Directed by Richard Shepherd
“Aren’t we fucking cosmopolitan!” laughs Hope Davis as she lounges, drink in hand, with her husband (Greg Kinnear) and his sexy new friend (Pierce Brosnan) in the best scene of the new thriller The Matador. Suburban housewife Davis exults, “Lies wash over us like the summer breeze.” She’s intoxicated by the new danger in their midst, and by the prospect of being bad in response to life’s uncertainty and the world’s unfairness. Brosnan, playing a visiting international hitman, picks up on her jest and nudges, “Next thing we’ll be wife swappin’.” To which Kinnear giggles, “You don’t have a wife!”
This moment of sly character definition and escalating threat is an example of writer-director Richard Shepard’s devious moral sense. It’s not exactly a surprise since Shepard’s previous film was Scotland, PA. which transposed Macbeth onto the contemporary fast-food industry. (A “clever” yet ludicrous idea.) In The Matador, Shepard’s cleverness almost works; it comes close to articulating the modern moral quandaries that drive his ambitious, if reckless, indie filmmaking. Through the triangle of wife-businessman-assassin, Shepherd gets down to the temptations that seduce both yuppies and Gen-X, but rarely were identified in the many indie films that, post-Tarantino, glamorized low-life corruption.
Tarantino’s impact on film culture popularized the use of sarcastic malice that once was the product of adolescent rebellion. (Shepherd begins The Matador with The Jam’s classic “Town Called Malice.”) Pulp Fiction’s success removed the stigma of immaturity by making sophomoric humor seem like the end-point of what used to be called Pop Art. This traduction was best illustrated when David Denby in New York magazine cheered that Tarantino “knows French New Wave conventions.” (But Denby and Pulp Fiction’s legions of fans overlooked that Tarantino was ignorant of the New Wave’s convictions.) Shepherd brings conviction back to that dreaded genre, the neo-noir. It isn’t enough to see neo-noir as a genre; it needs to be seen as a moral proposition. Consciously or not, that’s why Shepherd references Shakespeare, rather than exploitation fare.
The Matador’s cast of characters are not pop-quoting cool kids but frustrated adults for whom little in life has gone right. Bean (Davis) and Danny (Kinnear) have found each other, but their marriage is a series of shared tragedies and cosmic set-backs. Danny and Julian (Brosnan) find each other when both are on business trips in Mexico and despite different professions, they have in common the dissatisfaction and desperation of people of a certain age who are way past neo-noir flash. Yes, The Matador is flashily directed with large-font titles identifying Julian’s jet-set itinerary and a fancy presentation of the high-life settings. But the way Shepherd’s trio indulge their dreams and fears shows the basis of their individual failures and each one’s personal sadness.
“Aren’t we fucking cosmopolitan!” hits the bull’s-eye. It exposes the longing for cool that post-Q.T. cinema made profitable, and thus contributed to the ruin of popular culture. The waste is personified in Bean’s louche drunkenness, but it is exhibited throughout Danny and Julian’s south-of-the-border adventures, where the killer gives the nerd a close-up view of decadent thrills, pessimistic indifference and self-justifying murder. Julian tempts Danny and Bean with the ethos of violence so prominent in modern movies—he is the red cape to their bull. But Shakespearian Shepherd knows how soul-corrupting that enticement can be. Reimagining Macbeth as a neo-noir sitcom never becomes ludicrous because it critiques Danny and Bean’s weakness while dangling Julian over the abyss.
Where this often fascinating comedy ultimately fails is in the too-clever instant that Julian confronts Danny with a moral choice. There’s ingenious suspense since we’ve seen Danny’s revulsion at Julian’s lethal nonchalance during a bullfight, plus it’s suggested that Julian’s attraction might also be sexual. But when Shepherd finally does relieve our curiosity it is not gratifying. Shepherd never makes the necessary—expected—moral leap. He hides the complication in narrative trickery. Still, while we’re kept in abeyance, The Matador seems to be taking the neo-noir beyond hip. Julian’s eventual visit to Danny and Bean’s home approximates the moral complexity of Graham Greene’s classic short story “May We Borrow Your Husband.”
Brosnan’s Julian is a startling characterization. Wearing a gold chain around his lined, swarthy neck so that it dangles down his hairy chest, he resembles a Robert Ryan cad from the days of Hollywood’s moral stability. Yet he’s a Graham Greene character, too; tortured because he’s ensnared himself in nefarious business. Exposing his middle-aged torso before countless prostitutes, he wears an onyx ring inscribed with a crucifix. Self-disgust sinks Julian deeper into outlaw life. He tells Danny, “I wouldn’t know how to get a mortgage for all the teenage twat in Thailand.” The obscenity evokes Brosnan’s 007 past, as well as his morally ambiguous Graham Greene turn in John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama. This postmodern spoof of Brosnan’s own film career makes his former matinee-idol chic conform to reality. Julian’s moustachioed and stubbled visage forces us to smell the scotch and cigar stench, the funk of failure, with the same shock as clean-cut, cowardly Danny and Bean.
When Julian advises, “Consider me the best cocktail-party story you ever met,” it’s a fuck-off to timid Danny. But it also cautions our envy of the bad-ass life, mocking the safe distance that Q.T. fantasies deny. Julian’s ripostes (“A Vietnamese girl had her legs locked so tight, I couldn’t get a whiff of her spring roll. Two hours and a Quaalude later, I was at her all-you-can-eat buffet,” and “I look like a Bangkok whore on a Sunday morning after the navy left town.”) are as racist and rude as any Q.T. joke, except they’re not meant to be cool. They lead to Julian’s lament about being burned out—confessed while eating pecan pie in a suburban-America dining room—which brings the fallacy of toughness down to earth, as if Q.T. cinema finally grew up.
Unfortunately, “fucking cosmopolitan!” also defines the limits of Shepherd’s film. No irony is felt when Danny rationalizes his association with a killer: “Don’t successful people always live with blood on their hands?” Here Shepherd gives in to justifying the violence on indie filmmakers’ hands. (Their lies wash over us all, the rancid breeze of “summer movies.”) This is the same problem as American critics validating the neo-noir fable of David Cronenberg’s nada A History of Violence. Not just a Q.T. film sans humor, it’s in bad faith. Cronenberg implies that life offers no moral choice, it’s all pathological instinct. The Matador is really good whenever it makes the opposite clear. And that truth comes from Shepherd’s trio satirizing today’s weak-willed thrall with naughtiness, the juvenile sensibility that contemporary film culture defends as cool and subversive. Yet The Matador isn’t harsh enough. Munich’s view of violence says “No, in thunder” (to quote Leslie Fiedler). Shepherd’s got the right instincts (and it’s time his generation sounds the wake up call) but his satire of the cool, cosmopolitan urge is only part-way there.
