Nick Nolte fights his demons in Europe.
Just when you thought it was best to stay out of movie theaters, Neil Jordan's The Good Thief is a reason to come back. Jordan has not simply remade Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 film Bob Le Flambeur, he's revived the idea of cinema-a notion that has been in bad shape the past two months given that overhyped tv-special Chicago, the woefully unsatisfying Gangs of New York and a flood of dismal new releases of no esthetic value. Jordan starts with a character and circumstance-Bob (Nick Nolte), a middle-aged American in France wasting his senior years on drugs and hanging out with petty criminals. Bob's such an archetypal expatriate bum, he's attempted to turn slumming into an art form. But Jordan uses this observation for an enlightened (and accurate) summation that modern hipsterism comes down to cynicism.
This view-and it is a distinctly fashioned perspective, a generic world seen to fresh, new purpose-reformulates Melville's 50s essence, his existential chic. Jordan makes sense of Melville in terms of our contemporary political reality, in which opting out isn't rebellion but a louche form of giving up. (Something gangster practitioner John Woo, who "presented" the recent revival of Melville's dour Le Cercle Rouge, clearly does not understand.) Bob stands out as the spiritual hub of a multiculti gang of younger expats-Paulo (Said Taghmaoui), Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), Said (Ouassini Embarek), Vladimir (Emir Kusturica)-who have lighted upon the south of France escaping whatever terrors and dissatisfactions in their homelands to test their mettle in an atmosphere of tarnished romance.
Through these criminal lives, involving the escapism of drugs, prostitution and thievery, Jordan depicts a range of squandered hopes as the true new world order. The Good Thief surpasses an unprincipled heist flick like Steven Soderbergh's pre-fab Oceans Eleven remake, because Jordan isn't in love with Vegas-y fatalism. As his title suggests, he's looking for what's good in Bob. Following Bob's elaborately staged plan to rob a casino, he traces the complex of a broken-hearted adult in the same way a doctor examines an x-ray. The heist isn't a cool mode of behavior, but a series of maneuvers that illustrate the way a lost man and his pitiable allies attempt to find hope.
The Good Thief features a heady nexus of urbane movie fantasies. Jordan conducts his polyglot cast with its startling variety of accents into a world-weary chorale, their convergence evoking the human terminus of Casablanca. The mix of European, British and North African anxieties suggests Andre Techine's Les Innocents and Loin, prophetic dramas about sensual, global politics. Even Jonathan Demme's Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie, is hailed, continuing Demme's openhearted view of the criminal world that avoids trendy noir pessimism. And yet, Jordan's updated story of international disillusionment remains as existential as its French origins (which also recall Jacques Demy's gambling casino daydream The Bay of Angels). However, Jordan's existentialism displays different roots-and blooms unexpectedly.
Bob takes pride in a Picasso painting he says he won in a wager with the master. Yet his heist plans focus on appropriating a casino's hidden treasury of European art masterpieces. Jordan understands this drive to possess as a degraded, street-level version of Bob's personal faith. The Good Thief sees its protagonist's life as Christian allegory, a striving through suffering. The antagonism that a younger man like Paulo experiences when dangerously maddened by Anne's drifting allegiances is another form of spiritual anguish. (Their unique triangle is one of Luck, Sex and Loyalty.) Paulo simply lacks Bob's shady grace that comes from wisdom, age and his sense of mortality.
Nolte's grave performance combines a devil-may-care attitude with existential blues. There are traces of both Brando's American loser in Last Tango and Bogart's Rick in Casablanca (particularly in Bob's friendship with a French cop played by Tcheky Karyo) but growly-voiced Nolte achieves his own deft balance of psychodrama and romanticism. His tousled gray hair and gnarled face seem both common and ideal, like a great portrait painting. Even when stoned, Bob walks and mumbles with a lilt (underscored by Leonard Cohen's "A Thousand Kisses Deep," as perfect here as Cohen's songs are in McCabe & Mrs. Miller). This dissolute yet charming man reveals weakness and ambition-the human traits that have always animated Jordan's storytelling.
Most of all, The Good Thief shows Jordan's sympathy for human folly to be generous, insightful, visionary. He's not just repeating genre; he's pursuing human truth. Working again with the great cinematographer Chris Menges, Jordan reminds you how wondrous movies can look. The serenely designed, mostly nighttime imagery gives illumination to dark mystery. It's the first color noir movie I can think of that rivals the emotional subtlety of black and white. Shots of Bob or Anne or Paulo watching each other over banisters, across the distance of a courtyard, draw one into the suspense of their relationships through the space and depth of Menges' lighting and focus. The Good Thief holds attention agreeably but it's also just plain dazzling to look at. At last! The movie year has been jumpstarted.
As a boy you can thrill to movie violence, and then grow up to mistake that thrill for art. This profile has presided over movie culture's decline for the past 25 years-including the recent vogue for Hong Kong action movies that promote adolescent bloodlust (or punk-ass revenge) as an esthetic preference over movies about moral dilemma and hard-earned optimism. If you go back to the good westerns and crime dramas of the 50s and 60s, there's nothing like the tolerance for brutality that has lately been approved as fly, hot, thrill rides. The worst and latest examples are John McTiernan's Basic and William Friedkin's The Hunted. Both films are so odious, it's difficult to know where to begin placing blame.
Friedkin may be the most vile director ever to work in mainstream cinema. Though gifted with an assured hand, he appeals to the teenage barbarian in moviegoers-and has won unaccountable esteem for stylish nonsense like To Live and Die in L.A. and The French Connection. (Really, its sequel, The Seven-Ups, is superior, and Gene Hackman gives a better performance in French Connection II). You could dismiss Friedkin's The Exorcist as a crime against humanity, but it forecast that his favorite genre (pastime) is the horror film. The Hunted recalls Friedkin's Rampage, but this time the serial-killer hero is an over-programmed CIA assassin (Benecio del Toro) on a spree from Kosovo to the Pacific Northwest who must be taken out by his mentor (Tommy Lee Jones).
The stars chase, pummel and stab each other until Friedkin runs out of film-or you lose patience. For hip cred, there's ludicrous reference to Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" ("God said to Abraham/Kill me a son") but the half-assed critique of American military patriarchy is merely an excuse to keep teenage boys watching-and duped.
"When you kill with your own hands there is a reverence," Del Toro says. What obscene, insidious ad copy.
William Goldman could have written that line as Friedkin's (or his own) motto. Goldman is Friedkin's screenwriting equivalent-one of the most vile men in the industry. I don't know how he got left out of last week's "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" round-up, but he's my candidate for the next few years-simply for Basic, another military-set death-orgy. Goldman didn't write Basic, but the project surely grew from his script for The General's Daughter, the most disgusting film of this era, say all reasonable people. Goldman is so well-connected in New York publishing that despite every rotten movie he's worked on, editors hire him to browbeat other, always younger, more talented filmmakers-usually under the guise of handicapping the Oscars. His real talent is for contemptible movies like Dreamcatcher and Basic, Goldmanesque, violent box-office formula and cliche.
Naturally, it stars John Revolta and Samuel L. Jackhammer, Pulp Fiction alumni. Travolta's grinning amorality deserves a rant all its own; he's become the icon for grown-ups' adolescent bad taste. In Basic he recites dubious theory about murder as a basic human impulse, while enacting a plot that praises military drug smuggling.
Never mind more plot details. It's time reviewers stop closing their minds and jawing about inane, unbelievable plots like Friedkin's and Goldman's while ignoring what's really going on: These movies are nothing more than paydays for contemptuous, unprincipled, narcissistic people-actors, directors, writers, producers. (Only below-the-line personnel are concerned with mortgages and tuitions.) If one said what matters about these movies, rather than trying to sell bedtime stories to ADD teens, the fact of unrepentant film industry greed would be basic.