Financial Times (London,England)
May 4, 1995, Thursday
Talent in the making – Cinema
By STEPHEN AMIDON
LITTLE ODESSA (15) James Gray
CLERKS (18) Kevin Smith
MILK MONEY (12) Richard Benjamin ID (18) Philip Davis
THE STEAL (PG) John Hay
Little Odessa takes its name from the section of Brooklyn that has become home for the latest group of refugees to inhabit the dark underbelly of the American Dream – gangsters from the former Soviet Union. In it, a remorseless hit man (Tim Roth) returns to the neighbourhood after a long exile caused by his assassination of the local mob boss’s son. His homecoming is anything but cheery – his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is dying of brain cancer, his father (Maximilian Schell) has disowned him and his younger brother (Edward Furlong) has become a dreamy, troubled teenager. For a while it looks as if Roth will be able to affect some good, but his past soon catches up with him in a supremely bloody crescendo.
Twenty-four-year-old writer/director James Gray has fashioned a stylishly gloomy work which does not quite achieve its intended dramatic power. The darkly beautiful cinematography, the surging soundtrack of Russian monastic chants and the directorial echoes of Scorsese and Coppola all herald an American gangster tragedy in the making, but the story remains too thin and the pacing too slow to reach those heights. Still, there is much of value in Little Odessa, particularly Furlong’s wonderfully understated performance and a chilling moment where Roth allows a God-fearing victim ten seconds for divine intervention before blowing his head off. Once Gray gets his talented hands on a more fulsome script, real fireworks should ensue.
Another promising young American filmmaker, Kevin Smith, emphatically debuts this week with Clerks. Made for a mere Dollars 27,000, or what it costs to produce roughly eight seconds of an average Hollywood film, Smith’s effort is a gold mine of raunchy humour and creative invention.
The plot is simplicity itself, tracking one long day in the life a New Jersey convenience store clerk (Brian O’Halloran) and his best friend (Jeff Anderson), who minds the till at the video rental shop next door. There is little in the way of plot until the film’s end, when O’Halloran is forced to choose between his current girlfriend and his beloved ex.
But this is not a film about plot. Rather, it is a trenchant slice-of-life look at two underemployed slackers poised reluctantly on the cusp of adulthood. Their day consists of a series of hilarious encounters with hated customers, including a chewing gum salesman posing as an anti-tobacco crusader, a bureaucrat obsessed with finding the perfect box of eggs and an old pervert who dies masturbating in the employees’ bathroom.
Writer/director Smith takes us through it all with crisply scabrous dialogue and some very funny set-pieces, especially one including the above mentioned stiff and a confused young woman. If they awarded an Oscar for making a little go a long way then he would be a shoo-in.
If newcomers like Gray and Smith bode well for the future of American filmmaking, movies like Milk Money remind us that for now it remains in a sorry state indeed. Richard Benjamin’s story of a young boy who recruits a kind-hearted prostitute (Melanie Griffith) as a potential wife for his widowed father (Ed Harris) is of questionable taste but unquestionable awfulness. It is hard to figure out what is most distressing about the film – Harris telling Griffith that he has ‘strong mammalian’ feelings towards her, or Griffith reduced to the indignity of standing in front of a class of 12-year-olds while a boy draws ovaries on her leotard (don’t ask). More puzzling still is why Malcolm McDowell, in the role of an evil pimp, affects a fake English accent. Mind-bogglingly bad.
Id, the story of a young policeman who goes undercover to investigate football hooligans is a jumbled, frenetic mess. In it, Reece Dinsdale plays the cop who infiltrates the ‘Dogs’, a violent gang who follow a mythical East London club. He becomes so enthralled by the violence and tribal camaraderie that he winds up tattooing the team logo on his bum, murdering a rival supporter and joining the local branch of the BNP.
Plots dealing with undercover agents who go native are a worthy genre, but Philip Davis’s film proves altogether incapable of exploring this fascinating moral dilemma. His compromised copper is a shallow, loutish and utterly unsympathetic character who betrays none of the moral complexities that would make his fall compelling. He is merely a yob waiting to happen. Dinsdale’s performance suffers from this lack of dimension – it is all mannered scowls, shouted obscenities and gruesome pouts.
Equally crippling is the fact that Davis fails to show us anything enticing about the hooligan life – there is no sense of the male bonding or primitive rush that would make this existence attractive to an outsider. Instead of exploring the dark side of the national psyche in any profound way, Davis merely recycles headlines.
The Steal is part comedy, part caper film, part love story and part message movie, but winds up being not much of anything. The plot, such as it is, involves a sexy young computer hacker (Helen Slater, in need of a career re-boot) who is hired by some right-on activists to steal millions of pounds from a London-based merchant bank that is exploiting a third-world country. The plan leads ultimately to the blackmailing of the bank’s chairman (Peter Bowles) by having photos taken of him in a compromising position with an amorous poodle.
It is a measure of how far off-track writer/director John Hay allows matters to veer that a story that starts in a Los Angeles high rise soon finds itself square in the middle of Light Entertainment-land, with appearances by such central casting stalwarts as a sexually deviant judge, an underused Jack Dee and the secretaries from the Philadelphia cream cheese advert. The only thing at all remarkable about the film is that Stephen Fry (yes, he’s in it too) chose not to flee to France before the end of filming.
