe back in Maria’s apartment, Sherman is panicked over what has just happened while Maria feels relief that they managed to get away but when the kid winds up in the hospital the firebrand Reverend Bacon (John Hancock) takes an interest, determined to get this into the press in order to have the city investigate and Assistant District Attorney Jed Kramer (Saul Rubinek) prosecute. To get this done the City Light tabloid enlists has-been, alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) to their side and soon enough Sherman realizes that the walls are beginning to close in on him.

Even back when the film first opened, something seemed off right from the start in how THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES is visually spectacular throughout but too often this doesn’t happen in the right way. The time lapse shot of the Manhattan skyline taken from the Chrysler Building at the start of the opening credits is expertly done but doesn’t feel like anything particularly unique, no matter how complicated it was to attain. The famed prolonged Steadicam shot that follows as the credits continue, showing a drunken Peter Fallow played by Bruce Willis arriving at the event meant to honor him, is phenomenally executed on a technical level but the sequence still never feels like it’s about anything, playing like a case of De Palma determined to get such a shot in there whether it belonged or not, an attempt to visually open up a dialogue-heavy story or maybe compete with Scorsese’s famous GOODFELLAS Copacabana shot from earlier in the year. And maybe all this says something about the film’s visual approach to the city of New York, one of the greatest places in the world to photograph and a location De Palma had already explored in the past with incidental elements in films going back to the sixties, yet based on this film it feels like there’s nothing about the city circa 1990 that particularly interested him in a visual way so any sort of character to the city never comes through. However much really was filmed on location it never provides any sort of feeling of the actual place, no sense of what the city was in these days, no sense of what it was like to be in one of those crowded restaurants, no sense of what it was like to walk down the street.

That Steadicam shot is at least a visual idea and maybe since so much of the rest of the film focuses strictly on the plot and dialogue there’s simply no time or place for other such visual flourishes outside of what feel like Strangelovian-wide angle lenses to accentuate elements in a shot. With a screenplay by Michael Cristofer (who later shared the screen with Bruce Willis when he played a role in DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE) based on the novel by Tom Wolfe which originated as a serial in Rolling Stone, the movie offers the basic story but it’s the texture that hasn’t quite been translated so the De Palma quote saying he first envisioned this as a sort of cross between THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS makes me dream of what could have been. He can’t seem to find a way to bring this script to life since so much of it seems to be equal parts exposition and speeches meant to reflect things metaphorically with no middle ground, not enough room to play so it all feels stilted as the actors scramble around to play things as broad comedy. The epic feel that came from the sprawl of Tom Wolfe’s prose – and all these years later the idea of that compulsively readable sprawl is what I mostly remember, like the description of Sherman’s cab ride to work at the beginning -- is gone and the story all by itself feels surprisingly small now. Or maybe because of what we’ve gone through in the decades since all the scrambling around by everyone really does seem like a lot of hubbub over not very much which makes me wish there could be more visually to take in, the feeling of something more that the film might have wanted to say outside of all those long speeches.

Something in the staging is missing, an epic quality to make it more cinematic that would be a visual equivalent to all those words—maybe the film needed its own version of how a few years later the narrator of Scorsese’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE doted on every last detail of the world being portrayed or maybe just something else to give a feel of the energy that’s there all through the city. Too often it feels like De Palma doesn’t quite know how to stage all this dialogue in a way that interests him and only on rare occasions, like the framing of a car scene seemingly lifted from THE SHINING or another shot that is almost the exact inversion of the way he later filmed a scene in his own MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, does it feel at all playful in a way that helps the rhythm of what a scene might be going for. Even when he utilizes split screen at one point, just as he has done multiple times before and since, the device feels shoehorned in as if he’s trying to come up with something, anything, other than just flatly shooting the scene head-on but the staging feels like he pulled back from the idea when editing so for a few minutes the onscreen action plays entirely on the right side of the frame. Just like this scene, it’s a film being made by a master with a stylistic approach that for whatever reason he can’t take all the way so the idea never lands. Split diopter shots turn up, one speaker phone conversation at Sherman’s Wall Street firm is filmed entirely from above, Steadicam movements track the actors as they walk endlessly but it all seems to be for little effect. The De Palma satires GREETINGS and HI, MOM! from several decades earlier both of which starred Robert De Niro feel like they should be obvious precursors to this material—particularly the almost unbearably funny “Be Black, Baby” sequence in HI, MOM! which is one of the most racially charged pieces of satire ever—but it’s not really the case, so it doesn’t even feel clear what attracted him to the material, especially since he doesn’t seem to have enough good ideas for filming much of it. Maybe since the film had to be so expensive the freewheeling sense of how De Palma films back in the ‘70s felt where it seemed like anything could happen in the next scene is long gone. Even the specificity of how characters in the book are drawn feel like they’re based on actual people, or at least actual types prevalent in the city then but the film, knowing that people who live nowhere near the east coast aren’t going to care about those things, doesn’t bother with any of that so it never feels like any actual reality being satirized other than the generic concepts of things like ‘racism’ and ‘rich people’.

The movie does at least attempt to make the audience feel a little uncomfortable with its portrayal of the Bronx as a war zone as Melanie Griffith’s temptress Maria Ruskin asks, “Where are all the white people?” when they drive through it. The Al Sharpton parody that is the extravagant Reverend Bacon played by John Hancock whose belief in his ability to control the righteous steam of the city that’s ready to blow and gain his own power in making sure that someone pays for all that anger, expresses this through a speech that at least approaches challenging what the audience for this might be looking for although something like the gospel choir that follows him around always singing feels like a stylistic extreme taken too far. But all this winds up feeling disconnected from however the film feels about its main characters. Sherman McCoy is clearly an unsympathetic, unlikable schmuck but the film doesn’t know what to do with that feeling and presents the story as the character’s redemption, his great chance to break away from how the world sees him taking all this on faith because of the star playing the role. Peter Fallow, who never quite seemed to be the second lead in the book the way he is here (way back when the Bruce Willis casting was announced I first assumed it was a miscasting of assistant D.A. Kramer, played to the ceiling in the film by Saul Rubinek) also gets the narrating duties which sort of make him an audience surrogate but the disinterest in Willis’ voice and casualness of the final result is even less successful than, say, BLADE RUNNER. “Christ, was this the world he lived in?” that voiceover asks when lightly touching on details as Sherman walks through a society reception with Willis’ demeanor feeling all wrong and it spells out the obvious a little too much while not adding anything particularly interesting. Not to mention how the film tries very hard to give more depth to someone named Fallow although the way it’s played, there barely seems to be a character to add anything to anyway. Fallow was British in the book, the better to make him a low-level employee in a Rupert Murdoch-type empire, and maybe a few years later they could have gotten Hugh Grant when his stardom exploded. Then again, the studio never would have waited a few years to make this film with such a topical plotline even if the actual film never seems to take advantage of that. But the daydream of this film being made in the mid-90s makes me think of Mike Nichols directing it with a screenplay by Elaine May around the time they did THE BIRDCAGE (the movie of the moment they did make later was PRIMARY COLORS, based on another book that has now faded from prominence) and that right there offers an idea of what is missing from the film that got made as the city emerged from the tensions of the ‘80s, no matter how much this was the only time the movie could have made sense.

The script that did get made does give us Melanie Griffith saying, “Don’t think, Sherman. Just fuck,” which at least is a good line although that’s a low bar. And maybe the film is politically confused about what it wants to say or at least uncertain how it feels about all this, maybe just wanting not to upset anyone while still trying to seem edgy, acknowledging the politics while still presenting it all as ridiculous. The tone comes closest to showing some depth during the big speech by the unbilled F. Murray Abraham as the Bronx District Attorney with the actor bringing all the right energy to his biting dialogue (“You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge?” giving the whole thing weight for just a few seconds) but in a way, the Tony Roberts (RIP) speech in the great THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, a film which really does hold up as an incisive portrait of a racially charged New York, on what the voters are going to care about if the ransom on the subway hostages is paid (“The rich’ll support you, likewise the blacks and the Puerto Ricans won’t give a shit.”) gets to the point more succinctly than anything here.

The money is onscreen with cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and production design by Richard Sylbert that makes each scene look great. There are moments here and there that work but even when those things jump out it can sometimes still feel misplaced. Sherman’s reconciliation with his father played by Donald Moffat is actually a good scene, well-performed by both actors. It’s just in the wrong movie. Sentiment isn’t what’s needed, but even when the tone stays a little nasty like a drunk scene involving Bruce Willis and Beth Broderick as a woman who gives Fallow some key information the moment has potential but never manages to find the wit, resulting in a scene involving two drunk people that badly needs some Blake Edwards flair. We need to feel the opulence, we need to get the taste of a steak at a restaurant on the upper east side, we need the rush of one last martini before the check comes and you realize how much money you just spent. But along with that the film also needs a real kind of satirical anger and it can’t figure out a way to get you to choke on a laugh when the joke has gone too far. The film badly needs a bite that stings and this just isn’t there. Even the score feels like it needs the harsh trumpets of Elmer Bernstein music blaring and instead offers an easy listening saxophone vibe through the score by Dave Grusin that it does have which is maybe too lighthearted about the whole thing, although the bursts of classical music connected to the Don Giovanni sequence work much better. Too often it feels like the director doesn’t has the right inspiration for how to shoot all the dialogue and, as it is, a few zoom-ins on tape recorders playing have the most purely De Palma feel out of anything in the entire film.

Even the big meeting between the two male leads on the subway where Sherman opens up to Fallow without realizing who he is falls flat, with maybe the most notable thing about it being when Tom Hanks breaks down crying when he realizes he pissed his pants. I guess the film is saying everyone is guilty but only the white guys realize how guilty they are. This comes down to the infamous speech about Decency during the big climactic courtroom scene, spoken by the one character who isn’t guilty about anything in a stab at a Capra feel that becomes too much of an attempt at flashing a moral in capital letters to the audience before it all ends abruptly. The film version turned this judge, in the book a Jew named Myron Kominsky who keeps a righteous hold on things in his courtroom, into the thinly drawn Judge White played by Morgan Freeman as the epitome of all that is noble to maybe balance things out racially speaking but this also means that just about the strongest imagery involving a Jewish character has a bit player singing “Pennies From Heaven” at a funeral instead of taking control of a rioting courtroom. Morgan Freeman of course displays authority but aside from saying, “Get out of my face” to defendants a few times there really isn’t anything at all to the characterization. The film wants to redeem the people that it wants to redeem but that’s not the story. It’s also not funny, but this is of relatively minor importance. What does feel important is the lack of sprawl to the narrative that needs to ask the question of how the world has gotten to this place and maybe the only answer is to let the whole system burn down. It needs to show that there are no good guys and if they’re going to fuck you, you have to fuck them first. People don’t do the right thing, after all. Just typing out that sentence makes me wonder what a Spike Lee version of this would have been and the answer would have likely had more anger than the studio would have ever wanted but that version would also have been at least interesting too and maybe much more than that. The smart aleck nature of the way De Palma plays the material extends to the ending which I guess is meant to be a cynical curtain call, where good has sort of triumphed after beating the system at its own game but it doesn’t really matter. It also makes me wonder how good Peter Fallow’s book could really be, even if it is bullshit, since he did such a half-hearted job as narrator. Basically, everyone is applauding the moment because nobody cares about whatever the truth really was. All that matters is they get to have a nice dinner. These days, that might be the thing that has aged the best about this considering where we’ve ended up in the real world. But it still doesn’t make for much of an ending to the film.

Tom Hanks is adrift here no matter how much he tries, working to give each scene life and somehow bring his innate likability to a character who doesn’t possess any at all, but as much as he never quite convinces that he’s someone who doesn’t remember his doorman’s name is clearly trying his best. Bruce Willis, somewhere between the run of DIE HARD 2, MORTAL THOUGHTS and HUDSON HAWK, never feels like he’s doing much beyond wearing expensive suits which seem all wrong for this character and the way he underplays things feels too much the opposite of everyone else going through the roof. To be fair to him, Willis made several films in the ‘90s where it genuinely felt like he was trying to stretch, but the vibe coming off his performance that he’s maybe glanced at the script a few times means this simply isn’t one of them. When the news of the actor’s retirement due to his medical condition was officially announced, I found myself putting on this film that night even though I wasn’t sure why and maybe this speaks to my strange fascination with it that never went away but maybe also I was trying to find something of note to his performance because I wanted to, I always wanted to love Bruce Willis in films, but it still doesn’t seem to be there. Melanie Griffith and her exaggerated southern drawl does provide the right sort of energy whenever she turns up so it all feels refreshingly effortless in a film where you can feel the strain too much of the time, if only all the malapropism-filled dialogue she has was funnier. Even while overplaying things Kim Cattrall still brings the right sort of desperation towards making sure her character’s façade never cracks, the unbilled F. Murray Abraham probably does the most with all the dialogue he gets and Alan King in his big monologue, one of the best written speeches in the film and the one that really expresses what this is all about, is similarly enjoyable. Other actors find moments here and there, like Robert Stephens of Bily Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES as the Murdoch-like publisher, Norman Parker’s police detective who subtly begins reading McCoy his rights during their first meeting plus a Richard Belzer appearance is always welcome, but there are also actors in this film who I normally like but many of them are either playing it all wrong or were misdirected as part of the attempt to have everything be as big as possible. There’s no point to single out any of these people for blame although I will mention that no movie ever needs to have this much Geraldo Rivera. Among all the familiar faces, a very pregnant Rita Wilson is a publicist at the beginning, Kirsten Dunst makes one of her first appearances here as Hanks’ daughter and this is also a reminder of the days when films would feature random appearances by George Plimpton but I guess this was a long time ago.

When the Christmas present to the world that was THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES came out on December 21, 1990, it immediately died. The opening weekend box office came in behind the first weekend of KINDERGARTEN COP, the second weekend of LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO and several other films as well. Everything that season was beaten by HOME ALONE including other big-budget flops aimed at adults like THE RUSSIA HOUSE and HAVANA with only THE GODFATHER PART III doing anything near halfway decent business. It was hard to see the movie as its own thing at the time since too many people had opinions about what it should have been. It was also hard when the book about making it came out the following year and it’s still hard not to think about all the things surrounding it so many years later. But focusing on what the movie is even for a few minutes, shutting everything else out, it feels clear that De Palma and the other people involved just didn’t crack the material, which maybe is the only thing that needs to be said about it all these years later. In his book “Cinema Speculation”, Tarantino references how in making this film De Palma “would fall on his face and never really get back up again after fucking up Tom Wolfe” which is a little harsh not just because it ignores the films he made after this which are worth defending but because fucking up Tom Wolfe hardly seems like the biggest error a director can make. The epic scale of hubris displayed in Julie Salamon’s “The Devil’s Candy” could even be seen as a sort of spiritual sequel to the original novel, only things worked out better for Brian De Palma than the book’s version of Sherman McCoy. He got to make CARLITO’S WAY and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, after all, not to mention the phenomenal FEMME FATALE. I still love Brian De Palma films and wish the same could be said about this one, much as I want to be the one person around to proclaim this film really is great and you’re all just missing it. But there is something about THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES that keeps me coming back to it, maybe to understand the things that went wrong even more, maybe to find the good film that might be buried in there somewhere, whether it reconciles with the book or not. Maybe one of these days. This is something I can’t explain, but the fact that I do return to it has to mean something. I don’t rewatch WISE GUYS, after all. And I’ll probably return to this film again, looking for some kind of answer. Or maybe it’s all just an attempt to still try to remember the past.