Meaner
Streets:
The Usual Suspects
Clockers |
director
Bryan Singer
screenwriter
Christopher McQuarrie
producers
Michael McDonnell
Bryan Singer
cinematographer
Newton Thomas Sigel
music
John Ottman
editor
John Ottman
cast
Gabriel Byrne (Keaton)
Kevin Spacey ('Verbal' Kint)
Stephen Baldwin (McManus)
Chazz Palminteri (Kujan)
Pete Postlethwaite (Kobayashi)
Kevin Pollak (Hockney)
Benicio Del Toro (Fenster)
Suzy Amis (Edie Finneran)
Giancarlo Esposito (Baer)
Dan Hedaya (Rabin)
Paul Bartel (Smuggler)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 106m
u.s.
release: August 16,
1995
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other bryan
singer films
reviewed on this website:
- apt
pupil
- x-men
- x2
director
Spike Lee
screenwriters
Richard Price
Spike Lee
based on
the novel by
Richard Price
producers
Jon Kilik
Spike Lee
Martin Scorsese
cinematographer
Malik Hassan Sayeed
music
Terence Blanchard
editor
Sam Pollard
cast
Harvey Keitel (Rocco Klein)
John Turturro (Larry Mazilli)
Delroy Lindo (Rodney Little)
Mekhi Phifer (Strike)
Isaiah Washington (Victor Dunham)
Keith David (Andre the Giant)
Peewee Love (Shorty)
Regina Taylor (Iris Jeeter)
Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Errol Barnes)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 128m
u.s.
release: 9/13/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other spike
lee joints
reviewed on this website:
- bamboozled
- 4
little girls
- get on the bus
- he got game
- inside man
- malcolm x
- summer of sam
- 25th hour
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The Usual Suspects, which has just gotten a wider release,
is an intricate doodle of no special importance. It's all play,
all illusion, all movie. The director, Bryan Singer, has
a solid, straightforward visual style, which is fortunate, because
for almost half the running time we don't know what the hell
is going on. (If the movie were directed like Batman
Forever, we'd get more and more confused until our heads
exploded.) The film is arrogantly nonlinear, feeding us gradual
bits of a plot that, taken as a whole, isn't much. (It's about
guys going in on a big score.) Once I got used to what The
Usual Suspects was doing, I enjoyed it. You have to admire
a movie so sure of its own craftsmanship that it makes you wait
and wait for a ludicrously tiny pay-off like a close-up of the
bottom of a coffee cup. The movie is a lot like that cup: sturdy,
functional, filled with hot stuff whose jolt wears off fast.
All of the above comments, of course, also apply to Reservoir
Dogs and Pulp
Fiction, to which the blurbmeisters have compared this
film. These are not movies for the time capsule, nor do they
aspire to be, which is their chief charm. Men wave guns and talk
tougher than they are, or don't talk as tough as they really
are. There's a Mr. Big whom everyone fears -- Singer gives his
Mr. Big the most ominous build-up of any movie villain since
Hannibal Lecter. There are five guys, basically losers, who meet
during a police line-up. Is this a random meeting, or was it
arranged by someone else? Each of the men is ordered to step
forward, for identification purposes, and say "Hand me the
keys, you fucking cocksucker," and if you blink you miss
the reason why. The Usual Suspects is like Pulp Fiction
with a dozen glowing briefcases. Singer and writer Christopher
McQuarrie tell their story through one of the men, Verbal (Kevin
Spacey), and we're always aware that the story is only as reliable
as its teller.
Nobody blames Rubik's Cube for failing to make us ponder the
meaning of life. It exists to divert us, bug us, make our brains
hum in frustration over something trivial. The Usual Suspects
has no "point," no point of view. Neither did most
of Hitchcock's work. This is the sort of movie that catches you
leaning so far in the wrong direction that you either hate it
(I overheard a lot of "That was stupid" as the audience
filed out) or admire its control, but you can't really love it.
Singer doesn't make the mistake of engaging our emotions. He
plays with our need to get the whole story -- he involves us
as detached observers trying to pull chaos into order -- and
at the end, The Usual Suspects leaves more questions than
it answers. I bet you didn't know, for instance, that there is
such a thing as a Hungarian gang. And when the movie is over,
I bet you still won't know.
What people
don't get about Spike Lee is that he has no particular problem
with white people. He has a problem with people who make African-Americans
poor, addicted, or dead. That very often means white people,
alas; but in Clockers, Lee's new movie, it also means
other black people. Clockers is messy and didactic, but
it's complex in a way that a tidy film can't be. Black cops,
black mothers, decent African-Americans of every background and
gender, all do their best to stem the tide of racial suicide:
young black guys killing each other over nothing. But as long
as there is human weakness, there will be people of all colors
to prey on it. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Lee is 38 now, and a husband and father, and Clockers
is his passionate plea for the violence to stop. The source novel,
by Richard Price, whose script Lee reworked, was a vast Dostoyevskian
study of two men: Strike, a 20-year-old "clocker" (crack
dealer) looking to retire from the street, and Rocco Klein, a
homicide cop close to retirement himself. The book's magic was
in the way these men's worlds collided while remaining a universe
apart. Lee has jettisoned almost all the Rocco material, sacrificing
much of Price's narrative depth. Instead, Lee has irised in on
Strike, resulting in a very different Clockers. (The title
now seems to refer only to the crack dealers; Price meant it
to include Rocco, who watches the clock tick towards his retirement.)
The movie is sometimes excessive and clumsy, but its roughness
is affecting. In all, this is perhaps Lee's most emotionally
committed filmmaking since Do the Right Thing.
Strike (newcomer Mekhi Phifer) is too smart and too cautious
for his work; he has a bleeding gut and a perpetual expression
of nausea. This isn't a drug-dealer-with-a-heart-of-gold. Like
Price, Lee delineates the allure of crime to fatherless boys
-- crime represented by veteran hardcases who both nurture and
intimidate their young protegés. Years ago, the fatherless
Strike fell under the thrall of the legendary Rodney (Delroy
Lindo), who uses his small variety store as a front for a training
ground for clockers. Lindo, with his easy manner and honey voice,
gives us the most seductive and frightening portrait of evil
we'll see this year. Rodney positions himself as these kids'
ticket to prosperity, and they don't question him. When Rodney
gives Strike an oblique order to kill an uppity clocker who's
been pocketing too much of the profits, Strike sees it as an
opportunity, an honor -- but only for as long as he's in Rodney's
car, under his spell. Afterward, it's just one more thing on
his mind, turning his stomach to acid.
The offending clocker turns up dead. For a long time, Lee keeps
us unsure who pulled the trigger (unless we've read the book).
Was it Strike, or was it his upstanding older brother Victor
(Isaiah Washington), who may have snapped under the strain of
being decent? Victor turns himself in, offering a story that
detective Rocco (Harvey Keitel) pokes full of holes. In the novel,
Richard Price served up several red herrings, including a fearsome
young hit man absent from the movie. Spike Lee isn't into whodunit;
his Clockers asks "Why does this happen?" Those
who expect a twisty, satisfying resolution to the murder will
be disappointed. Lee couldn't be less interested in the fake-out
games that made Price's 600-page novel read like a meteor. He
stays with what's important to him: the cult of violence, the
business of drugs, the endless racial suicide -- themes that
have been covered in other recent movies but not, I think, so
impressionistically.
Rodney has a fatherly touch with Strike, and Strike, in turn,
gives the same attention to a young boy who watches, starry-eyed,
as the clockers do business on the benches of Brooklyn. Clockers
has an aching, pervasive mood of despair. First-time cinematographer
Malik Sayeed gives the images a desaturated, grainy texture that
seems to flesh out the characters and bleed them dry at the same
time; it's a switch from the bold, clear-eyed lighting used by
Lee's previous DP, Ernest Dickerson. The camerawork is often
jiggly and hand-held, recording the mechanics of clocking as
if a tourist with a camcorder were catching it on the fly. Spike
Lee almost always tries something daring in each new film, and
he always pulls off something amazing and does something else
embarrassing. I doubt even Martin Scorsese, who coproduced Clockers
and once planned to direct it, could have improved on Lee's staging
of Rodney's flashback to his first kill. The emotions -- fear,
disgust -- mesh with the jagged visuals. The same can't be said
of the climax, with Rocco interrogating Strike's young protegé.
It plays like an anti-crime commercial starring Harvey Keitel
as himself; he even, God help us, looks into the camera and says
"You wanna do the right thing."
I cringed at that, and at some other moments. Price's novel wasn't
perfect either. Both book and movie address weighty issues in
a crime-story format, a difficult balancing act unless you're
James Ellroy. This is an odd period for crime movies anyway.
Scorsese is still the acknowledged master, whipping up gangster
epics that feel definitive. On the other end of the spectrum,
you have postmodern pranksters like Tarantino and Bryan Singer,
who love crime movies for their rhetorical possibilities, the
parodic spectacle of tough guys whacking each other with words
as well as bullets. Clockers is somewhere off to the side,
loudly insisting on responsibility and sanity. Spike Lee has
finally made a genre film, but he hasn't stooped to conquer.
There are no exhilarating "Spike moments," no scenes
that make us feel the sensual pleasure Lee takes in moviemaking.
He makes us feel something else this time. Clockers is
a story Spike Lee wishes he didn't have to tell.
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