The Good Thief

Written & Directed by Neil Jordan
Featuring: Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo and Nutsa Kukhianidze
Boston’s Weekly Dig 2003

This remake of Jean Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Thief) feels like an excuse for an actor’s holiday in the splendid South of France, but it’s a pretty sour trip.

Nick Nolte plays Bob, a Cote d’Azur gambler who’s in the death spiral of a heroin-fueled losing streak. Offered a chance at redemptive and profitable thievery, he cleans up and assembles his multi-national coterie to enact the heist.

There are a dozen retread sub-plots: a buddy cop who’s wise to Bob’s scheme; a teen-aged prostitute he’s trying to save; a side-kick who can’t keep himself out of trouble; etc, etc.

The film strings together two disparate genres, and they’re uncomfortable bedfellows. It’s half lightweight heist caper, and half redemption of the tortured soul (in its drug-addict variation). We end up with method actors doing farce, mumbling through jokes and flattening mannerisms.

Nolte is everybody’s first choice to play an unsuccessfully-rehabbing, badly-aging bohemian. When we’re shown a picture of Nolte in his youth, we realize just how beaten up he is.

His voice sounds like wind in dry rock bed, and cracks above a whisper. He looks like he’s been marooned in a desert.

Neil Jordan, the writer/director, chose to modernize the story by giving his Bob a heroin addiction. Why does “tortured” in movies always means “drug-addicted?” Why not give Bob a slight eating disorder, like most middle-aged men have, stuffing themselves at the refrigerator at night in quiet desperation?

The movie finds itself in its last twenty minutes, when Nolte’s dry-heat finally subsides and the wastrel teenager is allowed to be a girl.

Jordan bestows a patch of kindness on his characters that offers them, and us, some needed relief.

The Sea

Written and Directed by Baltasar Kormákur
Featuring: Gunnar Eyjolfsson, Hilmir Gudnason, Nína Filippusdóttir
Boston’s Weekly Dig 2003

The adult children of an Icelandic fishing magnate return to their glacial home to pay bitter homage to their demanding, ailing father.

But don’t let the King Lear premise put you off. This potboiler offers more lusty catharsis than anything in The Matrix or X2.

As soon as the cantankerous clan reassembles, all bets for good behavior are off.

The various members of the extended family are so badly behaved—beating, cheating, screaming at, screwing and stealing from each other—it’s like Absolutely Fabulous played with just a little more gravity and grit.

Like Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven did with Douglas Sirk‘s melodramas, The Sea moves Tennessee Williams’ corrupt and broken family dramas out of subtext and onto the screen, full-blown. You don’t have to guess what anybody’s hiding in their closet—they just show it to you.

The effect isn’t subdued melodrama—it’s wild schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others).

There are some lovely visuals in the film: The black, ice-covered, stone hills; A galloping reindeer herd; A swimmer, identified first by her robust naked body in the vibrant blue water of the hot spring, as her lover swims to greet her, rudder out.

The final 40 minutes of the film are a crescendo of climaxes, one out-doing another to the point of shocking hilarity.

I imagine some will want to describe The Sea as serious, important or scathing, but I just couldn’t help myself—it was a riot.

Dark Blue

Dir. Ron Shelton
Starring Kurt Russell
Boston’s Weekly Dig 2003

Poet of the scruffy male Ron Shelton (Tin Cup, Bull Durham) directs screenwriter David Ayer’s (The Fast and the Furious, Training Day) testosterone tale about a third generation killer cop in the culture change that followed the Rodney King beating.

Kurt Russell plays a special forces officer as a perp-framing, race-baiting, thug-shooting good ol’boy, whose profound amorality is finally catching up with him. Russell’s new young partner can’t swallow the avenging angel tactics of the squad, and his protestations begin to rattle Russell’s conscience.

Ayer’s demon-cop script (based on a story by ultra-cynic James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential) is an odd match for Shelton’s bedraggled humanism. Russell bounces between lost puppy and mad dog without ever finding a center. His redemption is more scripted than felt.

Russell’s soulful shock-blue eyes and beaten So.Cal visage are a perfect match for Shelton’s loser-hero philosophizing, but not Ayer’s soul-dead maniac.

We’re with him most when he hits his low notes: defeated and riffing tragicomically about the limits of moral flexibility and the nature of being a cop.

The talented cast feels tight and under-rehearsed, but there’s plenty of plot and action to keep you interested. Short of grandeur, or even grandiloquence, it hits entertaining.