The Professional (Leon)
(1994)
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jean Reno, Gary Oldman.
Director: Luc Besson
Luc Besson’s 1994 film The Professional might just as well have been titled
The Killer and the Kid. It is a bizarre contemporary twist on the kind of
film Shirley Temple made in the 1930’s, but the curly-haired icon of the
talking cinema’s early days would have been burned in effigy had she dared
to flaunt her nubile charms as boldly as teenaged Natalie Portman flaunts
her’s in this riveting thriller.
Portman plays Mathilda, a worldly twelve-year-old who doesn’t need to be warned about falling in with the wrong crowd because she was born into one. Her father is a drug dealer and her stepmother is a hooker. If that wasn’t enough to make her home life less than ideal, her half-sister hates her. The only member of her family who Mathilda likes is her seven-year-old brother who is slaughtered along with the rest of her kin by corrupt Drug Enforcement agents led by a pill-popping, Beethoven praising psycho played with relish by Gary Oldman.
Mathilda is at the grocer buying milk for her neighbor at the time, and is spared from execution. When she returns, the bloodshed is still in progress, and it is the neighbor who shelters her from harm. In the kind of coincidence that is par for the course in Shirley Temple kid flicks, the neighbor, a quiet type who lives a spartan existence, happens to be the city’s top professional killer--a "cleaner," as he calls it--so who better to teach Mathilda the skills she will need when avenging her beloved brother’s death?
Leon (Jean Reno) is a solitary soul shut off from matters of the heart, but he has the sensitivity to respond to Mathilda’s needs and the two become an unlikely pair on the streets of New York. Leon teaches Mathilda how to "clean," while she cleans their apartment in a literal sense, as well as cooks and does the shopping. Their chaste affair is played out, more often than not, to French styled accordion music, giving the film an almost Chaplinesque feel. But the grim nature of their bond only serves to make their charming escapades look silly and out of place. (In one scene, she imitates Madonna for his amusement, but the hit man doesn’t recognize the "Material Girl.")
The Professional is essentially a fantasy; its violence, often quite graphic, is wrapped in a scenario that is out of a 1960’s comic book. This is especially true of Gary Oldman’s overzealous performance. Reno, who plays an Italian but who I assume to be French, is excellent, as is Danny Aiello as his Mafia connected employer, but it is Portman who dominates the film with a performance that is both sweetly angelic and tough.
© Copyright 1999, Brian W. Fairbanks. All Rights Reserved.
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