Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Mike Figgis
Star: Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski, Ming-Na Wen, Kyle McLachlan

“The woman she plays resembles a star, With one look, she lights up Wesley’s night. She is fragile and yet a hunter, dominating and perhaps dangerous.”
— Mike Figgis

The original idea for the film was by notorious sleaze-master Joe Eszterhas, who sold a four-page outline for $4 million in 1994, at a point when his star was still high after the huge success of Basic Instinct. Initially, the plan was for Adrian Lyne to direct but he bailed the following year, opting to kill his career with Lolita instead. Mike Figgis, then a hot property after Leaving Las Vegas. came on board, and with Eszterhas no longer in Hollywood’s good graces, after bombs like Jade and Showgirls, Figgis was given permission for a rewrite. And I mean, a radical one. According to the LA Times, the first 65 pages of Eszterhas’s version”are given over to an Olympic decathlon-style sexual encounter between the couple, with almost as much trash talk about sex as sex itself.” After reading the final shooting script, the original author requested the removal of his name – though Eszterhas kept the cash, naturally.

The final version had advertising director Max Carlyle (Snipes) on business in New York, when he encounters a literal rocket-scientist, Karen (Kinski), by chance. After he misses his flight, he ends up attending a concert with her, and the pair then have to handle a mugging attempt on the streets back to the hotel. Max chivalrously agrees to sit with Karen, but the inevitable happens: which would be the film’s title, if you hadn’t already guessed. Returning to Los Angeles and wife Mimi (Wen), Max is restless and distracted, though keeps quiet about his East coast escapade. However, he can’t hide forever, and when he and Mimi return to New York, where Max’s former best friend Charlie (Robert Downey, Jr.) is dying of AIDS, it turns out Karen is now married to Charlie’s brother, Vernon (McLachlan). Awkward…

There’s a three-act structure here. The first depicts the combination of circumstances which lead to Max and Karen hooking up. The second has the impact of this on Max, as he gradually realizes he is not as satisfied with his life as he initially states in his opening monologue to the camera. The third is, by and large, an extremely extended death scene for Charlie, stretched out over more than 30 minutes, and the impact this has on Max, who comes to the conclusion that existence is too short to spend with the wrong person, and seeks to rekindle things with Karen. Everything comes to a point at Charlie’s wake, where that spark becomes a bit of a raging inferno, but there’s a twist which, it has to be said, did not ring true, and seems like the kind of thing which only occurs in Hollywood movies [the same goes for Karen marrying the brother of Max’s best friend. Really, what are the odds?]. It does, however, set up a final coda, that tidies up the loose ends of the various relationships adequately, though I fear for their longer-term survival chances.

If I’ve some doubts about the plot, these are somewhat countered by fine performances all round. It’s a fairly high-profile cast assembled by Figgis, likely helped by his recent Oscar nominations for writing and directing Leaving Las Vegas: Downey was at the height of his legal troubles, but was, according the director, no problem on the set here. Other names you may recognize include Julian Sands. Amanda Donohoe, Ione Skye, Xander Berkeley and Saffron Burrows – Figgis himself cameos as a hotel clerk. Good performances from these names are unsurprising: getting them from Snipes is rather more so. Much as I love Wesley – Blade 2 is one of my favorite action/horror movies of all time and Demolition Man is another classic – he’s likely known far less for his acting, than his conviction on federal tax evasion charges. Here, he is certainly portrayed in a sympathetic manner – not that you could really blame any man for cheating on his wife with Nastassja – and I liked how the script took its time putting him in bed with Karen. It wasn’t a case of just a drunken fumble, but the glacially inevitable result (given the film’s title) of a number of unfortunate decisions, each of them likely entirely innocuous on their own.

Kinski was always the director’s first choice, and if anyone is going to be the agent that could destroy a marriage, albeit unwittingly, she’s a fine selection. But I wonder about the wisdom of the choice somewhat, paired with an African-American actor like Snipes. This introduces an inter-racial element to proceedings, enhanced by Wen’s presence as Max’s wife, to which the film is completely oblivious. While refreshing in many ways, it’s an elephant in the room which needed to be addressed. Instead, the film heads off into a lot of footage of Charlie sinking into death: at the time this was originally released, as a young and single man, this was the segment that stuck with me most. However, in hindsight, and now as a happily-married person, it seems unnecessarily melodramatic, though Downey’s performance remains good. From my current perspective, it’s Max’s decision to sabotage everyone else’s happiness in pursuit of his own which is most troubling, coming over as selfish, and only salvaged by the freakishly convenient way things turn out.

Despite solid acting, it’s not much of a surprise the film was a critical and commercial flop. While Leaving Las Vegas is 89% fresh at RottenTomatoes.com and made back nine times its (small) budget at the North American box-office, Stand took in barely one-tenth of its $24 million cost, with only 28% of reviews being positive. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it , “an astonishingly dopey middle-age male fantasy,” and that’s fair criticism. Whatever flaws may have been in the original script submitted by Joe Eszterhas, they can hardly have been any more glaring that the ones present here. This demonstrates one of the potential problems when directors decide they can write better than writers, especially when no-one apparently dares yank the reins and tell them otherwise.

Dir: Antonio Tibaldi
Star: Ryan Phillippe, John Savage, Nastassja Kinski, Jenny Lewis

When you’re shooting with her, she becomes a bit more complicated… When she shoots, she becomes not self-conscious, but insecure and the insecurity makes her self-conscious. It’s not like she’s self-conscious when she’s acting. She’s got amazing instincts and I think she’s very good, but I think she’s extremely insecure, so she wants to know how she did at the end of the take.
— Antonio Tibaldi

There are some films which are pretty much unremittingly depressing from the beginning to the end, a downward spiral of gloom, doom and depression, where things get worse at virtually every turn. Dancer in the Dark. Requiem for a Dream. And the masterwork of “Oh god, what’s the point of living?” cinema, Grave of the Fireflies. This isn’t quite up to the level of the last-named, but certainly deserves to sit among the second tier of slash-your-wrists movies. It plays like a particularly scuzzy episode of Jerry Springer: you’d probably find a picture of the West family in the dictionary, next to the word “dysfunctional.” This is mostly due to father Ray (Savage), who came back from a stint in the Vietnam war both physically damaged and mentally disturbed. He spends his nights hanging out in the bar which he runs along with his wife, Kate (Kinski), skirting the edge of trouble – such as his involvement in the “accidental” death of a stranger who seems to be looking for Ray.

They have three children, all boys. There’s Jimmy (Phillipe), a high-school baseball star, who wants desperately to get out of the hell in which he finds himself, and has a college scholarship which would accomplish this. Except, he knows all too well that it would abandon his two younger brothers, Mikey and Mark, to the whims of their father, from which Jimmy currently does all he can to protect them. The resulting tension causes Jimmy to break up with his girlfriend, Traci (Lewis), but worse is to follow, for Jimmy tells her that Mikey and Mark aren’t actually his brothers: they are his sons, the result of an incestuous relationship with his mother. Initially, I though that was the “truth” Ray demands is revealed to Jimmy, but turns out there’s more. For not long after that revelation, Jimmy vanishes, with everyone presuming he left town. Except there’s also a new arrival in town. The stranger who died in the bar turns out to have been a private detective, working on behalf of a woman, who suffered an extremely traumatic experience of her own, 19 years previously, believes Ray responsible, and is now in town, seeking payback.

I can’t argue with the performances here, in particular Savage, who certainly lives up to his name, depicting a character who seems perpetually on the edge of lethal violence, in a way that reminded me of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Everyone else is left tiptoeing around him on eggshells, uncertain of what might set him off, and the viewer is similarly on edge. More than once, I found myself holding my breath with a grimace on my face, genuinely concerned for his family and what he might do to them. Phillippe is also solid, which was a surprise, considering at that point in his career, he was more familiar for mindless teen fodder such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions (the latter isn’t bad, but still is unfit to lick the boots of the film it updates, Dangerous Liaisons). He does spend rather more time than you’d expect with his shirt off; maybe it was some kind of contractual thing.

Some aspects of the film did prove problematic, though it’s hard to discuss these without getting into spoilers – and that would be a shame, since knowing the wallop of these twists would rob the film of a significant chunk of raw power. Let’s just say, I’m left wondering how much Kate was involved in what happened. There’s an awful lot that she must have known about, yet apparently kept hidden from Jimmy, and you also have to wonder what kind of twisted mind-set made the incestuous relationship even remotely credible. There may be an element of shared trauma between mother and son involved? But the concept of her being an innocent bystander to the acts of her deranged husband doesn’t seem a perfect match for the facts which are eventually revealed. Also I’m unsure about the time period in which this is set: there seems a disconnect between the ages of the protagonists e.g. the “Vietnam vet” background of Ray, coupled with the ages of the three children and Kate being much younger than her husband.

As a character, Kate does come off as rather passive, which is a little disappointing: of the three main characters, she is probably the least memorable, and doesn’t get to demonstrate anything like the same degree of intensity. Of course, subsequent events involving her father add an entirely different spin to the appearance of Nastassja Kinski in a film about an incestuous family. Damn, there’s a dark part of me that wishes the makers of this had cast Klaus in John Savage’s role. Interestingly, while Nastassja was “our very first casting idea and choice,” according to the director, it was Nastassja who suggested Savage for the role. Of course, she’d worked with him before, on Maria’s Lovers, with their relationship there hardly any less dysfunctional. Tibaldi added, “They certainly used knowing each other and being comfortable with one another in this movie.”

Ironically, I note that on this film’s IMDb page, the “People who liked this also liked…” section, offers as its first suggestion, a documentary entitled Incest: A Family Tragedy. While hardly inappropriate, this doesn’t really seem like the sort of film which would trigger thoughts along the “Hey, let’s watch another one!” lines. Indeed, if you genuinely “liked” this – in the sense of this being your #1 choice for a Saturday night flick, rather than one which you perhaps appreciated, maybe respected and then consigned somewhere to the back of your collection – then I would probably recommend some kind of therapy.