The cast of 200 Cigarettes reads like a roll call of hot talent. They’re the kinds of young stars who are on lots of magazine covers and have Web pages devoted to them, and so they know they will live forever and are immune to the diseases of smoking. I wish them well. But if they must smoke in the movies, can’t they at least be great smokers, like my mother was? When she was smoking you always knew exactly how she felt, because of the way she used her cigarette and her hands and the smoke itself as a prop to help her express herself. She should have been good; she learned from Bette Davis movies.
The stars of 200 Cigarettes, on the other hand, belong to the suck-and-blow school of smokeology. They inhale, not too deeply, and exhale, not too convincingly, and they squint in their close-ups while smoke curls up from below the screen. Their smoke emerges as small, pale, noxious gray clouds. When Robert Mitchum exhaled at a guy, the guy ducked out of the way.
I suppose there will be someone who counts the cigarettes in 200 Cigarettes, to see if there are actually 200. That will at least be something to do during the movie, which is a lame and labored conceit about an assortment of would-be colorful characters on their way to a New Year’s Eve party in 1981. Onto the pyre of this dreadful film are thrown the talents of such as Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Janeane Garofalo, Courtney Love, Gaby Hoffman, Kate Hudson, Martha Plimpton, Paul Rudd, Guillermo Diaz, Brian McCardie, Jay Mohr, Christina Ricci, Angela Featherstone, and others equally unlucky.
Ricci and Love have the kinds of self-contained personalities that hew out living space for their characters no matter where they find themselves, but the others are pretty much lost. The witless screenplay provides its characters with aimless dialogue and meaningless confrontations, and they are dressed not like people who might have been alive in 1981, but like people going to a costume party where 1981 is the theme. (There is not a single reason, by the way, why the plot requires the film to be set in 1981 or any other year.)
Seeing a film like this helps you to realize that actors are empty vessels waiting to be filled with characters and dialogue. As people, they are no doubt much smarter and funnier than the cretins in this film. I am reminded of Gene Siskel’s bottom-line test for a film: “Is this movie more entertaining than a documentary of the same people having lunch?” Here they are contained by small ideas and arch dialogue, and lack the juice of life. Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue.
U-Turn
(Directed by Oliver Stone; starring Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton; 1997)
Only Oliver Stone knows what he was trying to accomplish by making U-Turn, and it is a secret he doesn’t share with the audience. This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking—the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources. Much of the story comes from Red Rock West, John Dahl’s 1994 film about a man and a wife who both try to convince a drifter to kill the other. And the images and milieu are out of Russ Meyer country; his Cherry, Harry and Raquel and SuperVixens contain the same redneck sheriffs, the same lustful wives, the same isolated shacks and ignorant mechanics and car culture. U-Turn and Cherry both end, indeed, with a debt to Duel in the Sun.
I imagine Stone made this movie as sort of a lark, after the exhausting but remarkable accomplishments of Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Heaven and Earth, and JFK. Well, he deserves a break—but this one? Stone is a gifted filmmaker not afraid to take chances, to express ideas in his films and make political statements. Here he’s on holiday. Watching U-Turn, I was reminded of a concert pianist playing “Chopsticks”: It is done well, but one is disappointed to find it done at all.
The film stars Sean Penn, in a convincing performance all the more admirable for being pointless. He plays Bobby, a man who has had bad luck up the road (his bandaged hand is missing two fingers), and will have a lot more bad luck in the desert town of Superior, Arizona. He wheels into town in his beloved Mustang convertible, which needs a new radiator hose, and encounters the loathsome Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton), a garage mechanic he will eventually be inspired to call an “ignorant inbred turtleneck hick.”
While Darrell works on the car, Bobby walks into town. Superior is one of those backwater hells much beloved in the movies, where everyone is malevolent, oversexed, narrow-eyed, and hateful. There are never any industries in these towns (except for garages, saloons, and law enforcement) because everyone is too preoccupied by sex, lying, scheming, embezzling, and hiring strangers to kill each other.
Bobby quickly finds a sultry young woman named Grace (Jennifer Lopez), and is invited home to help her install her drapes and whatever else comes to mind. Soon her enraged husband Jake (Nick Nolte) comes charging in, red-eyed and bewhiskered, to threaten Bobby with his life, but after the obligatory fight they meet down the road and Jake asks Bobby to kill his wife. Soon Grace will want Bobby to kill her husband (the Red Rock West bit), and the film leads to one of those situations where Bobby’s life depends on which one he believes.
Superior, Arizona, is the original town without pity. During the course of his brief stay there, Bobby will be kicked in the ribs several dozen times, almost be bitten by a tarantula, shot at, and have his car all but destroyed—and that’s all before the final scenes with the vultures circling overhead. Bobby comes across almost like a character in a computer game; you wipe him out, he falls down, stars spin around his head, and then he jumps up again, ready for action.
The film is well made on the level of craft; of course it is, with this strong cast, and Stone directing, and Robert Richardson as cinematographer. But it goes around and around until, like a merry-go-round rider, we figure out that the view is always changing but it’s never going to be new. There comes a sinking feeling, half an hour into the film, when we realize the characters are not driven by their personalities and needs, but by the plot. At that point they become puppets, not people. That’s the last thing we’d expect in a film by Oliver Stone.
Unforgettable
(Directed by John Dahl; starring Ray Liotta; 1996)
In the long annals of cinematic goofiness, Unforgettable deserves a place of honor. This is one of the most convoluted, preposterous movies I’ve seen—a thriller crossed with lots of Mad Scientist stuff, plus wild chases, a shoot-out in a church, a woman taped to a chair in a burning room, an exploding university building, adultery, a massacre in a drugstore, gruesome autopsy scenes, and even a moment when a character’s life flashes before her eyes, which was more or less what was happening to me by the end of the film.
What went wrong? The movie has been directed by John Dahl, a master of noir, whose Red Rock West and The Last Seduction were terrific movies. Seduction starred Linda Fiorentino, who is back this time. Her costar is Ray Liotta, from GoodFellas. The supporting cast includes the invaluable Peter Coyote and David Paymer. It’s a package with quality written all over it. But what a mess this movie is.