DIRECTOR
Jon Amiel
SCREENWRITERS
Ann Biderman
David Madsen
PRODUCERS
Arnon Milchan
Mark Tarlov
CINEMATOGRAPHER
László Kovács
MUSIC
Christopher Young
EDITORS
Jim Clark
Alan Heim
CAST
Sigourney Weaver (Helen Hudson)
Holly Hunter (M.J. Monahan)
Dermot Mulroney (Reuben Goetz)
William McNamara (Peter Foley)
Harry Connick Jr. (Daryll Lee Cullum)
J.E. Freeman (Lt. Quinn)
Will Patton (Nicoletti)
John Rothman (Andy)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 123m
U.S. release: October 27, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Jon
Amiel movies
reviewed on this website:
- Entrapment
- The
Man Who Knew Too Little
|
The
pre-credits sequence of the aptly named Copycat is a fair
warning of how idiotic and shameless the movie is going to be.
Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver), a cool and somewhat smug
psychiatric specialist in serial killers, is lecturing at a San
Francisco university. Illustrating the general serial-killer
type, she asks every white male in the auditorium between the
ages of twenty and thirty to stand up; they do, some smiling
sheepishly, some (disturbingly) not. Actually, this is a good
start for the movie, but within a minute or so, things go bad
and never get better. Helen spots a scuzzy guy in the audience,
who leers at her and makes a cut-throat gesture. She looks away;
when she looks back, he's gone. After the lecture, Helen needs
to use the ladies' room; a cop makes a sweep of the bathroom,
sees a pair of (apparently) female feet inside one of the stalls,
and leaves Helen alone. If you were Helen, wouldn't you make
the cop stick around? But Helen is brilliant and also very stupid.
The female feet belong to Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr.),
the sicko in the audience. What follows, as the psycho strings
Helen up by her throat and then turns his playful attention to
the unfortunate returning cop, is so overbearingly grotesque
that it threw me out of the movie, and for the most part, I stayed
outside.
After the credits, we cut to thirteen months later: Helen is
now an agoraphobic wreck. (Presumably she was rescued, but we
never learn how.) Helen has a cheerful gay live-in assistant
(John Rothman) and many agoraphobic e-mail buddies, and she's
flirting with alcoholism and pill addiction. She's become infantilized
by the trauma, afraid of everything, and I wished Sigourney Weaver's
performance were in another movie, where she wouldn't come off
as a neurotic bitch who has to pull herself together. She played
some of the same notes, for example, in Death
and the Maiden, and the character of Helen is a lot like
Weaver's Ripley in Aliens -- her run-in with the monster
gave her expertise but also nightmares. And, like Ripley, Helen
must face the monster again.
Young women are being butchered all over the city. The crimes
seem unconnected, but the chipper detective on the case, M.J.
Monahan (Holly Hunter), suspects the perp is the same guy using
different methods in each kill. Her suspicions are confirmed
when she and her partner Ruben (Dermot Mulroney) bring the case
to Helen, who immediately recognizes the M.O.s of the Boston
Strangler and the Hillside Stranglers. The ingenious killer is
copying the "greats," constructing a twisted artistic
homage to them, to himself, and mostly to Helen, who is presented
as a totemic object of adulation among deviants. They all want
to appear in her next book -- feared and infamous forever.
In bits and pieces, Copycat seems to be on to something:
Our fascination with serial killers can backfire and slash our
own throats. And maybe that's how the script (by Ann Biderman
and David Madsen) was conceived. The brilliant, baby-faced killer
(William McNamara) might almost embody the standard line that
psychos are easily swayed by the violent media. Doing his damnedest
with an unwritten character, McNamara is genuinely, blandly frightening
in some moments (usually at his most innocuous) and utterly unconvincing
in others (when he's trying to be diabolical). The killer also
dotes on a bedridden older woman who's never identified. Another
sicko mama's boy? Whether the fault of the writers or the director-for-hire
(Jon Amiel), the killer is maddeningly opaque. The movie is less
interested in him than in his elaborate (and highly implausible)
ingenuity. It also isn't interested in his victims, whose pain
is remote and depersonalized, as in a squalid slasher movie of
the '80s. At times, the film itself seems sick.
Every time Holly Hunter appears, she brings some light into the
murk. M.J. strides into ghastly crime scenes and smiles sweetly
at the cops gathering evidence. She's flirtatiously businesslike.
Yet she isn't callous. The script gives M.J. a few flower-child-Buddhist
lines to set up her character -- a detective who accepts everyday
death as part of the big picture, but isn't hardened to human
pain -- and Hunter stays inside this intriguing woman. She's
the reason to sit through the idiot plot and cheap tricks of
Copycat. Her enjoyment of acting translates as M.J.'s
enjoyment of deductive work. The other stand-out is Harry Connick
Jr., whose very persuasive performance as a vicious redneck wacko
is surprising (if not pleasurable). When taunting Helen via computer
link-up late in the movie, Daryll shows a malevolent playfulness
that shows up McNamara's generally blank psycho. Connick is riveting
without making evil seductive, though part of his effectiveness
in the role has to be due to novelty casting: the nice boy who
sounds like Sinatra gets nasty.
Copycat has too many characters and needless plot twists
-- padding in between corpses. Will Patton turns up as M.J.'s
former lover, a cop who's jealous of her developing bond with
Ruben. Then (I'm about to give a plot point away, so be warned,
even though you can see it coming a mile off) a random disturbance
in the precinct station is concocted so that Ruben can be shot
and Patton can tearfully confess to M.J. that he secretly wished
Ruben dead. The scene is pathetic and pointless; Patton's cop
has no reason to be in the movie. Neither does Helen's live-in
helper, so appealingly played by John Rothman that he practically
has "psycho fodder" tattooed on his forehead.
The scenes of Sigourney Weaver alone and frightened in her vast
apartment are, in a word, moronic. Jon Amiel drags out all the
old tricks: Helen in the shower, Helen creeping around in the
dark, Helen forced to leave her apartment when the monster comes
to visit (the hallway tilts agoraphobically; for a minute, we're
watching bad imitation De Palma). I looked at Helen's big bones
and powerful legs and had to laugh; she could cripple her rather
small adversary with a good swift kick. How can Copycat
ask us to be worried about Sigourney Weaver? No woman of her
great humor and great height is credible being menaced
by scummy little psychos. The Alien directors had the
right idea: put this formidable woman up against a huge and horrifying
creature out of Lovecraft. But William McNamara? |
