THREE BILLBOARDS....

 















Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri... is so full of wild emotion and bravura acting that it's not difficult to see why it has has earned so much acclaim. In an era where most movies are aimed at 12-year old boys, this one was bound to stand out.

Yet, for all of its tough acting and artful direction, it wears its own unpleasantness like a costumed hero wears a cape. Look at how sincere we all are, the characters seem to say, gritting their teeth like untamed dogs, daring us not to approve. What kills Three Billboards...is that underneath the blood and anger is a rather cheap and obvious story. The director has moments of inspiration, but then we're whisked off into another plotline, rushed along so we can get to the movie's fatalistic shrug of an ending.

The movie certainly starts out with promise. Frances McDormand plays the mother of a murdered girl. Feeling the Ebbing police haven't done enough to find the killer, she rents three billboards outside the town limits and puts up posters asking the police why it's taken so long. She aims most of her rage at good-natured Chief Willoughby, (Woody Harrelson). The good ol' boys in the department don't appreciate her accusations, and it looks like we're up for a battle between a strong, half-crazed woman and some dumb cops.

The cops, of course, are all a bunch of beer-bellied, fag-hating bigots. From the moment we see Willoughby's gut straining against his belt, we know writer/director Martin McDonagh isn't one for subtlety. Yet, he's good at playing a sort of shell game with his characters; we find ourselves rooting for people we didn't like at first, and uncertain about others, which keeps us interested.

The story begins with McDormand seeing a trio of abandoned billboards, not used since the 1980s for a diaper advertisement. Perhaps the baby in the old, torn ad reminds her of her daughter. Then she walks,  in slow motion so we know she's serious, to Ebbing's town hall where she asks about renting the billboard space. She stands at the window, which overlooks the police station. A cockroach is stuck on the pane, trying to turn itself over. She gives it a nudge, an easy metaphor for the filth she's about to get into.

In quick order we learn a lot - she feels horrible guilt about letting her daughter out of the house on that damned, fateful night; her ex-husband was an abusive jerk, and her son is embarrassed by his mom's behavior around town. The local priest, and even the town dentist, has a gripe with her, because they all adore the popular Chief Willoughby. Worse, the chief is ill, and doesn't have long to live. The chief also inspires great loyalty from his psychotic deputy (Sam Rockwell), a creep right out of a Jim Thompson novel.

Deputy Dixon is everything that is right and wrong with the movie. He's explosive, but also touchingly stupid. Rockwell plays him perfectly, though McDonagh  gives him a number of quirks that feel forced: he lives with his mother, owns a pet turtle, reads comic books, and listens to Abba. These bits, added to "flesh him out," feel like useless embroidery.

Still, the scenes involving Dixon are among the best in the movie. He makes most cinema cops look dull by comparison, because his temper seems genuinely to erupt from the deepest, most brutal pits of human nature. If Three Billboards... had focused on him from the beginning,  the abrupt change in his character that happens late in the film might've been more satisfying. Or believable. Instead, it's just another of the director's quick turns.

McDonagh, an Irishman, also wants  to say something about the American south. In an early scene we see someone reading a book by that great southern author, Flannery O'Connor; there are constant references to how the south is changing; the store where McDormand works is called "Southern Charms," and in a scene where Dixon is getting beat up, we hear Joan Baez on the jukebox, singing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Worst of all is  Dixon's name (Jason Dixon), a heavy-handed play on the Mason-Dixon line. In actuality, Missouri was split during the Civil War, but McDonagh is too clumsy to make his point clear, if he has a point.

Ultimately, the film is propelled by rage  - we get a lot of scenes of burning buildings and explosions and knives against throats. In between these high spots, characters clench their jaws and simmer, just waiting for the next outburst. What are we being sold here?  That violence and revenge gets us nowhere? Wow, there's an original thought.

The violent material in Three Billboards... is so well done, and the performances by the cast so compelling, and the cinematography by Ben Davis so rich, that I wish a better movie had been made. With so much cartoonish violence dominating American movies in recent years, a story like this was needed to remind us that violence is horrible and often kicks back on the perpetrators. McDonagh's method of following a scene of violence with an act of kindness is only partly successful, though, and the relationships I wanted to see develop, between the mother and the chief, and later, between the mother and the deputy, are only hinted at.

Three Billboards...is like an ambitious art project by a beginning painter who has some great ambitions, but hasn't quite learned his craft. Also, for a movie that is purportedly about showing us the downside of violence, McDonagh is clearly having the most fun when he's directing Rockwell to throw a guy out a window. This is a movie where we hear bones breaking and skin peeling, all quite realistically, yet the dialog feels fake, loaded with vulgarities. Children call their mother "cunt," and get away with it, unpunished. The movie has received so much praise for its realism, but in its own way, Three Billboards...is just as mannered and contrived as any comic book movie.

McDonagh started out as a playwright, and like many Irish playwrights, he has often been treated in America as an exotic personage, with a love of language and dark imagery and bleak humor. Some of the praise was justified; a few of his plays were quite fine. As a filmmaker, though, he's so bold with the violence and dark comedy that people overlook his sophomoric messages. 

He's like a big kid in a toy store, smashing the dolls until their heads fly off, and then asking us to feel bad about the evils of capitalism.

STREET SMART (1987)

What did audiences think of Jerry Schatzberg's  Street Smart (1987), a portrayal of rotten people in the world of New York publishing as well as the New York streets?  In the era of musclebound action movies, MTV videos, and teen comedies, its depiction of crooked journalists, pimps, snooty magazine editors, and  hookers, wasn't an easy sell. The women in the movie grovel and cry; the men are nasty, or phony, or brutal. Still, it was the kind of gem that could sneak into theaters during the late 1980s, a movie described by Roger Ebert as "far from perfect and yet it contains things that are so good they take your breath away."

The movie stars Christopher Reeve, best known for starring in four Superman movies, as a magazine writer struggling to get the attention of his editor. From upper class stock with sculpted, patrician features, Reeve liked to play amoral characters now and then - he was Michael Caine's partner in crime in Deathtrap - and as Jonathan Fisher he's very good as a smartass who thinks his intelligence gives him a pass to bend the rules of journalism. With "fake news" a new buzzword, it's not a movie that was ahead of its time, so much as timeless.

The rule Fisher breaks involves a story about a New York pimp. Unable to meet a real pimp in time to make his deadline, he simply wings it and turns in a fake story. His editor (Andre Gregory, horse laughing through the role) loves it and determines that Fisher will be his new star reporter. Meanwhile, local authorities begin to think Fisher's article is about a real pimp named Leo Smalls, known as "Fast Black," (Morgan Freeman) who is on trial for manslaughter. Faster than you can say Meet John Doe,  Fisher and Smalls are soon an unlikely team. Fisher needs to produce a real pimp to make his story valid, and Smalls can claim he was with Fisher at the time he supposedly killed a man. All Fisher has to do is produce his notes at Smalls' trial. But he has no notes.

As he goes deeper into his involvement with Smalls, Fisher learns that pimps have their own rules. When Fisher tries to stop Smalls from hurting one of the girls in his stable, the pimp thinks nothing of sticking a broken bottle into Fisher's face. 

Things get even more complex when Fisher develops feelings for Punchy (Kathy Baker), a good- natured prostitute who is tired of the street life. When Punchy tells Smalls that she'd like to try something else for a change, he's soon asking which eye she'd like have removed. The film has an unmistakable 1980s veneer - the hair is big, the shoulders on the dresses wide, and Gregory, as the publisher, looks like he borrowed his wardrobe from Bonfire of the Vanities era Tom Wolfe - but the explosive violence of Smalls gives Street Smart a nasty aftertaste. He keeps those around him, and the viewers, off balance.

Shatzberg, born in 1927, was a director who liked characters in compromised positions. In The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) he'd delved into the world of crooked politics,  after having launched his career with a trio of dynamic, edgy films about drifters, thieves, and losers - The Panic in Needle Park (1971),  Scarecrow (1973) and Sweet Revenge (1976) - but with Street Smart he seemed to be wallowing at the deepest end of the gutter. The Canon Group, mostly known for horror movies and action features, skimped on distribution; Street Smart died unnoticed at the box office.

The movie depicts the degenerating New York of the 1980s, a time of garbage strikes, rampant crack addiction, and racial tension. Budgetary issues caused much of Street Smart to be shot in Montreal, but one can't tell. The success of this masquerade is a tribute to cinematographer Adam Holendar, who had made his debut with Midnight Cowboy (1969), and to the set design team that turned a section of Montreal into 42nd Street.

The film may be 31 years old, but I watched it again recently on Epix and was still intrigued by its sly power. It is a film of the 1980s, but it's not stuck in the '80s. This is partly because the acting ensemble is so good, and partly because David Freeman, who had previously written a highly underrated Jack Nicholson feature called The Border (1982), turned in a script that dips and dives with the unpredictability of a good game of pinball.

We want to like "Fast Black," because he's flashy and dangerous, but he reveals himself to be an utter animal of the streets. We want to like Jonathan Fisher, and we hope he gets away with the little ruse pulled on his publisher, but in his own way he's as unscrupulous as the pimp. He sends his own girlfriend (Mimi Rogers) into a bar full of pimps just to see how they'd act around her, which is a sign that he's certainly not husband material.

Ultimately, Smalls thinks Fisher is a spoiled, over-educated wimp. Fisher  thinks Smalls  is a reprehensible lowlife. They're both correct, and they sense that each knows the truth about the other. But of the two, Smalls  has been in his game too long to change, and he knows how to survive. The journalist, who thinks he can play tough, is less sure of himself. He knows the pimp could tear his face off, but he won't back down.

Morgan Freeman was 50 at the time of Street Smart. His performance earned accolades from various critic's circles, and was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. That's quite a feat for a film that was barely released, and for an actor who had spent a big chunk of the previous decade on The Electric Company, a PBS children's show. He once said of roles like the one in Street Smart, "With bad guys you get to let it all out. All those dark places in your psyche? You can let 'em go. When you play good guys, it's kind of boring. It's one note."

Leo "Fast Black" Smalls is a tapestry of bad psychological wiring, and if there are times when he seems charming and likeable, it's only because that's how pimps get along. Where the cracks show in this character is when he lashes out, as he does in an impromptu game of  basketball with younger men. Unsure that he can keep up, Smalls suddenly interrupts the game to choke and humiliate some poor kid on the court. Losing a ball game wouldn't be so bad, but to lose his standing on the street would be unbearable. To hell with being respected. Smalls wants to be feared.

Reeve never quite outran his Superman character. He tried in movies like Street Smart, but the public didn't buy it. Critics were harsh, too. Pauline Kael raved about Freeman, but called Reeve, "a big nothing." This was unfortunate, because Reeve took his work seriously and tried to show versatility. Perhaps he was too tall, too cartoonishly handsome, to play a seedy reporter. Perhaps audiences simply couldn't accept that this clean-cut character could outsmart his urban rivals in Street Smart, though if Glenn Ford or Kirk Douglas had done it in their day, the film would be hailed as a classic noir. 

For Reeve, who died at 52 after a horse-riding accident left him paralyzed, Street Smart was a pet project. He had been turning down roles that would eventually go to Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, and Michael Douglas, hanging on to this script until he could get it made. In fact, Reeve only agreed to do Superman IV when producers agreed to finance Street Smart. He was already a rich actor, so he wasn't doing Street Smart for the money. There was something about Jonathan Fisher, a well-bred man with a dark side, that Reeve wanted to show us. It was a story he thought should be told. Whether or not you believe he was a great actor is up to you, but you can't deny Reeve's conviction. 

THE SHAPE OF WATER

Guillermo del Toro is fearless when it comes to showing us new and delightful things. In a Hollywood content to recycle the same comic book titles over and over, del Toro is among the most visionary of moviemakers, up there with Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. The bad news is, just like Burton and Gilliam, del Toro is better with visuals than he is with plots.

I felt this way even after del Toro's masterful Pan's Labyrinth, a visually stunning gem with plenty of weird little creations fluttering about, but no real story that I can remember. I almost wish del Toro aside would not bother with plots, and simply create a bunch of surreal demons and let them run wild for 90 minutes. He's obviously more inspired by monsters and odd architecture than he is by the mechanization of a script, so I'd suggest he do what he loves and leave the stories out. I could sit and watch his grotesques for hours, but his stories put me to sleep, including his latest, The Shape of Water.

The movie takes place in a stylized early 1960s America, a time when cars looked like rockets and there was constant talk about the future. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) lives above a movie theater with a bunch of cats and her gay, alcoholic male friend, who happens to be an out of work advertising artist. Their home appears to fluctuate in size - at times it seems highly claustrophobic, at others it looks to be as large as a castle - and they amuse themselves by watching old Shirley Temple movies on a little television. Elisa is mute,  resulting from an unnamed childhood incident that her left her with some nasty scars on her throat. She also works cleaning toilets at a nearby government laboratory, where a mysterious creature from the amazon is being held for observation. 

The creature is a wonder, an obvious descendant of Universal Pictures' infamous gill man of the 1950s, but rather than the fishmouth of the old lagoon creature, this one has a rather sensuous human mouth. The creature's nemesis is Col. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), a bully with a cattle prod. The creature, no doubt tired of being prodded, bites off Stricklnd's fingers. Such rudeness only intensifies their rivalry.

Elisa, who doesn't have many human connections, is enchanted by the creature. She's soon taking her lunch-breaks outside his holding tank, offering him hard-boiled eggs, and playing lush, orchestral music on a portable record player. He seems to like her, too. He likes the eggs, anyway. When Elisa finds out the plan is for scientists to kill the creature and examine his lungs - they think his unique breathing organs may hold the key to successful space travel - she decides to rescue him. This won't be easy, because the Russians want him, too.

It feels as if del Toro decided this thin plot was enough on which to hang a movie, and he immediately went to work on the visuals, which are stunning. I liked the giant computers at the military base; they reminded me of the ones I saw at my father's office when I was a boy.  I also liked the vintage automobiles, Elisa's fascination with sexy shoes, and the use of Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda on the soundtrack. But del Toro also goes for the cheap and obvious. It's a movie where  nobility is only found in gay men, poor black women, mute girls, lonely scientists, and sea monsters, while a white suburban family man is the embodiment of evil. Del Toro should be ashamed of such simple-minded pandering.

There's also the inevitable  showdown  between the creature and Strickland, and then an ending lifted directly from Splash. By then, I was looking for the exit.

As Strickland, Shannon practically vibrates with menace and is watchable throughout. He has the movie's best line: "Are you totally mute? Or do you squawk a little?" Hawkins is excellent, too. Still, the movie has been praised beyond comprehension -  it has received 13 Academy Award nominations - which says less about the value of The Shape of Water, and more about the miserable state of contemporary movies. 

Del Toro's work is always interesting to look at, and this, combined with a sentimental plot about misfits banding together to beat the evil old white military complex, will endear The Shape of Water to many viewers. For those wanting their fantasy films to have some edge, there's much bloody violence. For those who want things a bit saucy, Hawkins  masturbates throughout the movie, and  eventually fucks the creature in a bathtub. Maybe I should just be happy that a director like del Toro made a movie that, in many ways, is an homage to great films of the past, from the aforementioned Creature from the Black Lagoon, when Ricou Browning took  Julie Adams  to his underwater lair, to The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which del Toro quotes with a visual nod to the old Aurora modeling kit), to The Evil of Frankenstein, where a little  mute girl looked after the monster. Hell, it was even fun to think about Splash again. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't come out of the theater whistling an old Alice Faye tune.

I, Tonya

What we always forget about Tonya Harding  is that she was one hell of a skater. At the end of  I, Tonya, a rugged little movie full of violent, hateful characters, we're shown a clip of the real Harding at work, and it is breathtaking. We're also shown clips of the real characters that we've just seen portrayed in the movie, as if the filmmaker wants to assure us that the people in Harding's life were indeed imbeciles, and that the actors weren't exaggerating. The American lower class gets a hammering in the movie, with director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Steve Rogers getting all they can out of gaudy mustaches and cheap fur coats. It starts to feel a bit like a mean-spirited Saturday Night Live sketch lampooning the poor, though the movie is highly watchable thanks to the bravura work of the cast, and the story of Harding, who comes off as a likeable if prickly underdog. 

The sympathies are stacked in Tonya's favor early on, as we see her abandoned by her father, horribly abused by her mother, and regularly beaten by her husband, Jeff Gillooly. Gillespie chooses to give the beatings a slapstick feel, because otherwise the constant attacks on Harding would be unbearable for viewers. The result is not entirely successful. Harding's mother is the villain of the piece, but she's given the best lines and, as played by Allison Janney, she's the sort of villain you love to hate. We haven't had such a campy, despicable mother since Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, but Janney comes close, especially when offering her daughter such encouragement as, "You skate like a graceless bull dyke."

Despite her mother's cruelty, Harding becomes one of the top skaters in the world, the first American woman to hit a triple axle in competition, but can't get a break from the judges because she won't change her less than wholesome image. At 23, her best years already behind her, she finds herself at the edge of a murky plot to hurt another competitor, the clean-cut Nancy Kerrigan. The plan is instigated by Gillooly and his idiot friend Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), who imagines himself a sort of international security expert, though he can barely find his mouth with a potato chip. Still, the crux of the movie is Harding's relationship with her bullying mother. "I made you a champion," the mother says, "knowing you'd hate me for it. That's the sacrifice a mother makes!" We later learn that mother and daughter are long estranged, which seems fine with both. Harding says at the film's conclusion that fame was fleeting and that she has spent most of her life being hated, or the subject of jokes. She also denies knowing about the plan to injure Kerrigan. "Everyone has their own truth," Harding tells us, "and life just does whatever the fuck it wants."

Margot Robbie is exceptional as Harding, demonstrating equal measures of strength, vulnerability, and pigheadedness. It's the role of a lifetime. As Harding's evil mother, Janney has  already won a Golden Globe award. Sebastion Stan is excellent as Gillooly, Hauser is perfect as Gillooly's goofy pal, and if ever there was an award for show stealing, it would go to Ricky Russert as Shane Stant, the goon hired to disable Kerrigan. There's a bit too much music on the soundtrack, every new scene introduced by some banal pop song, but what kept me from totally enjoying the movie was the nagging thought that  much of I, Tonya was created so audiences could laugh at the expense of poor people. A big part of the movie is Harding's lack of taste, in her clothes, her makeup, and her men. I think Gillespie wants us to like Harding, and to appreciate her instincts for survival - he even includes a bit where she tried boxing - but the well-bread folks in the audience may have too good a time snickering at these tacky, uneducated types in their blue nail polish. Harding may or may not deserve our sympathy, but this movie feels made for an elite class, for whom Harding remains a kind of boardwalk freak.

THE ONION FIELD (1979)

Harold Becker's The Onion Field (1979) was made in the final year of the last great decade for American movies, but it's never mentioned alongside other films of the era. Perhaps there were so many excellent titles from the era that a movie like this one, which didn't feature a De Niro or a Pacino or a Nicholson, gets overlooked. But none of those actors could've done any better than James Woods does here as Greg Powell, an ex-con who imagines himself a kind of master criminal, when he's really just a cheap hood who robs grocery stores. The Onion Field is about many characters, each with a story worth telling, but Powell is the the black hole into which they are all sucked, a man too nasty, perhaps, for audiences then and now.

Still, what a challenging and terrifying movie this is. And how well it has survived. True, there's a short bit at the beginning, of suburban lawns and sprinklers with a cheesy musical score, and there's a sentimental bit at the end. But Becker, over 50 when he directed this, came of age during the 1940s, when such things were expected, which makes The Onion Field all the more of an achievement. Remove the sappy Hallmark bookends, and you have a hell of a strong picture.

Everybody knows Woods as an edgy character actor. He was as close as the MTV generation came to its own Richard Widmark, and as Powell he's as sinister as Widmark's Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947). He's thrilled when his pregnant girlfriend calls him "Bun," as in "Honey bun," and he likes to brag that he's "a virtuoso" when it comes to pleasuring women.  Still, he has an ex-con's warped sexuality, and upon meeting new males he is very free with his hands.

Woods daring performance wasn't unnoticed. He received a Golden Globe nomination, as well as nominations from The New York Film Critics Circle and The National Society of Film Critics (his only win came from The Kansas City Film Critics Circle), but none of these mild accolades suggest how utterly he dominated the screen as Powell, from the first moment we see his  skeletal face, gold teeth, and wild eyes.

But is he just another trigger happy gunman who murders a cop and then implicates his  partner in the shooting? Not hardly, because Powell is one of the more multi-layered creeps one will ever see in a movie. Childish, self-serving, egomaniacal, still nursing wounds from his childhood, he stands out in a movie full of sharply drawn characters. Nearly 40 years later he's still disturbing.

The Onion Field was based on a true story. Powell and his partner, Jimmy "Youngblood" Smith (Franklyn Seales) were a couple of small-time robbers who were pulled aside one night by two young police officers, Karl Hettinger and Ian Campbell (John Savage and Ted Danson). Powell outmaneuvered the two cops and had Campbell drive them to a nearby onion field in Bakersfield, California. Believing that kidnapping carried the same penalty as murder, Powell shoots Campbell in the mouth and then goes after Hettinger. We hear more shots fired, but the shooter's identity isn't clear in the chaos.

Hettinger manages to escape; Campbell ends up dead in a ditch. And soon the ramifications of this ghastly midnight crime take a toll on all involved. Hettinger is destroyed by guilt, which results in a sort of slow-motion mental breakdown; Smith is outraged that Powell has said he fired bullets into Campbell, but ends up back in prison; and Powell finds himself back in the slammer, too, where he resumes his habit of feeling men up. He also becomes a rather haughty jailhouse lawyer. 

The movie is a no-frills cop drama, with a lot of court scenes, and interrogation scenes where the walls at the station house look like the lungs of a longtime smoker. There are dank motels and vintage cars - allegedly the actual vehicles used by Powell and Smith - and most of the movie has the atmosphere of a dirty carpet. Cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr cut his teeth on TV shows like Mannix and  Mission: Impossible, but also worked alongside Robert Atman and Michael Ritchie in the years just before The Onion Field. The story is set in 1963, but I cannot recall any music in the film, except for some bagpipes. A director in 2018 would soak the thing in music by Bobby Vinton and Chet Baker, trying hard for period cool. I think it's cooler the way it is: unadorned, plain as a brass shell casing.

The screenplay and the book it is based on were written by Joseph Wambaugh, a former policeman who turned to crime writing in the early '70s. Wambaugh also helped finance the feature, assuring that he'd have control and input into the final product. He was serious about details, inviting officers who were on duty the night of the murder to "to come around and take a look at how we were depicting it." Though the film suggests Jimmy Smith was innocent of shooting Campbell,  Wambaugh was never certain. Many of Wambaugh's books became the basis for movies, including The Choirboys, The New Centurians, and The Black Marble. In The Onion Field, he probably thought he'd tapped into something akin to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. In Powell, he had a character far uglier than Capote's killers.

James Woods is 71 now.  Though he does a lot of voice work for cartoons, the last thing I remember seeing him in was  a lousy remake of Straw Dogs (2011, and not surprisingly, he was the best thing in it). In the 1980s, though, he turned in a series of "hypnotically watchable" performances, as Roger Ebert described them, in films like Videodrome (1980)  Split Image (1982 ), Against All Odds  (1984), Salvador (1986)  Best Seller (1987) Cop (1988),  and True Believer (1989). He embodied some intangible character of the age, the hyper-intelligent iconoclast swimming against the tide of Reagan's America. Without Woods the 1980s would've been nothing but Tom Cruise and Steve Guttenberg. 

As Powell, Woods is a sort of grinning corpse, but one who has studied Dale Carnegie. Rail-thin, unpredictable, convinced of his own genius, he is one of cinema's great villains. As Smith, Seales is a nervous whelp of a man, just as jittery as you'd expect someone to be after too much time with Powell. John Savage, a popular actor on the rise in 1979, is convincing as Hettinger, a cop who loses face. At one point he's having such a meltdown that he slaps his infant daughter, a scene that caused one audience, according to John Simon of the New Republic, to "let out a gasp of human horror." Danson, years away from his role on Cheers, is every bit the clean-cut young policeman, trying to remain calm as Powell pokes a gun into his ribs. Danson is gone after the first half hour, but the impression he leaves is remarkable.

Becker would go on to direct several fine films, many in the crime genre, including Sea of Love (1989). His movies are like sledgehammers, hard and heavy. He'd direct Woods again in The Boost (1988), an underrated movie where a tax investor ruins his life with cocaine. Without drawing much attention to himself, Becker was one of our better directors. If his only film had been The Onion Field, he'd be well worth praising. He turns 90 this year, and probably won't make more movies. But to use one of Powell's words, he was a virtuoso.

PRICK UP YOUR EARS (1987)

Gary Oldman had a peculiar kind of magic going on when he played Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987)  He was 29, had been in only a few movies, but had an eerie way of inhabiting a character. He'd portrayed Sid Vicious a year earlier in Sid and Nancy, and followed up by playing Orton, the British playwright who was murdered by his gay lover. Ever since, when I think of either Sid or Orton - and for that matter, Lee Harvey Oswald, played by Oldman in Oliver Stone's JFK -it's Oldman that I see in my mind, rather the actual people. How did he do it?

Prick Up Your Ears isn't as impressive as Sid and Nancy, but it may be more realistic; the earlier film has been criticized in some quarters for playing with the facts of Sid's life, and for glorifying a couple of junkies. As Sid, Oldman was somewhat likeable, a naive bumbler who wasn't bright enough to navigate the world of drugs and punk rock. As Orton, he's diabolically smart and self-possessed. To think of another actor who played such diametrically different characters so early in his career, one might reach back to Dustin Hoffman, going from The Graduate to Midnight Cowboy. There aren't many others.


Orton was one of England's leading young playwrights of the 1960s. His plays (Entertaining Mr. Sloan, Loot, What the Butler Saw) were broad farces laced with menace and occasional violence. Orton's murder - he was beaten to death by Kenneth Halliwell, himself a failed writer who resented Orton's success - was the sort of scandalous climax that might've appeared in one of his own stage works. The story of Orton's life and death is intercut with the story of New Yorker writer John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) doing research for a book on Orton.  Lahr spent years trying to tell this story, and was largely responsible for the 1980s resurgence of interest in Orton, which culminated with Prick Up Your Ears.

Director Stephen Frears shot much of the movie in the actual Islington flat shared by Orton and Halliwell, an impossibly small place where two men of outsized personalities were bound to get in each other's way. Halliwell (Alfred Molina), bald as an egg, slumps around like Peter Lorre in Mad Love, his bulging eyes practically wobbling in his head. He had been Orton's mentor in their college days - he was older, smarter, crueler - before they became lovers. Halliwell introduced Orton to literature, gave him the boldness to try writing. Orton, meanwhile, taught Halliwell how to pick up men in public toilets. As Orton's fame grew, Halliwell went from being his mentor to his assistant. Orton, cheeky monkey that he was, relished the changes in status. In public, Halliwell endured one humiliation after another, following Orton about like a faithful servant. He occasionally made reference to helping Orton with his scripts, but was never credited by Orton. Why Orton didn't simply leave Halliwell says a lot, as if some unbreakable bond from their younger days still existed. He should've left; it would've been better than having his skull bashed in by a hammer. 

Molina, one of the most underappreciated actors of this era, might be best known for playing Diego Rivera in Frida (2002), or the crazed drug dealer in Boogie Nights (1997). As Halliwell, he's all sneers and self loathing. In a mime class at RADA, he mimes strangling a pussycat, which is what catches Orton's eye and leads to their friendship. Frears allows Molina plenty of room as Halliwell, to where he goes from sinister to vulnerable and back. We believe that he thinks of himself as a superior being, and we also believe he'd be too shy to take part in one of Orton's furtive orgies. He has a stunning bit near the end where he says to Orton, "I don't understand my life. I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was 20 I was going bald. I'm a homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not and you are!" It's a speech worthy of Saliery in Amadeus. Yet, Hollywood couldn't think of anything to do with this actor but cast him as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 (2004).

I don't know how the attitudes about homosexuality in Prick Up Your Ears would play today. The movie is set in the 1960s and was made in the '80s. Though Orton and Halliwell are living together as a couple, it's all toilet sex and secret hookups under bridges and occasional domestic violence. You can't picture these two in a parade, or exchanging catty remarks with Graham Norton. I remember thinking the movie was quite graphic when I first saw it, with Orton seeming a bit nasty with his Moroccan rent boys and his dim British studs. A recent viewing, however, revealed the movie to be rather matter-of-fact. Homosexuality was a crime in England, and Orton treated it as a crime. Look at the way he unscrews the light bulbs in a railroad lavatory to prepare for a quick romp. He has the stealth and ease of a robber casing a bank.

It's difficult to imagine any other actor besides Oldman playing Orton. Not only is there a physical and facial resemblance, but few actors could manage to be as mercurial as the role would demand. To be Orton, one has to be charismatic, then cocky enough to turn you off, then charming enough to win you back. You believe Oldman as a writer on top of the world, being asked to write a script for no less than The Beatles, slinking away in a limo with Paul McCartney. Then, in a flashback scene, we see a teenage Orton, stammering at an elocution class.  How he went from his shy beginning to screwing any bit of rough trade he found in a tunnel took quite a leap; we don't see it, but we believe it. Oldman depicts Orton as a man who simply delighted in his own kinks.

The murder of a minor literary figure may not resonate with an audience, but what makes Prick Up Your Ears fascinating is that it's the story of a doomed romance. It's a bit like Bob Fosse's Star 80, which chronicled the murder of Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratton by her sicko boyfriend. Both films move back and forth in time, both tell the story of a young, talented person who paid a fatal price for outgrowing an older, less talented mentor/lover. 

There's also a bit of Sid and Nancy here, where the wrong people get entwined in a contract that can only end in death. There's almost a sense of relief when Halliwell finally kills Orton, so claustrophobic is the narrative. We don't know the exact circumstances, but Frears and screenwriter Alan Bennett concoct a reasonable scenario where Halliwell is angry at being snubbed for what seems the millionth time. He's the ultimate neglected housewife.

Frears, one of our great filmmakers, was already a veteran director in 1987. He sprinkles bits of Hitchcock all over this one, from the bug-eyed neighbor who first discovers Orton's dead body, to the bemused mother-in-law of Lahr who, given the job of deciphering Orton's diary, seems intrigued by the naughty bits. Wallace Shawn is too Wallace Shawny, but the rest of the cast is excellent, especially Vanessa Redgrave as Orton's agent. No other actress has shoulders as wide as a barn door, yet still projects elegance.

Oldman and Molina, the pillars that hold the movie upright, have worked consistently since Prick Up Your Ears. Oldman received an Oscar nomination for his recent turn as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, but has spent most of the recent decade in various Batman and Harry Potter movies. Molina has been doing a lot of voice work for cartoons and video games. I always think there should've been more from these two men. More movies, more awards, more reverence. Maybe I'm wrong. "There's a lot of rubbish talked about acting," Oldman once said, "and it's often propagated by practitioners of it. You just want to say, 'Oh, shut up.'"

So I will.