Mickey Rourke's old Suntory commercials (echoed years later in Bill Murray's funny and sad portrayal of a movie star adrift in Japan in Lost in Translation) are awesome, he's at the height of his powers, so he's phoning it in, because he doesn't need to do anything else - and they are ridiculous, and totally entertaining.
Thanks to Alex N. for pointing me to the one below.
My brother recounts his experience of going to an Inside the Actors Studio taping - guest? Mickey Rourke.
In Barfly, Mickey Rourke, as Henry, gives one of his best performances. It stands alone. It is a symphony of movement and gesture, of humor and pathos ... and I remember at the time his performance being criticized as "over-the-top". (Insert Sheila's - and Michael's - eyeroll here). I have a problem, in general, with people thinking "over-the-top" is a valid criticism, in the first place. It's kind of like the stupidest criticism of all: "He just plays himself!" Oh, is that all? And you think that's easy? Really? Have you ever actually tried it? While the cameras are rolling? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Judy Davis is 100% "over-the-top" in Husbands and Wives, and I think that's one of the best performances I've ever seen. Most of my favorite performances are, to some degree, "over-the-top" - if by "over-the-top" you mean: fully realized, balls to the wall, unafraid, committed. Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, wearing giant sunglasses, smashing her face against the door jamb, and then saying in a cold cold voice in the diner the next day, with cuts all over her face, "I'm in trouble." Over-the-top. Jeff Bridges as "The Dude", with drops of White Russian be-dew-ing his messy mustache, galumphing across a parking lot, jellies slapping on the pavement. What? Over-the-top. This is fearless stuff. This is not an actor only waiting for his closeup to do his best and most personal work, these are not actors waiting for THEIR moment to "act". They have created a character from the DNA up, and so the walk, the talk, the gestures, the emotional complexity - all come from someplace deep and real (as Humphrey Bogart said, "Good acting should be six feet back in the eyes.") . The quietest performance in the world could be "over-the-top". It doesn't mean loud and bold. It means (to me) committed, free, unafraid, unselfconscious.
So. Going in, I am already annoyed by that criticism of Mickey Rourke's performance.
Second of all, if you've ever seen live footage of Charles Bukowski, or if you've ever heard his voice, then you know that Mickey Rourke was actually doing some astonishingly subtle and accurate mimicry ... He NAILS the cadences of Bukowski, how things sort of go up at the end of the sentence, left hanging there in the air ... a sort of acceptance of the uncertainty of life that is IN the man's speech patterns - and completely unlike anything Mickey Rourke had ever done before. Mickey Rourke always has a gentleness to him, it is what makes him such a disarming performer, along the lines of Sylvester Stallone's best work, or Jimmy Cagney ... such a tough guy, such a barrel-chested guy, being so gentle ... but here in Barfly he can bring that to the forefront. It is not hidden behind a tough-guy exterior of cool and reserve.
Henry is a mess. Henry has no coping skills for life. He is a raw and open wound. That's obviously why he drinks so much. His drinking, though, is not so much a coping mechanism, although we could psychoanalyze him to death, if we wanted to waste our time. His drinking is an active choice. He is opting OUT of the world of competition and ambition, consciously. He does not understand the American obsession with career, and why the first thing you ever ask of a new person is "what do you DO?" Not "what do you care about" or "what poets do you like" but "what do you DO?" Henry is baffled by this. He chooses to not participate. Yes, he is killing himself, yes, the audience wants to detox after seeing the film - even if they haven't ever had a drink in their lives - but in the topsy-turvy underworld that Barfly shows, his anti-choice is seen as almost heroic. It is truth, in a way, a much stronger truth than those of us who blindly accept the values of the society at large, who take on handed-down assumptions without questioning them.
"What do you do?" we ask each other upon meeting, never wondering if there might be a more important (and definitely more interesting) question to ask.
The film centers around the boozy chaotic relationship Henry gets into with another professional drunk named Wanda (played with gorgeous insane aplomb by Faye Dunaway - I love her here - she is having so much fun). Wanda is even more pathetic than Henry is, because she doesn't have art to keep her going. At least Henry, in his moments of clarity in his horrendous room in the SRO Hotel, has a pencil and paper, and the drive to write. She has nothing. She is way worse off, even though she still has her looks (kind of), slammin' legs, and can still get by on fucking men for booze money (although that time will soon be over for her). But for a brief period (very brief), they connect. They are not a good match. Of course. Who would be a good match with either of these wackjobs? Henry spends his evenings at the same bar every night, fighting one of the bartenders intermittently out in the alley, taking beatings that would kill someone else. There's an odd masochistic pleasure in it for him. He is "that guy" in the bar. They're all losers, but he's MORE of a loser. There's a hierarchy at work.
But let me get down to brass tacks.
Unfortunately, Barfly is not available on DVD at the moment (it's out of print), which is a shame. Michael sent me his copy. I think it's due for a re-issue, with some great special features, and a commentary track, the whole shebang. These are two major performances by two major stars. Let's get this thing back into circulation.
Mickey Rourke walks down the street in the blinding light of day, and his head is hunched forward, jutting away from his body, which is obviously in a lot of pain. Not just from the beating he took the night before, but from the crushing hangover. His arms hang down, but they're arched out a little, in gentle curves. He holds them this way. He appears unaware of this, and why he would hold his arms that way, because, of course, when we are hurting, physically, our body just does what it needs to do to survive. Rourke is in charge of this physicality. It is his genius. Whether or not he worked in front of a mirror, like other actors do, to get the right "look", I don't know, but I imagine (just speculating here) that his process is more organic, and less intellectual. His smarts about the human condition, his knowledge of what it is that people go through, is impeccable. That is his talent. It seems to me that his imagination is so potent, so real, and his own experiences are so at his fingertips (he's a highly emotional person, highly available) that all he needs to do (mentally) is just send out a "suggestion" to his body (ie: I'm totally hungover. Or: I'm wasted. Or: I'm insecure) - and his body kicks into gear, morphing itself into the shape he needs. When you're hungover, your head hurts. So it makes sense that it would jut itself away from the neck, trying to separate itself. When you've been punched in the stomach repeatedly the night before, your whole midsection hurts, so of course your body would hunch over the hurt area, protectively, and your arms would gently circle out to the sides, creating a small clear space for you to maneuver. Mickey Rourke creates the shape of this man, and it is unlike any other shape he has ever created as an actor, before or since. I have not yet mentioned the underbite.
Mickey Rourke's mouth is naturally very sensitive and soft. It's one of his defining characteristics. (Or, it was.) It's very kissable, and it makes the mouth look like it was meant to whisper sweet hot nothings, or to whisper a gentle yet deadly serious threat of violence. But here, in Barfly, the lower lip juts out, making him look defiant, kind of stupid, almost like he's asking to be punched. He's belligerent, like a little kid sulking in the corner. "No. I don't WANNA go home. I am going to stay RIGHT HERE." It's a kid's mouth in Barfly, pre-sexual. Now Mickey Rourke was one of the most sexual of male movie stars - he had no shyness in that regard, no hesitation to "go there" - so to see him here subvert that totally obvious masculine sexual energy, drown it in alcohol and physical aches and pains - is quite startling, because it is not what we are used to from him. In that physical process of transformation, out comes that lower lip, letting the canny women audience members know, just by that lower lip, "No. I'm not going to be doing THAT in this performance ... I'm doing something ELSE here ..."
Mickey Rourke's sex drive is a force to be reckoned with. It's WHERE he operated from for the most part as an actor (which, I think, is why, even with all the macho stuff, he can come off as quite feminine - there's an openness there), so it's really something to see him not utilize that part of himself at ALL as Henry. It shows that he was not a one-trick pony, not by a long shot. This is a character. From his emotional expression to the way his voice sounds to the underbite - this is a character. Any sexual impulses Henry may have are so submerged beneath his primary need: alcohol ... that they can never come in first. They will always be secondary. If you think about Mickey Rourke's other roles around this time, and what he brought to the table - this jujitsu move with something that is so essential to who he is - his sexuality - is startling. That's acting. A lesser actor would not have known how to get rid of the thing - THE thing - that set him apart from other actors. "But ... if I don't use THIS ... then how will I play this part?" Rourke never asks himself these questions. And when his star fell, in the 90s, and you saw him start to repeat himself, in a hollow manner, trying to re-capture the "Rourke thing" - with the whispering and the touching-of-the-face and the smouldering look - it was painful for those of us who love him. Because he was manufacturing something that had once been completely organic - his entire ESSENCE.
But again: to go back to the time of Barfly, and to place it in the context of the other roles Rourke had been playing ... no wonder the performance was either misunderstood or disliked. It did (of course) have its champions, and its stature has just grown in time, which is good. A movie like Barfly would never be a giant hit, and neither should it try to be. There are places for summer blockbusters - but God, there's a big wide world of artists out there who have no interest in that stuff, and who want to do good work in smaller movies ... In the atmosphere now, it is the mid-level movies that suffer the most. Not the low-budget indies, those will always be fine. And of course there will always be giant special-effects driven summer movies. But the middle ground - the ground that used to be occupied by films like Ordinary People, Barfly, Bull Durham - is shrinking. It's harder to get THOSE films made now than anything else. That's a shame.
There are so many great scenes in Barfly (Dunaway and Rourke in the mini cornfield, Dunaway shoving green ears of corn into her jacket), and the script is beyond awesome. Almost every line is memorable. You just want to chew on that language. Scenes don't feel a huge need to "go" anywhere, because the characters themselves aren't going anywhere. None of them have anywhere to be, there are no deadlines, or clocks ... so scenes can play out, behavior can be captured without feeling the need to explain it or make a point of it (the old guy chewing the sandwich in the bar, the grumpy drunk woman at the end of the bar scowling at Rourke, the huge-titted whore coming out of the bathroom wiping her mouth, all of the spectators in the alley fights - who are those people? Pruitt Taylor Vince is one of them, but the rest of them just don't look like actors.) There are small moments of kindness and clarity (the grizzled bartender who seems to have a protective feeling towards Henry, but at the same time isn't afraid to get firm with him) ... and even tenderness.
The section with the long-haired British chick who shows up looking for Henry - she wants to publish his stories - is the only part of the film that rings false for me, and I blame her. I just didn't like her acting. She was way out of her league. When she finally gets wasted with him, like she wants to live on the wild side, and then is devastated when he doesn't want to stay with her, I rolled my eyes. Who on this good green earth is that naive? Rourke is great with her. He's great with anyone. He is great with non-actors and actors alike, and he is terrific in his scenes with her. I just didn't like her acting. It needed to be underplayed, because suddenly - in those scenes - we get a very literal and almost plot-driven film: The Snooty Literary Chick Who Is Turned On Sexually By the Bad Boy - (yawn) ... and she plays everything directly on the nose. But that's a minor flaw. It is not the main driving force of the film. Thank goodness. She is an interruption in the flow that is the Dunaway-Rourke pas de deux. She is an important character if only because it shows that Henry is not just some anonymous loser wanna-be scribbler. He has actually gotten his shit together enough to submit things to magazines, and it has generated some attention. The times he spends huddled over a paper after a long bender is starting to pay off.
There are a couple of other evocative gestures I want to mention, and they're a bit hard to talk about, for many reasons. I think with someone like Rourke you obviously are in the realm of instinct. To discuss these choices as though they are fully conscious, in the same way that you make "choices" like "Do I want tuna or chicken salad for lunch" - would not be right. We're on the level of something subconscious. By gesture, I don't quite mean Michael Chekohv's psychological gesture, although there is some overlap. If you have a good eye for human behavior, then almost everything another person does becomes a "psychological gesture". The way they smoke, the way they listen, the body posture, the hand motions ... all of these things reveal a person's psychology and personality - far better than a minute-long monologue in words about "where I am coming from" could ever do. Psychological gesture is more about tapping into the emotional depth of the character, something you can draw upon later if you ever feel lost about "who you are" - it's almost like the THEME of a play and how every scene must somehow illuminate SOME aspect of the theme. If it doesn't, then it needs to be cut. I have been dealing with that a lot in putting together my book and it has not been easy. Precious things have had to be cut (perhaps to be used later - yes - but not in THIS book), and I have had to do some rigorous soul-searching about all of it. But the theme of the book is clear as day to me, and always has been - it is WHY I wrote the book, which led to HOW I wrote the book. A "psychological gesture" can help an actor stay on track with the deepest wishes, desires, hopes (ie: objective) of the character his portraying. When I speak of gesture here, I am speaking on a more prosaic level - how someone stands, sits, walks, smokes - but as I mentioned, these things can be extremely revealing. It is NOT just in closeup that an actor really "acts", although I have worked with such people before. They don't know how to work with the whole body. Without the camera 2 inches away from their nose, they are not sure how to "show" the character. None of this stuff is easy, by the way, if you don't have talent, and much of this cannot be taught. But when you start looking for those defining characteristics in the performances you love (or, more accurately, the performances you find unusually effective), it is amazing how much detail you can find. It is a mysterious process: how much was the actor aware of what he was doing?
In a way, picking such moments apart ruins them, but that's what I'm all about.
Ruining the things I love by overanalysis.
There are two moments in particular which I think say, in no uncertain terms, THIS IS WHO THIS CHARACTER IS.
And both of them have, as their main strength, the fact that they seem unconscious, unselfconscious, spontaneous.
The first one is after one of the bloody brawl Henry finds himself in (or, uhm, no, that he chooses actively) in the alley of the dive bar. In this one, he does NOT get beaten so badly that he lies on the ground in the trash bags. In this one, he gets the better of his opponent (played, speak of the devil, by Frank Stallone, Sly's brother). The crowd, who always roots for the bartender, placing bets on him, can't believe it. They're almost pissed. What happened to their entertainment? Henry is supposed to get beaten and battered, they're all supposed to win ten bucks, and then they get to go back inside, full of a sense of superiority that they had been right yet again, and also with a couple more drinks they now can buy with the bet money. But this time, Henry goes crazy. Frank Stallone doesn't know what hit him. All hell breaks loose.
Everyone's night is now effed up. No one knows how to react. The world of drunks is surprisingly conservative. They like routine. They abhor surprise.
Henry almost doesn't know what to do with himself. He was victorious? Who IS he now?
All the spectators (save one) shuffle back into the bar, grumpy, disgruntled, leaving Henry alone in the alley, as always, only this time he is still standing. Rourke starts to stagger back towards the bar, and there's an old grinning toothless drunk standing there (this guy can't be an actor, can he??). This old guy seems to be the only one delighted by the unexpected turn of events. He stands there, beaming meaninglessly at Rourke. Who knows why ... perhaps it's his advanced stage of alcoholism that just makes him unnaturally happy and positive ... or maybe somewhere, in his drowned soul, he recognizes that some important ground was just claimed by the GOOD in this world. As Rourke walks by him, he is struck by the gentleman. They have a moment of looking at each other. Again, Rourke is kind of hunched over his midsection protectively. (I just want to interject one thing: Rourke is also a boxer, as we all know. He knows how to take a punch. He knows how to "save face" when he is hurt. But Henry doesn't. Henry isn't a professional, he doesn't "spar", he doesn't dance around, dodging punches. Rourke beautifully embodies something that is essentially unfamiliar to him: a man who doesn't know how to fight. Again, many other actors - some of them quite good - would protect himself in this role by somehow suggesting to the audience, "If I really tried, I could KNOCK THIS GUY OUT. I am CHOOSING not to knock this guy out." Rourke does not protect himself.)
He glances uncertainly at the grinning drunk. He can barely stand himself. His arms are hunched out at his sides, again in a little curve. It may not be the classic definition of a "psychological gesture", but it tells me all I need to know. About this man's protectiveness of himself, and also his halting openness.
The drunk smiles at him. It is unclear why he is smiling - to us, and to Henry. But Henry, unlike many other drunks, is not a cynic at heart. He is actually a poet. He gives people the benefit of the doubt. He assumes the best of everyone, which is why he gets hurt, every day, all day.
In response, to the drunk's unending smile, Rourke suddenly shrugs and holds his arms out at him. It is a big gesture. Fearless. It is, essentially, unexplainable.
I could talk about that big shrug for hours. What I love so much about it is how childlike it is. It's embarrassing to see in a grown man, but it's embarrassing in a heartrending way. You are not embarrassed FOR him, you are more embarrassed for yourself, that you do not allow yourself such openness. He offers himself up to the smiling drunk, like: "See what I just did? Wasn't that great?" and he's like a shame-faced little kid, after doing a somersault through the adult's cocktail hour. "I know I'm only a kid ... but did you see what I just did? I need your approval, and I don't know why ... but will you please give it to me?"
The entirety of Henry's whole life is in that shrug.
The other moment I love is from the first time Henry takes Wanda into "his" bar. Everyone is in a hubbub about Henry actually having a woman. Henry walks like a strutting peacock ("Look at who I got!") and Wanda glimmers and glows at his side, getting a kick out of it, as though she is at a red carpet event on the arm of a movie star. The two settle in at the bar. It's morning, by the way. Henry decides he wants to go try to get a job at some construction joint that's hiring. Wanda panics about him leaving her. She told him what would happen ... she loses her "direction" when booze is offered to her. They go back and forth about this. They just met the night before, but already they are talking about boundaries and commitment. Everything in their world is messed up. Intimacy must happen immediately or it cannot happen at all. Nobody has any TIME to court, or "vet" each other. It's now or never.
Henry is busy talking at her, in his strange cadences, his voice going up at the end of every sentence, reassuring her - but he's not really connected to her. How could he be? In the middle of one of his monologues, she reaches out and touches his face tenderly.
And all I want to say is, watch how Rourke responds. It can't be captured in a screengrab. It's an infinitesimal moment, nearly invisible to the naked eye. But his face relaxes when she touches him like that. How long has it been since he has been touched tenderly? How long has it been since he - HE - has been touched? Sure, he got sucked off by the old whore in the bathroom, but to her he's a dime a dozen, just another man. In that moment with Wanda, SHE is touching HIM. His face relaxes, and while it's wonderful to see him relax (I can relax, too), it's tragic, too, because already in the film the world has been set up, and we know that such tenderness is just a tiny moment, here and now gone. Nothing is meant to last.
Mickey Rourke, in his wonderfully malleable sensitive face, using all of his powers of imagination and talent to step into the shoes of another man, allows himself to
1. enjoy her tender touch ... his whole face goes slack with the pleasure of her touch.
2. experience the loss and grief at the same time that this moment will not last.
And that is fine fine acting. All without a word being said.
Collage below:
"He refuses to join the rat race. He drinks and he waits."
"Some guys know how to get all the women."
"You don't know how?"
"I can get one for ten minutes. That's my limit."
"I can't stand people. I hate them. Do you hate them?"
"No. But I seem to feel better when they're not around."
"I'm gonna ask you the same damn thing people are always asking me."
"Like?"
"Like, what do you do?"
"Just one thing. I don't want to fall in love. I can't go through that again."
"Hey. Don't worry. Noone's ever loved me yet."
"You're the damndest barfly I've ever seen. You act like some weird blueblood, like royalty."
"Do you trust me?"
"Why not? It's easier that way."
"What are you doing with a woman, Henry?"
"Lily, sometimes ... I think you could use one, too."
"Excuse me. Who are you?"
"Oh, the eternal question. The eternal answer ... I don't know."
"This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something. They gotta be something. A dentist, a glider pilot, a Narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that. Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things I don't want to do, all the things I don't want to be, all the places I don't want to go, like India, get my teeth cleaned, save the whale, I don't understand that."
"Why'd it have to be Eddie? He symbolizes everything that disgusts me."
"What?"
"Obviousness. Unoriginal macho energy. Ladies man."
"Nothing but a dripping sink and an empty bottle. Euphoria. Youth fenced in. Stabbed and shaven."
"I know something about you. You've been jailed 12 times. You like Mahler and Mozart. You can't dance. You hate movies. You like avocados and Schopenhauer."
"What do you want me to do, write a book about the suffering of the upper classes?"
"This may come as a surprise to you, but they suffer too."
"Heyyy, baby ... nobody suffers like the poor."
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"Hey, I'm not pretending to be anything. What's your point?"
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
"Now look. Twenty bucks for that kind of head is outrageous."
"I did ya good, old fart. I did ya good. I oughta bit your champagne cork off."
"I'm givin' ya fifteen bucks."
"Twenty bucks. Nobody in this neighborhood can swallow paste like I can."
"Why don't you stop drinking? Anybody can be a drunk."
"Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth."
"So you hired a dick to find an asshole?"
"I take it you don't care for my world."
"Well, baby, look around. It's a, it's a cage with golden bars."
"You know, in the guest house, you could write in peace."
"Hey, Tully baby, nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace, Jesus."
"Baby, what we had was just green corn."
"Don't be sorry, just put on some new underwear."
"I hate the police, don't you?"
"I don't know, but I seem to feel better when they're not around."
"Drinks for all my friends!"
"And as my hands drop the last desperate pen, in some cheap room, they will find me there and never know my name, my meaning, nor the treasure of my escape."
Mick as Boogie was electric - girls wanted to do him and guys wanted to be him. Cooler than the Fonz and more fragile than an egg.
"more fragile than an egg".
How lovely.
I got that quote from this terrific retrospect of Rourke's career that came out around the time of Sin City, complete with a list of Rourke must-sees (some interesting choices). I love how much people remember Johnny Handsome (well ... except for me at first ... uhm ... sorry, Michael ... my post about the film here) - and how the "moment when he takes off the bandages" is referenced time and time again. NOT to be missed.
In the article I link to, he writes:
An older, wiser Rourke gingerly accepts the attention this time around, but the boxer's instincts remain. Play the game, but don't get played. Deep inside, you know it stings...why can't it just be about the acting? Ask the really intriguing actors about Mickey - the Penns, Walkens, Depps - and to a person they'll tell you how Rourke remains an untapped well of talent. How his swaggering but vulnerable machismo was an inspiration to them. How he could stand toe-to-toe with the best and still can. How he will generously share a small scene instead of trying to steal it, yet still make his turn one of the film's pivotal moments. That he's an actor's actor despite everything else, and that life's hard knocks have given him even greater resonance and depth.
Definitely go read the whole thing.
The Mickey Rourke piece I wrote for House Next Door is now on the main page of IMDB, the first link under their "Hit List".
Thanks for the heads up, Emily!
(To anyone who makes it over here from that link, here is my full Mickey Rourke archive of content. I do write about other things, too - like Ben Marley as well as Alexander Hamilton, the "miracle on ice", and various other random topics of interest.)
Screenshot of the link on IMDB courtesy of my good friend Emily:
This is how we are.
If you've been following along on my site, then you'll know.
Mickey Rourke and Michael - and the strange and exciting melding of those two - helped me get through this terrible fall.
Dana Stevens has just written an article on how Mickey Rourke became "irresistible" again, and she quotes the piece I wrote about Rourke for House Next Door.
I'm very very flattered and excited. She called my piece "definitive". Well, well. That is just damn nice.
Thanks, Dana Stevens. I've been reading you for years. This is a real treat for me (and Michael, by proxy).
Go read her whole piece. Great stuff.
Francis Ford Coppola directed Mickey Rourke in Rumblefish in 1983.
In 1997, Coppola put the by-then-fallen Mickey Rourke in The Rainmaker, where he played the sleazy lawyer Bruiser Stone.
There is something about Mickey Rourke's career that loops back in on itself. He reached iconic status very early, he made an impression ... not like other actors make impressions by giving good or detailed performances ... but by having a force of personality that threatened to un-balance the entire picture. And so ... when Rourke started working again, for real, in the late 90s, the smart directors would reference this, would consciously let us in on the secret, the joke. Mickey Rourke could never just slip into a picture, and do a tiny cameo. His presence automatically pulled attention, whether the project could handle it or not. His performance, all of 15 minutes, totally knocks Animal Factory on its side, and I found it to be detrimental to the actual picture. The picture was supposed to be about pasty-faced whiny Furlong. But I kept waiting for his cellmate to come back. The whole movie missed Rourke when he wasn't onscreen, and that is not a good thing when you are only in a film for 15 minutes. But that is Rourke's gift as well as his burden. And like I said, the smart directors would utilize this un-balancing effect of his presence, letting the audience know (at least letting the Rourke fans know): "Yes. We realize it is him. Yes. He is here. We know you remember." Not all actors have that kind of power and presence. Yes, there are stars, and yes, they have iconic status - but there is something different going on with Rourke. Perhaps because the excitement he generated was above and beyond the excitement generated for any other actor in recent memory ... and perhaps because he did "go away" for so long ... It would seem unfair to just try to slip Rourke into a movie, without somehow letting us who care about him have at least a MOMENT to go, "Oh my God. There he is."
Coppola gives us that in the opening shots of Rourke in The Rainmaker.
Perhaps only diehard Rourke fans would notice.
But that's why I'm here. To point out the parallels. To point out the conscious choice of Coppola to reference us back to an earlier Rourke performance. It is a signal, a message, a nod to the power he still generates in an audience that remembers him from the 80s.
If you get it, awesome, then the message is for you. If you don't get it, then nothing is lost. It's just an interesting shot of an interesting character.
But no way would a diehard Rourke fan see the opening moment in Bruiser Stone's office and not think back ... remembering ...
RAINMAKER, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1997
RUMBLEFISH, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1983
I was also very pleased to see my old boyfriend Dean Stockwell show up in The Rainmaker as the hacking-cough-infested cranky judge who excuses himself from an important meeting "to go to the can". It was lovely to see him again.
Great interview with Rourke. I like the part when he gets overheated. There's that weird vulnerability he has in interviews - it's startling because he looks like such a bruiser. The story about Springsteen writing the song that rolls over the final credits is really cool:
You were responsible for getting Bruce Springsteen to write the song for the end credits. How did that happen?
MR: After about six days, I knew something magical was happening on the movie. It gave me the gumption to write Springsteen a letter. I told him we had no money, but we shot it in New Jersey. And we even shot an extra scene in Asbury Park! He wrote back, and then five months later he called and said, “It’s Bruce,” and I said, “Who?”—I think I was on my Vespa—and he said, “Bruce. Springsteen.” I was like, “Oh fuck! Oh! OH!” He said, “I wrote you a little something.”I don’t think Darren had a clue what The Boss was all about. I took him to Giants Stadium—there were like 80,000 people there—and he was like, “Hmmmm, they really like him.” So we go backstage, and Bruce picks up a guitar and plays the [song on an] acoustic guitar for us. It was the first time we heard it, and I was like, he’s got words to it and everything! Man, he really got it. He didn’t see the movie, he’d only read the fucking script, but the song sums up the whole character. He did me such an honor, such a favor.
For some reason, the "he's got words to it and everything!" brings a lump to my throat.
My giant piece is now live at House Next Door.
All my pieces on Mickey Rourke on my site can be found here
The Aero Theatre in Santa Monica (a wonderful place, I saw Papillon there) is now hosting a Mickey Rourke Fest.
Day One was a double feature: Pope of Greenwich Village and 9 1/2 Weeks.
Naturally, Michael was there. I asked him to "report" on it for my blog. He agreed, hot shot though he is. My own Mickey Rourke piece is done (it ran to 9 pages, sorry, editor) and should go up next week.
In the meantime, here are Michael's thoughtful comments.
DAY ONE, by Michael
Day One was great. So amazing to see these films, particularly 9 1/2 WEEKS on the big screen. I never had. He's simply stunning. He never looks like he's making choices, like he's "acting", and yet he's completely unpredictable, funny and transparent while also being mysterious. And beautiful, in a broken way.
I agree that part of his genius, like Brando, was his self-destruction, but it's heartbreaking to see how beautiful he was then, how expressive his face was, how he was capable of playing a wealthy stockbroker, while now he can only play criminals, sleazebags and weirdos.
I'm very interested in seeing THE WRESTLER, seeing some old Mickey in the new visage. Thank you for not saying anything about it.
Pretty cashier: "Got a name?"
He pauses. A smile wafts over his lips. Mysterious. Bullshit.
Mysterious stranger replies: "Harley. Harley Davidson."
I love deliciously bad movies. They make the world go round.
... being stared at, during the shooting of the film, by S. E. Hinton, the author.
I'm saving up all my big talking for the piece I'm working on about Mickey Rourke - but I saw Rumble Fish in high school (it was the big Matt Dillon - S.E. Hinton collaboration that swept the nation - or at least the early teen female set) and fell in love with it. Rumble Fish is a weird freakin' movie and I only realize that now that I have seen it as an adult. It is truly bizarre. There is not a camera angle that Francis Ford Coppola does not enjoy. It is the simplest of stories, yet the method of storytelling is overly complex and intricate, as though we are watching some abstract intellectual French drama or highly wrought German melodrama.
The film is told with high-angle shots and deep creepy closeups - not to mention the fact that it is in black and white - except for the red and blue fish floating in their tank. The performances are over the top, all operatic and palpitating with tortured-young-man energy (S.E. Hinton's glorious stock-in-trade) - and there are times when it either looks like a noir, with shadows thrown so long they take up entire blocks - or early Sidney Lumet movies, with the jangly jazz music and busy chaotic street scenes. Some of it, with its deeply-inward-looking urban angst and repetitive images of bars (on gates, fire escapes, grates on shop doors), reminds me of The Pawnbroker. It's all rather ridiculous. The soundtrack is insistent, bossy, and omnipresent. BUSY. This movie is BUSY. But when I was a young girl, my heart throbbed to it. The lonely dumb kid, who could be a wonderful person if he was just given the chance ... the loyal yet fiery young teen who is his girlfriend ... and then, of course, the mythological Motorcycle Boy, who haunts the town. He haunts everyone even when he is right there in front of them - because he reminds them of who they are not, he reminds them of their best dreams for themselves, and also their worst fears. He dominated when he was absent, and graffitti declaring that he "reigns" has covered the walls of the city. He dominates now that he has returned, even though he seems to have lost interest in domination altogether.
In many ways, this is THE MOST RIDICULOUS of movies. I guess I love it for that reason. I love the big gesture of it. I love the balls. To make a teen-rumble drama look like a pretentious art-house film. And to have it, strangely, WORK. All I know is it worked for me as a teenager, and even though now I think, "Holy crap, how on earth did they let him get away with this??" it still works. It's over the top, even in its quietest moments. Everyone in the film is chewing up the scenery, playing their parts to the hilt: Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, Tom Waits, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Spano, Chris Penn ... they stand around in empty landscapes, with the clouds rushing by overhead speeded-up, they sit at counters that look like something out of a 1950s cautionary tale about rebel youths - but in one shot, Dillon and Rourke walk past a movie theatre and Debbie Does Dallas is playing. These boys live in a world that pre-dates the 1960s and the social and cultural upheaval. They are macho, isolated, sensitive and restless.
I saw the entire thing as totally realistic when I first saw it in the movie theatre as a 13 year old girl, or however old I was - it just seemed REAL to me. Perhaps because I was the kind of teenager who lived almost in a dreamworld, where things were fiery and important and "crucial" and life-or-death. I wouldn't have recognized melodrama if you blasted it in my face at point-blank range. Melodrama was just life, man.
Now I see Rumble Fish as high camp. I am more struck by the look of it, the in-your-face camera angles and mood - which somehow highlight, in a strange and abstract way, the quietly intense Method-actor performances going on.
Truly weird. I love it.
Joe Valdez at at This Distracted Globe has more.
A plethora of screengrabs below.
... essential ... to recognize not just the larger blessings, but the smaller ones as well.
I am having such a moment right now.
From an email from Michael:
here's one of many stories/anecdotes/observations of Mickey:when i moved to LA for the first time, back in my early twenties, i was renting a piece a shit car from a place called Rent-A-Wreck and i desperately wanted to just BUY my own piece of shit. a friend of a friend of a that kind of thing led me to a purple 50's stunt car from a low-budget movie that the production company was selling for far more than it was worth. but when the woman selling it told me that it was the car Mickey Rourke drove in the movie they just wrapped, i told her i'd buy it, sight unseen. to her credit, she basically told me it was lemon, don't bother, but i said i'd like to take it for a spin. which i did, all by myself, cruising West Hollywood with my mirrored cop glasses on, saying to myself, "i'm sitting in the same place Mickey Rourke sat in, touching the wheel that Mickey touched," soaking in his vibe. later i saw the movie (on video, of course. it was in the mid 90's, his dark days) and it was called FALL TIME. avoid it. it sucks. and Mickey was in his lazy, whispering, touching his lower lip with every line and always wearing sunglasses phase. he needed the paycheck.
have you seen FRANCESCO? Mickey Rourke plays St. Francis of Assisi. yes. you read that right. i don't remember it much but i know Helena Bonham Carter was in it and at one point you can see Mickey's biker tattoo (in the 1200's!).
Ah yes. The 'touching his lower lip on every line' phase. I know it well.
But that's why I love Michael. Because we have that same level of obsessiveness that leads us to things like driving purple stunt cars around wearing cop sunglasses. Or flying to Taos and crashing Dean Stockwell's party. Either one.
Mitchell, I wonder if Helena says "Crockit ... Oim a joooonkie" in that movie?
Sin City tonight.
Also, in other news, slightly braggy: it's kind of awesome when the managing editor of one of the best literary magazines in the country remembers you from when you submitted to them three years ago. Yes, they turned me down, but not after a prolonged and agonizing cut process ... I was getting little slips in the mail every couple of weeks: "You made it thru the first round ...." I finally had to write to them and ask them to come to a decision because they don't accept "simultaneous submissions" and as long as they were considering it I couldn't send it elsewhere - and I really wanted to move on (if they weren't going to take it). The managing editor wrote me a really nice letter (that I still have), singing the praises of the piece but saying they wanted to pass. Okay, fine! I placed it in the next place I submitted to. I KNEW that piece had legs!! Just submitted another piece to her again 2 days ago, and she remembered me. Now, come on. That is something.
I need every little bit of self-propelled confidence I can get.
Quoted from one of the many emails that have been flying back and forth:
MUST-SEE MICKEY MOVIES YOU HAVEN'T COMMENTED ON YET (that i'm sure you've either seen or know you should):POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE: most guys love this movie and it seems to be THE Rourke movie for most.
RUMBLE FISH
SPUN: good late Rourke. he's billed as a supporting character, but he's actually the lead.
SIN CITY: you may have already commented on this already.MEDIOCRE MICKEY MOVIES YOU SHOULD STILL SEE:
BULLET: i remember thinking this Tupac movie was OK, but i was desperate for a silver-lining.
HOMEBOY which he co-wrote and starred his wife at the time. an interesting performance as a dim-witted boxer.
HARLEY DAVIDSON & THE MARLBORO MAN: campy bad, but if you want to see Mickey try his hand at comedy, worth seeing.GOOD CAMEOS:
THE RAINMAKER as "Bruiser Stone." what a perfect name for late period Mickey.
BUFFALO 66
HEAVEN'S GATEIF YOU GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO:
DESPERATE HOURS
GET CARTER
DOMINOxo
G.
He's basically annoyed that I am not posting more. I love his kind of judgey parenthetical: " (that i'm sure you've either seen or know you should)" .
It's the "know you should" that kills me.
Sadly, Barfly is not available on Netflix and if you want to buy it on Amazon it starts at 70 bucks. I remember seeing this in the movie theatre and I must see it again. (Naturally I am working on a huge Mickey Rourke project in anticipation of the premiere of The Wrestler on December 17). So I emailed Michael in a panic about the Barfly situation and Michael popped his copy of the CD in the mail this morning.
At least ex-boyfriends are good for something.
I kid.
I've had a tremendously long day involving Actors Equity, gynecology, and almost zero food. Tonight I watch Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon.
Ultimately, I think it is her sadness that makes the movie. She is sad from the start. She is sad before she met him. She's got a good game-face, and she's gorgeous in a head-turning way, but she's not really living a real life. You can see that in the one interaction she has with a guy who tries to hit on her in the store in Chinatown. He's a goof, yeah, but whatever, he's just trying to make conversation, and she is openly rolling her eyes at him, but it is not quite a successful rejection. She doesn't come across as a dame who knows how to handle the men (like a Lauren Bacall), she's insecure, one of those beautiful women who really can't own it, and has hostility towards men for the attention they give her. It's a subtle moment, and is really just setting up the entrance of Rourke - but I think it's illuminating in terms of her character. She doesn't really enjoy herself. She seems "off" to me. From the start.
And so it is not that he breaks her down. It is that he perceives that she was on that path anyway. That's the kind of woman he wanted. When they run into each other at a street fair, and he appears beside her as she oohs and ahhs over a French silk scarf, he stands right next to her, smiling down at her. There's something about him that moves her, but she has been too dominated and hurt by men in the past to let him "get to her" right away (there is the whole gnarly relationship with her ex-husband ... you can tell that she is the kind of woman who abdicates self in a relationship - Not ALL women do that, but she does ... I think he senses that willingness in her ... he makes it a game for her, with rules, as opposed to some scary passive-aggressive thing, so she can have fun with her already-existing tendencies of self-obliteration ... I don't think she realizes this about herself ... HE sees it, she does not). She walks away from him. He eventually follows her down the street, and takes the silk scarf out of his pocket - he has bought it for her. Her reaction is the key to the movie, I think. (Well, that, and Mickey Rourke's general hot-ness). She is not thrilled, or happy, or even tentative as to who this guy is and why he has done this. She looks tragically sad. It is as though the bottomless pit of need inside her has suddenly been touched, seen, by a total stranger ... and for the first second it seems, maybe, that someone could fulfill her. This is not a happy revelation. I speak from personal experience. After a long life of rejection, loneliness, unfulfilled dreams ... to have someone say, "Yes. I see that. Let me try to make it better" is actually quite awful. Or it can be. It's hard to be happy. (For some of us). It's hard for that character to be happy. He presents her with a gift, out of nowhere, and a look of unbearable sadness comes over her face. That's the key to the movie.
He sets her free. You can see that. But it comes with a price, which he will exact from her, bit by bit, over the course of the film.
It is a silly movie, and I am not, in general, a Kim Basinger fan (my favorite performance of hers is in Nadine, with Jeff Bridges - she's a wonderful and goofy comedienne, she reminds me of Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth in that movie, only with a Southern accent) but what elevates 9 1/2 Weeks from a movie like, oh, hm, let me think, Wild Orchid or the abysmal Another 9 1/2 Weeks where you basically want to tag Mickey Rourke with a stun-gun to put him out of his misery ("Tell me about Elizabeth" he says in the middle of some "erotic" sex scene and you know that he doesn't give a SHIT about "what happened to Elizabeth" - he just wants to get out of there!!) ... is the sadness underneath everything. Yes, it's about sex, but it's about sex that is connected to who we are, dreams, loss, hope ... That sex isn't in a vacuum (like it is in so many movies). It takes place in a larger context.
I know Mickey Rourke scorns this movie, or - no, he seems to have a complicated relationship with it. It made him a GIANT star, the sexiest man in Hollywood - although he had been doing stellar work for some time before that. But when people come up to him on the street, to this day, it is usually 9 1/2 Weeks they reference. He said, in the fantastic interview that appeared in last week's Entertainment Weekly (thank you, Michael), "That was when the whole pretty, sexy thing came about." He had mixed feelings about it. He says, in the interview, "I never saw myself that way, and I ran from it like wildfire. I don't know why. I don't ... know ... why."
Later in the interview, he is asked "if boxing was perhaps a subconscious attempt to destroy the good looks that had made him famous", and Rourke pauses to think. Then says, "There may be some validity to that."
Pauline Kael wrote, in her famous review of 1982's Diner:
[Rourke] has a sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and no one else.
That's part of the effectiveness of his work in 9 1/2 Weeks and why he is so unsettling to Elizabeth. He smiles at her and appears to close out the rest of the world, smiling at her and no one else. It is her undoing.
All Mickey Rourke stuff here
Oh were we? Yes, we were. Where were YOU?
In this post about Laurette Taylor and her comeback, MrG and I start to discuss Mickey Rourke in the comments, and the possibility of his giant comeback - which seriously, if it actually happens, will be like a man resurrecting himself from the dead. But we started to talk about what roles would be wonderful - in a perfect world - for him (we were thinking of the stage, primarily). I was leaning towards Tennessee Williams (mainly because of the Laurette Taylor connection) - but MrG brought up O'Neill, which struck me as really insightful - he'd be wonderful in any of O'Neill's rough "plays of the sea", where the characters are rough around the edges, tormented, macho, tender ... all that crap that Rourke has going on in spades, but I have now decided that 10 years from now Mickey Rourke must play James Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night - BEAR WITH ME - (excerpt here) - just try to picture it, try to see it, and you will see how brilliant the idea is. Anyway, I'm going to fantasize about it with or without your permission. He couldn't do it now, he needs to be in his 60s ... but the thought of him playing that ruined bear of an actor, a man who sold out his divine talent to perform in TRASH only for the money, a man in denial about his own pain and his own contributions to his family's pain ... a man who can't even deal with the fact that he 'coulda been a contendah' in the theatre, if he had just had the courage to not sell out ... not to mention the man's staunch Irish Catholicism, which Rourke also shares, and the battle with alcoholism ... it's all there.
Well, frankly, it must happen, that's all.
I'm on it.
How else do you get things done in this universe except by putting the idea out there?? (Of course it would be wonderful if I could also do that for my OWN life, as opposed to focusing on what Mickey Rourke should be doing 10 years from now ... but that's besides the point. We all need our fantasies to get us through the dark moments, and I'm going to be fantasizing about an aging Mickey Rourke playing the bitter failed Irish patriarch if that's all right with you.)
This was the film where Mickey Rourke played an IRA terrorist, haunted by an explosion gone awry, who now wants out of the terror business - but oh, it won't be that easy, will he? There is just one more job for him to complete, and then he will be granted a Visa and a passage to America, and a whole new life. He is tormented, he is torn - but what can he do??
This was also the film that Rourke famously disowned after it came out, saying he had wanted to make a serious movie about "the Troubles" and the director had fucked it all up. Way to make friends, Mickey. But Rourke was never in this thing to make friends. He might be NOW, but that's because he has been deeply chastened and punished by the business that once celebrated him so highly. At the time of Prayer for the Dying, he was at the top of his game. The movie flopped (not a surprise) and Rourke went off on the powers that be. You can almost hear all of the doors shut on him.
So. Onto business.
LUDICROUS THINGS
-- The first shot of the film is of rolling green fields with a lonely grey road snaking through. Then comes a title, and it says: NORTHERN IRELAND. Now, look. That would be like showing a scene of autumn leaves and putting the words NEW ENGLAND up on the screen. Or showing a humid scene of vines twining around trees by a river and putting the words THE SOUTH on the screen. Can you please be more specific? Northern Ireland is a big place. Is it Belfast? Derry? Or - if you don't want to nail it down to a specific town, could you at least choose a county?? There are six counties. Choose one. I beg you. NEW ENGLAND is a big place, you can't just show a road and some trees and say it's NEW ENGLAND, you have to say MASSACHUSETTS (at least! although I'm still not happy with that) - or RHODE ISLAND ... So when I see that it takes place in NORTHERN IRELAND, a place that covers almost 5,500 square miles, I am suspicious. NORTHERN IRELAND is not real in Prayer For the Dying. It's not a real place with distinguishing characteristics like any large region. It's a symbol, it's a code for the ignorant American audience who will nod sagely and say to each other, "Yes, this takes place in NORTHERN IRELAND ... there's a war going on there, you know."
-- Mickey Rourke's hair is not red. He should not have dyed his hair. Plenty of Irish people have brown hair. Go with that. The dye job is distracting. It looks like he didn't rinse properly. And believe me, I know from red hair.
-- What the HELL was going on with Bob Hoskin's character? He does a fine acting job but his character was merely a cog in the creaky plot, with no inner life (except what Hoskins brought to it), no reality - and the dilemma he finds himself in is totally phony and set up by the filmmakers as another code, a symbol ... and then, randomly, in one scene - he beats the SHIT out of this one guy. Now it has been set up that he was in the army, and he's no pacifist priest. The priests in NORTHERN IRELAND are, of course, another breed altogether - more along the lines of Karl Malden in On the Waterfront than a beatific smiling man hearing confession in the light of Jesus. These guys are in the muck, they are political, they take sides. So that's fine. But out of nowhere, Bob Hoskins starts whaling on this one guy with a garbage can cover and - I'm not sure - but it seems like he keeps going until he kills the guy. Bob Hoskins has not been set up as a loose cannon. He obviously has a sense of indignation and a fierce sense of protection towards his church - but ... If you can see that one more blow with the garbage can will clearly KILL a man, wouldn't you stop? He does not. But ... it makes NO SENSE in light of what we know about the guy, and THEN - even more ludicrous - it is never referenced again. Will charges be brought up? Is he wanted for murder? The movie drops the plot like a hot potato and I wonder if there was more that was cut - stuff that would, you know, make that moment make sense!! It also didn't horrify me, or shock me, or make me think deep thoughts like, "My God, the violence we all have in us." No, it made me go, "What the hell was that moment? That was so fake."
-- Alan Bates plays a sneering villain, an undertaker - who is so ruthless he will have his men stab a traitor through the hand with a screwdriver, and smirk to himself as he hears the scream. I don't know. I have friends in Northern Ireland. I know people who are actually affected by events there. There aren't smirking chortling villains. There are some bad and violent dudes of course - but to turn the adversary into a cartoon villain really does the entire situation a disservice. Mickey Rourke, the terrorist, gets to be conflicted and haunted and disgusted. That's good. It's the story of his character and his journey. But in a movie such as this - that is supposedly NOT just a thriller with "bad guys" - having a villain like Bates just makes the whole thing seem dumb.
-- And so I realize very early on: Oh. This actually isn't about NORTHERN IRELAND ... this has nothing to do with The Troubles. This isn't Cal or Some Mother's Son or Name of the Father. This is a stupid Hollywood thriller using the Troubles as its bid to be taken more seriously - and THAT kind of cynicism I can't abide. I remember laughing once with Mitchell about that movie Swing Time, about the jitterbug dance club in Nazi Germany. I hadn't seen it yet. Mitchell has a big problem with movies that use the Holocaust as a plot point, a shorthand ... Like: no. Don't do that. It's too big a world event, it needs to be the center of the movie or don't use it. Mitchell was laughing about Swing Time and he said, "It's basically a heartwarming story about a bunch of German kids who manage to have some fun during the Holocaust." hahahahaha Anyway, this is what I get from Prayer for the Dying. By the final confrontation, which involves a leering ferris wheel, a weeping blind girl, an empty elevator, and an actual countdown until the bomb goes off, I was so over the whole thing. I had given up, obviously - and had issues from the first moment (NORTHERN IRELAND) - but I did hope that there would be SOME dealing with the issues of Northern Ireland - but nope, it's just a starkly drawn stupid thriller all building up to the big "standoff" at the end. But ... but ... this is The Troubles, peeps ... this is an actual real thing happening, with tragic consequences to actual people ... don't make it a SIDELINE. And if you're going to make Rourke a terrorist with a conscience, then REALLY deal with that. REALLY do it. Don't give him a couple of lines like, "I can't sleep at night" or "I hear the screams of children in my dreams" and expect that I will just accept that!!
-- There's a ludicrous moment when Alan Bates, for no apparent reason whatsoever, shows Mickey Rourke how to cremate someone. What do you want to bet that that information will come in useful later in the film??? LUDICROUS.
-- The blind organ player, Bob Hoskins' niece, is a bit much. She's a lamb for the slaughter. I think making her blind was a bit overkill. Again, it seemed like overheated script doctors cooking all of this up. (I know it was based on a novel, but that's neither here nor there.)
-- What the hell was going on with the tiny character Siobhan? She's barely in the film, but she has a moment late in the film - and she has had all of 2 lines (I am not exaggerating) up to that point, and suddenly she does something that totally tips the movie off-balance. Again, maybe she had a larger storyline that was cut - she did seem a bit TOO MUCH with the little she had to do in the film ... and I found myself thinking: what the hell is HER deal? Why is she scowling? What's she got in this thing? What's her angle? Then - BOOM - she shoots someone through the head, but again, I was more caught up in: what the hell is going on? You need to SET UP a moment like that. An audience needs a PAYOFF. If you're going to have a tiny character who has 2 lines shoot her own husband through the head, you need to GIVE ME a little somethin' somethin' to make that moment horrifying. Same as Bob Hoskins killing a man in an alley. What? Where did THAT come from? I'm not saying you have to spell things out, or pander ... but come on, we're talking about character development here. There is NONE in this film. Any character development that was done was done on the actors' own time - and Mickey Rourke, Bob Hoskins and Sammi Davis (as the blind girl) all create real and believable characters - who act and behave BETWEEN the lines ... which is essential because this is the kind of movie that IS its plot.
-- One of my biggest pet peeves about any movie is if it feels like it IS its plot. So boring. I can see the ending a mile away.
NOT SO LUDICROUS THINGS
-- I have read criticism of Mickey Rourke's accent. I totally disagree. "His Irish accent is not good ..." is the general consensus. I think this comes about because the idea we have of a "typical" Irish accent is the southern Irish accent, with its mellifluous lilt and downward-slant on the ending of the line. Now you get different variations in different areas and there are parts in Galway where I almost can't understand what people are saying the accent is so thick. And Dublin has a harder edge than the softer Southern accent - a little bit more hardscrabble, a little bit rougher and clipped ... but all of that is recognizably SOUTHERN Irish accents. Northern Ireland is completely different, and I think Mickey Rourke nailed it. It is as good as it needs to be. The accent is not a fetish, he doesn't make it precious - but to me it sounds very much like a Belfast-area accent - which is very very different from what you hear in the South. In the South, the inflection at the end of a sentence goes down. If you know an Irish person from the South of Ireland, just think about it, and you'll see it's true. It goes down. In the North, the inflection goes up, and kind of hovers there at the end of the sentences - it's like the voice bobs up a notch, and trembles there, staying on the same pitch or higher. It's a subtle difference, I guess, but it's really night and day and when you are in Ireland it is immediately apparent who is from "the South" and who is from "the North". You would NEVER mistake the accents for each other. Mickey Rourke is doing a solid Northern Irish accent - with the kind of coiled sound in the vowels - the dropping off of "th" (listen to how he says "Father" - it's almost like "Fa-her") - what else ... and his voice hovers at the end of a sentence, bobbing on the same pitch or higher as what came before. In the South, you float your voice down, in the North you lob your voice up. (Can you tell I've studied this? I've played more Irish people onstage than I've played American, so sorry for all the technical talk.) I am here to DEFEND MICKEY ROURKE'S ACCENT from the naysayers. They have ONE sound of Irish accents in their head, and his doesn't cut the mustard. Well, like I mentioned earlier, Ireland is a big place - and North is North and South is South and never the twain shall meet - and to my ear, Rourke's accent is SOLIDLY in the North. I think he did a great job.
-- Despite the silliness of the NORTHERN IRELAND title, the opening scene is the masterpiece of the film. It is truly awful, and filmed in a way where you can see the horror unfolding from a distance and you can feel the helplessness of the situation, that something BAD is going to happen you cannot do anything about it.
-- Mickey Rourke is captivating. But then, he can't help it. He's so good, and such a natural, that all he really needs to do is "show up" and you want to watch him. Other actors show their work. Either because their egos are somehow involved, or because they just flat out are not as talented and so their efforts are apparent. You never see Mickey Rourke work. In the ridiculous movies he made in the 90s, where the material is terrible, you still don't see him "working". It's almost worse what you see. You see a man who just doesn't care, who is in it for the money, who has contempt for the project he is in, and can't wait to get home that night and have a drink and fuck his girlfriend. He's lazy. Being that good at something can make you lazy. If you are not challenged, if you are not asked to rise to the occasion, acting can become a huge bore. I am not absolving him - because look, he has a gift, and he threw it away. It makes me sad to see him in those bad movies. But still: even here, in the middle of a dumb thriller, you cannot take your eyes off of him. And he manages to suggest, in BETWEEN the lines, how dangerous this guy is.
-- There are some lovely scenes between him and a prostitute, a bleached-blonde British bimbo who is in charge of keeping an eye on him. In true Mickey Rourke fashion, he treats her with interest and respect - asking her at one point, "Why do you do this?" He doesn't ask in a judgmental way. He's just curious. And when she comes on to him, he pushes her hand away, gently, almost regretfully ... Nope. He cannot have sex with this damaged woman who is a prostitute just so she can support her young daughter. It wouldn't be right. All of this is dreadfully cliche, naturally, but Rourke fills it up, makes it real and interesting.
-- The scene where Sammi Davis, the blind girl, is attacked at night by one of Alan Bates' goons - is truly terrifying. She can't see, she lies in bed in a white slip, Mickey Rourke has just left, she's just had sex for the first time (with him) - and it was tender and sweet ... and suddenly this goombah we've seen earlier in the movie sneaks into her room. He wants to know what it is like to have sex with a blind girl. (Of course we know this because the script pounds us over the head with it, foreshadowing the inevitable confrontation from minute one - YAWN). But her terror is palpable, her eyes flit around wildly - and he's in the room but she doesn't know where - and yes, it's all kind of dumb, and once again - a moment of terror for one of the characters is basically just an EXCUSE for Mickey Rourke to barge back in at the last second and kick some ass, gratifying the stupid popcorn-fed audience - but still: it's a good moment.
-- And whaddya know, after all this, the very last moment of the film brought me to tears. I knew I was being manipulated, and I knew how it would end from very early on in the film ... but it worked anyway. This is mainly because of Bob Hoskins' commitment to his dumb lines, making them real, and Mickey Rourke's unbreakable sense of reality and truth.
So no, I shed no tears for NORTHERN IRELAND during Prayer for the Dying because the filmmakers did not earn that response from me. But Bob Hoskins crying and clutching at Rourke as Rourke lies there with a shining soft light on his face ... Yeah. I'll cry. You got me, ya feckin' bastards.
All Mickey Rourke stuff here
4-part interview with Mickey Rourke below.
Riveting.
One of the things that strikes me is the long-percolating faith of his former colleagues and friends, and how they all seem so so eager to talk about him in a positive way again - because even 5 years ago, it would have been too early. Now is the time. Alan Parker, Eric Roberts - and the guy named Carl Montgomery (he killed me!) - who was the proprietor of the Marlton Hotel, where Mickey Rourke first lived when he moved to New York. Montgomery was a theatre buff, and he sensed Rourke's hunger - and just had a sense about him - "I truly thought he was going to be the best actor of his generation" - so he started to lend Rourke (who was totally uneducated about acting) biographies - which is how Rourke learned about Brando, Clift, the Actors Studio. So Montgomery, now an old man, is interviewed - and you can sense his loyalty to Rourke - especially in the moment when he talks about watching one of the movies Rourke made during his bad years - "You almost felt embarrassed for him, they were all so bad ..." But these people ... they remember ... and it is like, even with the number of bridges this guy burned - and not just burned - but blew up into a fireball in the middle of the night - there is a place for him. They remember. They remember. Roberts was like, "Yeah, he's had plastic surgery and that made him look a little weird - but now the surgery has relaxed a little bit - and I think he's going to blow our minds."
I am also struck by Rourke's gentleness (all of his parts have that gentleness in them - even though he usually plays tough guys - the way he moves a strand of hair off of a girl's face - a more delicate gesture you cannot imagine - and that gentleness and sensitivity seem very much genuine in him, it's an essence thing, rather than an acting thing) and by the fact that he is STILL a mess. I relate to that. Because yes. Messes are made. But what can be done with what remains? The damage was done. Long ago. Can't be undone. No amount of self-help stuff will get rid of it. But perhaps now ... perhaps now ... it can be used. Like my acting teacher Doug Moston said, "I am a big fan of sublimation. Take your pain and make it sublime."
The most stunning moment for me is when the interviewer asks, in regards to Carre Otis, his ex-wife, "Do you think you'll get over her?"
Rourke replies, "Probably not." Just watch how he says it, how he looks after he says it, the way he takes a drag, then the little grin - and it's got everything in it - he knows he's dramatizing, but there's truth in it, too - he's not self-pitying, just telling it like it is. But it's also riveting in that way that he has - that movie star's awareness of the impact he has on an audience ... yet it doesn't feel played. It's not pretty, but then, nothing is pretty with Rourke.
Do you think you'll ever get over her?
Probably not.
And that's the way life is sometimes. That is the hand that is dealt.
Riveting. I can't take my eyes off the guy.
So I recounted some story I got off of a documentary about a screening of Diner - and now I read that James Wolcott was there at that screening back in 1982. Exciting!
Yup. The love for Diner rolls on.
I got together with Ted last night and we had a great talk about the movie. Ted was raving about Kevin Bacon and how good he was ... I forget the exact word Ted used for Bacon's performance. Was it my third glass of wine that has obliterated the memory? Ted loved, in particular, the scene where Kevin Bacon stages his own death early in the movie, tipping the car over and lying dead and bloody for his friends to come upon him.
I love when Bacon gets wasted (well, he's wasted through the whole thing) and punches out the Wise Men in the nativity scene on the church lawn. It's so absurd.
But then I love the counterpoint scene of Bacon sitting by himself in his apartment, shouting out the answers to a television quiz show questions. "HERODOTUS. HERODOTUS." or "THOREAU." He gets very little joy out of being right, he's more contemptuous of the ones who didn't get the answer than anything else ... but I just love how Bacon plays that scene. You realize: Huh. This guy has some gifts I hadn't seen before. He's sharp, quick, not just a self-destructive mess. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder why he is so lost.
That's all because of how Bacon plays it.
Well, and how it's written, of course.
Wolcott writes:
At first the movie didn't quite click. The rhythms seemed disjointed, the staging of the fake car wreck didn't quite work, there was a sense that we might be witnessing yet another Americanized version of Fellini's I Vitelloni gone askew, but then came the diner-booth scene where the characters converged and fell into place and the hilarious argument over the sandwich escalated into a guy spat and from then on Rourke and his smooth moves seemed to contour the entire movie to the bittersweet fade.
Diner fans - go read Wolcott's piece.
"Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about? "
"Boog, the bet was 'touch your pecker' not 'pecker in popcorn'."
"What is she ... twelve?"
"She'll be twelve."
"That's what you get for going out with 11th graders. Their brains aren't developed yet."
"Yeah, but her tits were."
"Uh-uh. Falsies."
"Were they?"
"First-hand info."
"Aw, shit."
"Elise's mother's on the phone. How's she doing?"
"The guys think it could go either way."
"Either way. Okay."
"You sonofabitch ... You're a virgin."
" .... Technically."
"Boy, you've got a lot to learn."
Pauline Kael on Diner, 1982:
A wonderful movie, set in Baltimore, around Christmas of 1959. A fluctuating group of five or six young men in their early 20s hang out together; they've known each other since high school, and though they're moving in different directions, they still cling to their late-night bull sessions at the diner-where, magically, they always seem to have plenty to talk about. It's like a comedy club-they take off from each other, and their conversations are all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. Conversations may roll on all night, and they can sound worldly and sharp, but when these boys are out with girls, they're nervous, constricted, fraudulent, half crazy. Written and directed by Barry Levinson, DINER provides a look at middle-class relations between the sexes just before the sexual revolution, at a time when people still laughed (albeit uneasily) at the gulf between men and women. It isn't remarkable visually but it features some of the best young actors in the country: Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Paul Reiser, and Timothy Daly.
This is one of those rare moments when a critic actually had something to do in a tangible way with a film's success. And not just success - but its survival, its existence. The fact that we have it and were able to see it can be traced, in part, to Kael's review.
I can think of an example of this from the theatre world, when Ashton Stevens championed this new-fangled dreamy play Glass Menagerie written by a newcomer with a weird name, Tennessee Williams. It had opened in an ice-coated Chicago and had not found an audience. Stevens had seen the play and knew something amazing was happening here. Not just in Laurette Taylor's once-in-a-century performance - but in the play itself. It MUST survive. Stevens felt it MUST survive - this small delicate piece of nostalgia. So he hammered away in his columns, begging the Chicago populace to brave the wintry blast and go see it. Celebrities from New York and Los Angeles started flying in to Chicago, or stopping off via train, to see the show. It was one of those moments that happens once in a lifetime - it really COULDN'T happen more than that - because work, in general, just isn't usually that good. But here it was ... and Stevens went to town, drumming up an audience. It worked. That play could have closed in Chicago for good, changing American theatrical history as we know it. Tennessee would obviously have gone on - he had already had a couple of flops - he was the ultimate survivor - and perhaps his "time" WOULD have come later, if it hadn't come with Menagerie - but we'll never know that. It happened the way it happened. The cast, crew, composer (Paul Bowles) ... everyone was working at the top of their game ... but Stevens is a huge part of that story.
When the studio execs first saw Diner, they didn't want to release it at all. Nobody got it. There were no stars in it. Nothing seemed to happen. Diner was going to be shelved. Paul Reiser, who played the mooch Modell ("You gonna finish that?") says in a behind-the-scenes documentary I watched:
There's a story that Barry always told afterward when the movie came out, how executives didn't know what to do with it, the studio guys, and they watched a rough cut of it, a screening, and they said, 'Look, like that scene in the diner when they're arguing about the sandwich - why doesn't he just give him the sandwich and get on with the story?' And Barry said, 'Because there is no story. That is the story. The fact that they're hocking each other for 15 minutes over a sandwich is the story.'
In the middle of this back-and-forth with the studio, someone showed a copy of it to Pauline Kael. At this point, there wasn't even a release date. It couldn't be seen anywhere. Not in New York, Los Angeles or anywhere else. But she wrote a glowing review in The New Yorker - of a film that no one, at that moment, could see.
Ellen Barkin, who plays Beth, the suffering wife of Shrevie, the music fanatic, says:
They didn't want to release it at all and I think it was only released out of embarrassment. They thought, how do we have a movie sitting here that Pauline Kael says is so great, and we're not releasing it ... So let's throw it out there.
And so they did. It certainly wasn't a blockbuster, and it didn't make a ton of money, but you would be hard pressed to find a bad review of the film. And not only that, but it has just grown in stature over the years, for all sorts of reason. It was the launching of the career of Barry Levinson, first of all, and the first of his Baltimore movies. Like Steve Guttenberg says, "Every city would be lucky if it could have a biographer like Barry." But it has also grown in stature because of the long careers that virtually everyone involved has gone on to. It's remarkable. These were all young guys, starting out, green ... they all talk about being terrified at the beginning because they barely knew what they were doing. They also talk about the "green"-ness of Barry and how he would forget to say things like "Action" and "Cut" ... they were newbies. But every single name in that picture has gone on to amazing success. Ups and downs, sure, but look at the longevity and diversity of these people. They are ALL still around. Tim Daly, Daniel Stern, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, Ellen Barkin, Steve Guttenberg and, of course, Mickey Rourke. Remarkable.
Posted, naturally, in the Mickey Rourke category
Prologue here, in which Michael remembers more than I do, an unheard-of situation in my personal experience.
Me to Michael in response to first email:
What??? I had already seen Johnny Handsome? What am I, on crack? I remember EVERYTHING ... how could I have forgotten?? I was probably just so aware of your smokin' hottiness next to me ... could that be it? ... I am mortified. I wonder what else I have forgotten. Horrifying.
Michael in response:
yes, you completely forgot a lovely afternoon in which we watched JOHNNY HANDSOME together. i feel that Pat may have been there with us, in that uncomfortable apartment with that weird, fey drug addict dude with the dark eyes. i remember lots of cat hair or dog hair, but we watched it. we may have justified watching it for the Southern accents, i don't know, but we watched it all right. i think the assumption that you were distracted by my "hotness" is accurate, though, and i'm willing to forgive you.
Believe it or not, the "dog hair cat hair" detail actually does spark something in my memory, as well as the fey drug addict who eventually became so bizarre that Pat and Michael fled into the night to find other lodgings.
To quote Inspector Clouseau in one of my favorite moments in the entire Pink Panther series: "Yes, it's all coming back to me now ......" (crash ... bang ... boom ...)
Believe it or not, I think this scene was a difficult one to pull off effectively, at least in terms of the goals of the film. I do want to talk more about the film and the fine line the whole damn thing walks (which Adrian Lyne, to put it mildly, is NOT able to capture in some of his other "Oooh, graphic sex" films) ... but for now let's talk about the strip scene. He turns on Joe Cocker's "You Can Leave Your Hat On" and she strips for him, as he sits back, eating popcorn and enjoying her.
What's sexy about it (and this is not the case with a couple of the other more sexual scenes in the film) is that you really feel that these are two characters going through this - not just bodies and attitudes. Often in movies, when it comes time for the characters to have sex - the soundtrack comes on, the lights go down, and these characters become Olympic athletes of the sexual variety. The fact that they are people - who might have feelings about getting naked, or whatever - vanishes (in movie-land, anyway). In 9 1/2 Weeks - which is risky material any way you look at, and could have ended up being just a joke - or soft-core stuff like Wild Orchid - Lyne (and Rourke and Basinger) do not lose sight of the MEAT of the film - which is the relationship between these two. And - (and this is key) - NOT just his controlling of her (although that becomes more and more paramount as the film goes on). But his growing affection and love for her. Actually, that affection is there from the start, which makes him so off-putting (and yet sexy) in his first couple of scenes. He stands too close. He smiles intimately at her like he already knows her. Guy could come off as a creep, but he obviously senses a receptivity in her, a willingness ... and he plays her like a violin. But again: it is NOT just his controlling interest, it is not just his "let me feed you and infantilize" you attitude that comes out over the course of the film. 9 1/2 Weeks is mainly her battle, her battle to stay present, to ask herself questions like, "How far am I willing to go?" ... but by the end, we realize that it was his battle as well. This is a damaged individual. Look at his closet. I would see a closet like that and run screaming into the night. No, just kidding. But it's an interesting character detail, never really dwelled upon, just showed - and we are left to make up our own mind about it. All we need to know about the guy is what his closet looks like, and also the moment that he fills up with emotion at the very end right at the moment that he says the words, "My mother ..." Mickey Mickey Mickey, why are you so brilliant. A lesser actor would only be interested in playing the cool aloof part of the character, because it's safer that way.
Like I said, a film like this could end up being rather silly, and there are silly moments in it - some intentional, some not intentional. Having sex is sexy while you're doing it - but if you put a camera on two people going at it, it can look rather amusing. When the two of them have sex in the rainy stairwell - I know THEY'RE turned on, but to me, it's a funny scene. Not like goofy or dumb, but funny - because in that moment, those two people are totally focused on having sex, dammit, and it's just ridiculous! Actors have the same insecurities that real people do about all of this, so sometimes - as a defense mechanism against that - you can see male actors playing it "cool", like they'll never ever lose their cool - even in mid-sex ... Mickey Rourke is not playing that here, although in their "game" scenes, he definitely takes the lead, and loves taking the lead. But - what he never forgets to play - the element he never forgets to add into the pot - is HIS growing feeling for this woman. When he says at the end, "There have been a lot of girls ... but none I reacted to this way ..." I believe him. Not totally - it's a very unbalancing moment, and his performance is the most unbalancing thing in it, that's why it's great - but because of how he has played other moments (laughing at her jokes, being playful, moments of just BEING with her - when they're cooking in her kitchen, stuff like that) - I buy it. It costs him a lot to say it. And you know (or at least I know) that, in the life of this man, this is the most open he will ever get. This was his chance. She will have other chances. He will not. NONE of this is said, and that's why I think the film works.
I don't think it's a great film, but for me, it does work - and it's that strangely unsettling mix of fondness and cool control that makes it work.
So imagine the strip scene being played in Wild Orchid fashion (only without the plumped-out cheeks): a cool-as-ice man, smirking on the sidelines, as he watches a woman push past her comfort zone. A cool man who would never "lose it", who is always wound up tight, but without ever showing the effort. He would look on as she stripped, maybe he would have one eyebrow raised - that's as close as he would come to showing arousal. He would hold back, withhold ... and cackle with interior joy at her abandon.
That's not what is being played here and that's why the scene is so good, I think. I feel like they're a couple, first of all. This strip scene didn't happen on their first night together. It would have had a much different feeling if it had happened earlier in the timeline. This is at the halfway mark. She doesn't have to be coaxed or cajoled (although she does have a couple of cute freakout moments at the beginning) - and he is into it - not in a "Oooh, look at how much control I have over this woman" way ... but in a "Holy shit, I am the luckiest man alive" way. He's playing that. Some of the other sex scenes are played slowly - lingered over to an almost fetishistic degree - this one is not. They are having a blast.
And he's doing some very unexpected fun things as he's watching her. It's hard to have any focus on yourself in a scene where a woman is taking her clothes off. How do you compete? He does. This is not a scene where it's all about HER (even though it is) - HE is an essential part of making the whole thing work.
Just by watching.
And not just by watching. But HOW he watches.
(Screenshots and clip below. Check out what he does at around the 2:10 - 2:13 mark ... that's the kind of thing I mean).
Mitchell has always referred to me as "the Homer in our group of friends", due to my propensity to write everything down and to retain EVERYTHING. I have a tendency to shock my friends with my memory about THEIR lives. I not only retain my own life, but everyone else's as well.
When it comes to my ex-boyfriends, I sometimes feel like I carry around ALL the memories for both of us, which is not entirely fair of me, it's just a perception I have.
Cut to a couple weeks ago. I am starting my Mickey Rourke obsession and I write a piece on Johnny Handsome, which I hadn't seen.
Last night, I get an email from Michael, one of my ex-boyfriends. I dated him for 6 weeks over 10 years ago, yet we have remained in touch, and good friends. Michael has gone on to great success - and I included the movie he directed (and also wrote and starred in) - Kwik Stop - in my under-rated movies series. I'm proud of him. In 2006, he came and stayed with me for a week, and while the whole week was full of talk - we also had a great conversation, on the roof, about "what we remembered". I love that crap. The world can be a howling wilderness. It is so nice to be reminded that you are specific to someone, that YOU are held in THEIR brain ... it gives substance to the intangible. It means a lot to me.
SO. There is the preamble for the hysterical email I received last night.
He and I haven't talked in a couple of months and suddenly an email from him comes in.
I read it and started laughing.
I wrote him back and asked him permission to post it on the blog, because it is too funny a joke on myself NOT to share. When I asked him if I could post it, he replied,
of course you can quote my email (i'm a whore).
more soon.
#1 Mickey fan
I am laughing out loud.
So here is Michael's email entire.
And remember that I had made this huge deal on my site out of not seeing Johnny Handsome:
ok.
so i just read most of your posts on Mickey and as you already know, i worship the man. more than Travolta. in fact, it's always been a joke amongst my friends that i could go on for hours about his career and how important he is, etc., and for nearly a decade, i was still renting all those straight-to-video pieces of garbage for a glimmer of the former man (Another 9 1/2 Weeks, Bullet, Thursday, etc) and hoping for a comeback in Animal Factory or The Pledge or even Get Carter and finally, yes, Sin City, but The Wrestler seems to be the film to finally put our man back on top.So.
what's this bullshit that you NEVER saw Johnny Handsome before? uh, excuse me, but i distinctly remember showing it to you in Ithaca, at that first apartment Pat & i were staying at, one cloudy Sunday afternoon, talking throughout, pointing out his genius, especially the scene in which he takes off the bandages. how could you forget any precious moment with me?
I have no reason to doubt Michael's memory - although, in my defense, I have NO memory of this - and that is so so weird to me, because like I said - I remember everything. I thought I remembered EVERYTHING about our relationship. That's the whole point of the damn cup I stole. But somehow, I did NOT remember him showing me Johnny Handsome and "pointing out his genius" to me "one cloudy Sunday afternoon". Not only that - but the movie itself has VANISHED from my memory. That is so weird. I remember word for word dialogue from 8 is Enough episodes that aired in 1979 and I don't remember Johnny Handsome, a movie starring my favorite actor? Was I on crack? Was I so overwhelmed by Michael's presence that I wasn't thinking straight? What the hell?
Perhaps it will come back under hypnosis.
So now I am getting a taste of my own medicine. Someone remembers MORE than I do. Very odd. And also - I have been SO busted on my "Ohmygod I have not seen Johnny Handsome" statements and I just love it when that happens. It's so funny to me. I love picturing Michael reading that post and being like, "What the hell is her problem? Yes, she DID see Johnny Handsome. BAH HUMBUG."
Fact-checked by an ex.
So, yeah. I guess I DID see Johnny Handsome, lo those many years ago, as the clouds rolled in from the north, sitting next to my boyfriend, as he pointed out moments he loved, a movie that clearly means a lot to him. But as far as I'm concerned NONE of it remains in my brain. I'll just have to trust him that it happened.
I revel in the novelty of this experience.
A couple things:
1. The Manhattan in 9 1/2 Weeks is one that I recognize, and that is not always the case when it comes to the representation of my fair city in film. I am thinking of Unfaithful, another of Adrian Lyne's films, where the streets of Soho look art decorated to death, an idea of itself, rather than the genuine article. Perhaps that was appropriate for Unfaithful, but here in 9 1/2 Weeks, we can see the Manhattan of Midnight Cowboy and other gritty 1970s films. Perhaps not quite as disgusting as the Manhattan of Taxi Driver, but still: the greyness, the random glimpses of humanity, the long long vistas of crazy avenues, the cabs that barrel along looking just as ready to kill you as pick you up ... and the general frenetic air of things like Chinatown and street fairs ... all of this ring true. The opening section of the film, as the beginning credits start, shows Kim Basinger strolling through the streets of New York to her job (at the Spring Street Gallery which means Soho) ... and seriously this woman must have the longest walk to work since my great-great-grandpappy struggled through 10 feet of snow to get to school every day and he liked it. Hasn't she ever heard of subways? She appears to live on the Upper West Side and so she walks 70 odd blocks to work? Also, she strolls under grimy overpasses, walks down roads that look like Broadway, crosses over on side streets, narrow and wet ... Does she cover all 5 boroughs in her morning commute or what exactly is going on here? Maybe that's how she stays so slim. She walks 20 miles to work every morning even though Manhattan is only 13.4 miles long. Anyway. Ridiculousness of her morning walk aside ... Lyne takes the time to show a New York that appears to not have a mask on. A woman with curlers stands on the sidewalk, waiting for her dog to pee, looking annoyed - but not at all concerned that she is out in public in her curlers. Garbage men hoot and holler at Basinger as she walks by. Things are seen and then vanish - which is just what it is like when you walk through Manhattan on any given day. I liked that part of the film ... that even with all its sexual shenanigans - it seems place-able. It seems like it happens in the real world - not some Art Deco soft-core version of New York. (There are a couple of exceptions to this in the film which I'll get to later in some other post. This is just a preliminary post.)
2. I liked how - in the first half of the film - both Rourke and Basinger are, more often than not, filmed from at a distance, with things passing in front of their faces, or a pane of glass in between them and the camera, reflections going by ... Basinger strolls through a street fair, and we see glimpses of her - through the displays of scarves and necklaces, and the bubbles floating through the air. We see Rourke too, and he is also partially hidden by foreground objects or people. It gives a voyeuristic feeling to the film - and yes, I do think that was deliberate - BUT - more than that, it dovetails with what I observed in my first comment: This is New York City, a crowded metropolis. You rarely look at anything without other things in the way. You look up at the spire of the Empire State Building, and there are 10 buildings in between you and it. You look at a sign across the street, and it comes to you in flashes because of passing busses, or garbage trucks, or just the throngs of people. It is a city that seems to keep you at a distance - but at the same time, it beckons you, "Come closer ... come closer ... the only way you will ever really get to know me is if you come really close ..." 9 1/2 Weeks captures perfectly that distant yet intimate feeling in the streets of New York ... and places its characters firmly in that environment. It is not just about them. It is about them navigating their way through the world, with all kinds of things in the way - even just things like a display of necklaces - so that whatever it is that is facing them cannot, yet, be seen directly. Nothing comes off as whole. You have to make sense of the fragments.
This is not wholly successful in the film and there are times when it flat out does not work ... but if you notice by the end of the film - when Basinger finally cracks - we see her head-on. We see him head-on. She stands in his main room, looking at him. Nothing in the way. And he stands in the doorway looking at her, nothing in the way there either. And it's unbearable. They can't be with it - neither of them can ... and so it ends.
I may be reading more into this than is there, but I don't think so.
Some screenshots illustrating all of this below.
More on Mickey Rourke at clarkblog - an extensive piece about the actor.
Excerpt:
For my money, he never burned brighter than in The Pope of Greenwich Village, an immensely enjoyable character-driven story elevated into the mythic by Rourke's magnetic presence. He stars as a struggling NYC restaurateur so desperate to make a buck that he foolishly steals from the mob. He's loose and fun and tense and frantic all at once -- an embodiment of the city itself. Rourke's amazing work here is matched on every level by Eric Roberts, never better anywhere, as his weak-willed and shifty cousin. In the shot above, Rourke's playing stick ball while dancing a dreamlike lilt to Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind." It's always this scene that springs to mind first whenever I think back to this film.
And:
That pale, sometimes ruddy but always soft face is gone. But as a washed-up and battered wrestler still struggling for glory, it's a face that fits the role. Look beyond the rebuilt cheekbones, the suddenly lantern-sized jaw, the plastic pug nose and Cro-Magnon brow, and there they are: that unforgettable pair of wounded, human eyes.
Speaking of Pope of Greenwich Village, here's an essay about it by one of my favorite film bloggers out there.
Jeremy writes:
Twenty eight year old Mickey Rourke was on absolute fire in 1984. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a major hit yet or wasn’t even a household name, nearly every critic and fan was laying down odds that this guy was the rightful heir to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Searing, intense and beautiful, Rourke had just floored many people with his triple shot of Body Heat (1981), Diner (1982) and Rumble Fish (1983) and it looked like he was getting ready to absolutely explode. Watching him today in The Pope Of Greenwich Village, I still feel the same way I do when I see Brando in On The Waterfront or Pacino in Serpico. It is that performance that comes in every great actors career, when everything falls into place and there is something nearly sacred in their work. I’ll take Mickey’s relatively un-acclaimed work as Charlie in The Pope Of Greenwich Village over almost any Oscar winning work you care to name…he was my guy back in the mid eighties and he is still my guy today.
Yes.
And ... you knew this was coming right? I just set up a Mickey Rourke Category. I can't believe it, actually ... that the Mickey Rourke I so admired 20 years ago ... is actually walking amongst the living again ... enough that I feel safe enough to resurrect my interest in him.
More thoughts on him to come. It's been a lot of fun and strangely moving to watch his movies again - because somehow - in him - I see my OWN journey ... I fell in love with his acting when I was, what, 19 years old? What time does to us all. I am aware of that when I see Rourke now.
Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, a screen adaptation of Eddie Bunker's book about being in prison (Bunker also wrote the screenplay), came out in 2000. Willem Dafoe and Eddie Furlong starred. The rest of the cast is full of New York regulars, people you would recognize from the independent film world, Buscemi's world.
It's about a young privileged kid (Decker) who finds himself in prison for dealing marijuana and having to survive, suddenly, a rough institutional life. Willem Dafoe plays Earl, a guy who has been in the prison for a long time, someone who has learned to work the system, bribe the guards, get revenge to keep people in line - and in general bend the rules to get his needs met. Dafoe is bald, which just accentuates his odd face - and his body, in this film, is hard as a pit bull's. He looks terrifying. But then you realize he's actually not. Or maybe he is. Who knows. All we know is is that he sees Decker and, for whatever reason (it even seems opaque to him at times) decides to protect him. Maybe it's a fatherly impulse. Or maybe it's a remembrance of what it was like to be "outside". Everyone in the prison has been basically "in the system" since they were juveniles. But the Eddie Furlong character actually lived in the "real world", and brings with him a whiff of that. Dafoe gives him Demons (Dostoevsky's book), saying, "Read it. You'll like it. It's a new translation." I admit I rolled my eyes at that one. Okay, okay, he's educated and weird. I got it.
There's nothing really new in Animal Factory. We've seen it all before. It has elements of Shawshank Redemption (older veteran, younger white-collar guy), although the prison in Animal Factor isn't as golden-lit with care-bear sentimentality as Shawshank. It's the real deal, and feels much more authentic. There's the older jaded man, the younger innocent ... there's the father on the outside (played by John Heard) who is trying to get his son out ... Seymour Cassel plays a prison guard who has basically befriended the Dafoe character - they've both been at the prison for the same amount of time.
I saw the film when it first came out in very (very) limited release. I saw it at the Angelika Theatre, here in New York, in a 50-seat theatre. About 25 people were there. So I watched the movie, and I found it a little bit boring (although Dafoe is good, always fun to watch) - and I find Eddie Furlong, at times, hard to take. Sometimes he's good, but sometimes he just seems lost as an actor. Animal Factory revolves around his journey, becoming "institutionalized", and he, the actor, didn't seem up to it. There are some horrifying scenes of violence, a prison strike, riot guards, and a various cast of characters to fill up the screen. It's okay. Willem Dafoe always seems more like someone from commedia dell arte (with apologies to Mitchell) than a realistic world. Even in gritty movies, there is something mannered about him - a lot of it has to do with what he looks like. He has said it himself. I think he said something once like, "I look like a woodcut", and that's pretty much the size of it. His face isn't one thing, it's a blank slate almost - or a mask - that the audience can project things onto. He looks rather severe. But when he cracks a smile, it's so mischievous you want to join in the fun. And here, he has a quiet strength - he's like a coiled spring. Territory is there to be defended. You are never safe. He's been "in" long enough that he's at home in prison, but there are always threats to the alpha dog. Dafoe is good. His job in this film is to look at Eddie Furlong and feel a dawning tenderness towards someone for the first time in eons. And that wasn't really an easy job with Furlong not giving him much to work on. Dafoe is playing that relationship as it should be played.
All in all, it was a pretty typical movie.
But there's one character named Jan the Actress, a transvestite who is Eddie Furlong's cellmate in the first half of the film. The entire movie takes off when Jan the Actress enters. You miss her when she's gone. She only has three short scenes, and you keep waiting for her - it throws the movie off balance. You think she will be more important, mainly because you just want to see her again. At least that was my experience.
She lies on her bottom bunk, in full makeup, smoking, with big hard biceps - she's wearing a sleeveless vest with a lacy bra underneath - and she calls Eddie Furlong "sugarplum", and yet there's more of a big brother-ly (or sisterly) aspect to it. You don't feel like she's going to rape Eddie Furlong or insist on anything scary. She just reads magazines, likes to gossip - makes psychological statements about other inmates ("When he first got in here, he was the most dysfunctionary man I have ever seen ..") - and basically shoots the shit. She is definitely a queen, but more of an East Village circa 1983 queen: tough, brutal, sweet on the outside, hard as nails inside. The role could have been offensive. Roles like this always can be. If it seems as though the filmmakers or the actor is condescending to the part, and using it as a punchline (cue St. Elmo's Fire with the gay character who just HAS to be drinking a frilly pink drink when we see him - it's a kind of shorthand which is just another word for bigotry) - then it's not good. I'm not against cliche. Cliches exist in life. All of the characters in Sopranos were cliches - but they seemed real, too. I'm a cliche, you're a cliche - we each have our little box that we could be nailed down into with a couple of key phrases. But that's not what makes up good acting (or good script writing). What makes up good acting is a feeling that what you are looking at is real. Sometimes the reality means so fully embodying the cliche that audience members will gasp to one another, "I know someone just like that!!" It's accurate, yet it is not just its surface.
Jan the Actress is tough. She talks about wanting to become a butterfly and fly to "Paris France" where she can sit on a "motherfucking cherry blossom tree" and watch all the "pretty people". "And I can say to the pretty boy waiting on me - 'Mama, go get me a caffe latte and a jelly donut' ..." But then when Furlong asks him how he should handle a certain situation, Jan gets pissed. "How should you handle it? You get a fucking knife, that's how you handle it. You won't survive in here, sugarplum, if you don't look after yourself. How should you handle it ... Jesus Christ."
Jan the Actress is nobody's fool, although she puts on a flirty act, just to survive. In prison, identities harden - you have to project a SELF, as hard as you can, as a message that you are someone not to be fucked with. Jan the Actress has done that, with her flamboyant outfits, her long green acrylic nails, her movie magazines, and her language - which has a whiff of Blanche Dubois in it.
The actor playing the part is riveting. He has one moment after his long monologue about Paris, France - when you can suddenly hear the clang of a door shutting, and something happens on his face - something primal ... It's like after years of being incarcerated (you have no idea what this guy has done to get imprisoned, but you know he's going to be there for a long long time) he suddenly feels the sound of a door clanging shut. And locking. After going off into a rambling monologue (and the actor is great - I have no idea if that was scripted, but the monologue is ridiculous - yet heartfelt - "I'll see all the pretty places and people will take me to pretty places and they'll be polite to me and I'll walk down the fucking Champs Elysee and I'll be in Paris France ..." You know, he's articulate in a way, but not neat or poetic about it ... and the actor plays it perfectly) ... so after going off into a rambling monologue, it is as though the sound of a door clanging shut affects him. He doesn't wince, or cringe ... he barely looks sad ... It's like he feels the sound. That's all. He feels the sound. That sound is in him. He ain't never getting out.
Jan the Actress disappears halfway through the movie when Eddie Furlong is moved to another cell and I never quite recovered from her absence. It ruined the rest of the movie for me, because every scene then became about (for me): "Will Jan show up?" as opposed to, "I wonder how this whole father-son relationship is going to end ..." She tipped the movie over. She couldn't help it. Her acting was that good.
The credits at the beginning of the movie had been brief and simple - with only Dafoe's and Furlong's name of the actors - so I waited at the end of the movie to see who Jan the Actress had been played by.
Was she familiar? Did her voice ring a little bit familiar to me? Haven't I seen her before?
I was stunned - literally - my jaw dropped - when I saw the credit roll by:
JAN THE ACTRESS ............. Mickey Rourke
What???
THAT was Mickey Rourke? So suddenly it became not just the best part of the movie - but an exciting moment of possibility, of wondering ... will he ... will he work again?? I haven't written much about him, mainly because I find it to be a painful topic. His work didn't just mean a lot to me back in the late 80s - he was really IT, as far as I was concerned. I didn't sleep after watching Angel Heart. He raised the bar for all of us - anyone who was interested in acting got fired up after watching him. So I did have that strange feeling of personal connection to Mickey Rourke. To watch him back out of the arena, on purpose, was painful for me. I've liked other actors since - I was VERY excited when Russell Crowe arrived on the scene (and the response to him, in actor circles anyway - was similar to the response to Rourke) ... but Rourke was the one back then, and you never forget those people who show you the way back then. I would watch some of his movies in the 90s and finally I just stopped, because it was too painful.
So to see that Jan the Actress was Mickey Rourke ... and how good she had been, how much she made the movie ... and that it would turn out to be Rourke, the guy from back then, I just felt strangely exhilarated about it. Moved. Like I wanted to write him a letter or something and tell him how much I had missed him. It was so good to see him. Because he was so in CHARGE of that thing. And now that I know it's him, he's completely recognizable - the voice, the phrasing, the eyes, the mouth ... totally Rourke, unmistakable. But he was channeling something else as Jan and it is never less than 100% convincing. And not just convincing - because hell, Dafoe is convincing, and I wasn't waiting with baited breath for HIM to come back onscreen - but exciting. Addictive. Palpable with reality. Riveting - you can't look away.
Buscemi had taken a risk and called Rourke, offering him the part. Rourke read the script, and was confused. You want me to play HER? He couldn't see it. Buscemi said yes - he wanted him for Jan. So Rourke said he would do it. It was a low-budget film, of course, and Rourke worked for one or two days only. It had been a long time since Rourke had had a job that excited him. He went shopping for Jan's clothes, which is so amusing - imagining Rourke trying on bras and such. From what I understand, and what I can glean (because Rourke, like all the greats, doesn't really talk about HOW he does what he does) ... in the time before filming, Rourke started dreaming his way into the part. He saw Jan as someone who was totally institutionalized - had been in juvie as a teenager and just graduated to hard-time incarceration. It was a process of assimilation for Jan - at first you fight against the bars, then you accept them, and finally - life is like you're just living in a slightly seedy hotel (where the doors are locked at night). You are institutionalized. That's what Rourke wanted to convey. He also decided (who knows why) to have no front teeth as Jan - so he went to his dentist and had his dentist remove his front bridge. (This makes me want to cry. I love actors. Who knows why Rourke wanted to have no front teeth, but he did - "I thought it would be an interesting aspect to the character" - and had his dentist do this huge procedure so that Rourke ACTUALLY had no teeth during filming). Rourke was nervous. He had never played such a part before. He's such a macho kind of guy, and he knew he needed to break the ice with playing this type of part. He would have no rehearsal for the film, he'd have to show up and start shooting - so to ease into it, so to speak, he flew across the country to get to New York in character. This wasn't a stunt, or a game to him ... It was a practical solution to the situation of having no rehearsal. He just didn't want to have to have the first time he put on those clothes out in front of people to be on the set, right before shooting a scene, when his nerves would be up. So, toothless Mickey Rourke, wearing a sleeveless vest, with a bra strap hanging down, and a full face of makeup, boarded the plane at LAX. Hysterical. But it did the trick. By the time he walked on that set, he WAS Jan. He also loved working with Buscemi, who is also an actor, and so Rourke felt good in his hands - safe.
Jan the Actress is a glorified cameo but he dominates that whole movie.
Rourke's main problem over the years (well, he had many problems) - but the main problem was that no one would insure him for the run of a film. And as long as he kept insisting on boxing - even during shooting - then there was no way that a director or producers would take a risk with someone who could come back with a broken nose and ruin their continuity. So he stopped being insure-able. There were other issues - mainly how bored he had become with acting (the mark of a true genius), how tedious it was, and how he had done a couple of jobs just for the money and it had really damaged him. Because this guy was serious about acting. This wasn't just a guy who fell into it. He worked, studied, devoted himself to the kind of acting he wanted to do. So to have mercenary concerns really hurt him, and it made him feel like never going back to work again. Not to mention the slow transformation of his face over the 90s - into something barely recognizable. He had been punched in the face so many times that they had to rebuild the cartilage in his nose (a la Michael Jackson) by taking parts of his ear and whatnot. His doctors told him he needed to stop. He also started having short-term memory problems. "I could remember what happened 20 years ago, but couldn't remember yesterday." On top of all this, he had major money problems - addiction problems - and a tempestuous relationship with his wife, involving arrests for domestic abuse (charges later dropped) and a messy divorce that he did not recover from (emotionally, I mean). She walked out on him and Rourke lost it. (I'm talking about all of this like I know him. Sorry. I know that can be obnoxious. But whatever, I've read a lot. I've been following Rourke's career - on AND off - since 1987 or whenever it was Angel Heart came out). He has said, 10 years later, that he would still get back together if she wanted it. But anyway, in the wake of the divorce began the whole chihuahua obsession - I think he has 8 of them now - and he walked off the set of a movie because his chihuahua was not allowed. All of this stuff hit the news ... Rourke, now out of the business for 14, 15 years - still got headlines. For all the wrong things, it seemed ... but he was not forgotten. His work still had an impact.
When Sin City came out, suddenly there was a Rourke resurgence, which I found very very exciting. I was almost afraid to hope for it (to quote Cashel, when he prays: "Dare I hope???") because it would just be too awful if he fell off the rails again. I mean, awful for him, certainly - but awful for me, too, as a giant fan. Rourke started doing interviews again, and I was amazed by his softness, sweetness, and how the scary image he had built up in the 90s was not at all the whole truth. He was honest about his face, and how it had to be rebuilt from getting punched one too many times - he was honest about the boxing, and about how he had alienated so many people in Hollywood with his attitude that he really had to prove it to them that he was worthy of their trust. He said in one interview, "Look. Lots of people treated me like shit - but when you don't work for 14 years, you have to take responsibility for the fact that you made one or two mistakes." He was asked once if he regretted any of it, and he said, "I regret all of it." But, he added, "I'm being given a second chance." He had wanted to start working again in the mid-90s - but that was around the time when he found that no one would insure him. He turned down some very famous roles (most famous being Bruce Willis' part in Pulp Fiction). He has kept his peace about the missed opportunities "because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings anymore". He's a Roman Catholic, very devout, and he is what I would call a true eccentric. He's NUTS. But his energy in interviews, albeit nuts (you know, stroking a chihuahua in his lap as he answers questions, wearing sunglasses, chain-smoking) is utterly sincere. He knows he's good. He knows he blew it - but it seemed like those were the choices he had to make back then. He and Sylvester Stallone are friends and Stallone would advise him during the rough years, saying - "You have to be able to think of this as a business as well as art ... you need to toughen up a bit ... It's okay that it's a business - you can still do your art ..." But Rourke had never found that balance. He, like Meryl Streep's character in Postcards From the Edge, doesn't want life to imitate art, he wants life to be art. And so he is the classic case of someone who was chewed up and spit out. As tough as he is, he didn't have a thick skin. That's probably why he's so phenomenal as an actor.
So back in 2000, sitting in the darkened empty theatre in New York, years before this Rourke Renaissance happened (or appears to be on the cusp of happening, anyway, fingers crossed) ... I saw his name go rolling by and I found myself thinking, "Oh, God. Please let him come back."
Yeah, the atmosphere.
Yeah, the exquisite filming of objects.
Yeah, the people in it.
It's a true collaboration, the entire team were old friends, who had already worked together many times. You can feel it in the film. Not only does it look great, but it feels like it was a blast to make it.
But you know, there's only one reason to really see the movie.
"I know who I am ... I know who I am ... I know who I am! ... I know who I am ... I know who I am ... I know who I am ..."
You keep thinking he will stop, that he is "done", that there are no more depths of grief for him to explore.
But you're wrong.
Where you think he will stop, he keeps going.
An extraordinary talent.
Angel Heart was filmed, for the most part, on location in New York and Louisiana. Even the interior shots - like the hotel room where Rourke and Bonet have crazy bloody sex, and Charlotte Rampling's red-walled apartment - were actual rooms in actual buildings, not sets. Of course they were dressed up for the film, but they were already existing spaces. Filming in this way is highly difficult. You have to squeeze your camera crew in, you have to make room for equipment, you can't just knock down walls (although it has been done), it limits your choices. That's why Parker likes to work that way. He likes the limits. In some of the scenes, there was only room for a cameraman, Parker, and the cinematographer (Michael Seresin). That's why the film has such a sense of reality. You can smell New Orleans. You can feel the wet. You are in humid air. Your fingertips are grimy. These are not sets. This is real. When they needed to re-vamp something for the purposes of their film, they did. For example, the scene where Rourke meets up with DeNiro in the huge church in New Orleans - that was a deserted church that was still very much intact with the stained glass windows still there, all the pews, etc. But the rest of it was completely dilapidated. So the film crew went in there and put in a gleaming tile floor, re-created an altar, put up a bank of candles, etc. It ended up being a blessing (even though it was a pain in the ass) because getting permission to film in actual working churches (especially for a movie that is, uhm, about the freakin' devil) is very challenging.
Location scouts are crucial. Parker and Seresin and the scouts traveled all over New Orleans to look for perfect places. And then it was up to Seresin to make it pop off the screen, to ooze with atmosphere, to insist upon the audience's psyche: "I am real. You are here."
The atmosphere of the film, with its voodoo craziness and occult presence, is the best of the sensibility that I would call "campy". "Camp" is not just drag, or divas. It is also an over-the-top immersion in something that might seem artificial. It is investment, total 100% investment, in the surface of things. Plumbing the depths of meaning in what something looks like.
That's the atmosphere of Angel Heart.
The wonderful Armin Ganz was the art director of Angel Heart. Alan Parker had used him before in Birdy. Ganz had a long successful career as a set decorator (he was nominated for an Oscar for Tucker) - and if you look at his bio you can see many "period" pieces on it: mid-20th century Americana was his milieu. Robert Franco and Leslie Pope (both Oscar-nominated artists) were the set decorators for Angel Heart. The art director is in charge of the whole look of the picture (or, the cinematographer is REALLY the one in charge) - and the set decorators are the ones who fill the apartments with knick-knacks, period-appropriate calendars, family photos, whatever. They are the ones in charge of atmosphere. They are the ones who will butt in and say, "There were no milk cartons then. There were only milk bottles." They are the nitpickers. They research the period exhaustively (if it's appropriate, I mean) and make sure, to the best of their abilities, that there are no glaring errors. Like someone writing with a ballpoint pen in 1941, for example (ha. If you've seen Angel Heart recently you'll get the reference). The way the lamps were, what the clocks were like ... they're in charge of all that.
(I like to focus on how objects are filmed, how they are handled in films.)
For Angel Heart there was, again, multiple layers going on at the same time. It takes place in 1955. And while it is a movie about the devil, and supernatural evil exerting its influence on us here on earth - Alan Parker never wanted to film it in the style of a horror movie. He always wanted to keep it in the cliched world of the crumpled gumshoe, the tough-talking Sam Spade guy, trying to put his case together. It just happened that the devil was involved. Because Parker made that conscious choice, the art direction and set decoration followed suit. There should be no "clue" that this will be a supernatural story about the occult. The objects in the film should reflect the period and yet at the same time comment on it, and work with the audience expectations that, oh yes, they know what kind of movie this is, because they had seen it before ...
Nothing should grate or pull you out of it. So that - in those startling supernatural scenes - with the elevator grate sliding open, and the scary black-shrouded woman walking up the spiral staircase - images clearly out of a surreal non-realistic world - should come as a surprise, and be even more terrifying. Because here in our everyday world, we don't see things like that, and so we don't know how to interpret it.
The juxtaposition works wonderfully, I think. The atmosphere of the film is truly creepy. Through the objects we see, the coffee pots, the crumpled cigarette packs, the key rings and newspapers ... we think we know where we are. Not just in terms of time and place, but in terms of what movie we are in. We have seen this before, in every lonely detective story ever made. And so there's a kitschy feeling to some of it - which appears to me to be deliberate. With some films, the kitsch is not deliberate - and those are the films that "wear" their "period" like a self-conscious costume. "Oh, look at me, using an old-fashioned percolator with marcelled hair! Aren't I cute? Weren't people so cute back then??" It's condescending. Kitsch doesn't necessarily have to be phony. In Angel Heart, I feel like it is giving us clues, breadcrumbs through the forest, sometimes leading us astray. We see the old-fashioned cars and garter belts and think: "Oh yes, oh yes, I know where I am." The kitsch here is appropriate - because it serves as a misleading signal. By the time we realize we are in the middle of a really fucking scary story about Mephistopheles - and not a cute little period-piece movie - it's too late. We can't escape.
The cinematographer (Michael Seresin) is also responsible here - for choosing to cut-away from closeups of faces to objects ... at times when it seems odd, pulling you out of the action, distancing you ... and he should be congratulated. I think it helps to create a really haunting atmosphere, yet beautiful and seductive at the same time.
Risa Bramon was the casting director for Angel Heart. She also cast Something Wild, Jacob's Ladder, True Romance, all of Oliver Stone's pictures, Flirting With Disaster (if there was an Academy Award for "casting", she should have won it for that film), Flesh and Bone and many many others.
Casting is not just about reaching out to the giant movie stars, or finding co-stars appropriate to the giant movie star who has already signed on. Casting is about finding the right woman to play the hatcheck girl who has one line, or the closeups of various people in crowd scenes, the little girl sitting on the steps in one scene, everyone. The faces of a film help us into its atmosphere, its world. People like Howard Hawks, working as he did within the studio system, would try as much as he could to fill his crowd scenes with actual people who seemed like they actually LIVED in that world (as opposed to hopeful starlets and professional extras). It gives his films a sense of reality that many others at that time do not have. Witness To Have and Have Not (my post about it here - look at some of those faces - they appear indiginous to the world of the movie, not the world of Hollywood) or witness Only Angels Have Wings (here is my post on the first 10 minutes of that movie - launching us headfirst into that world, and look at the faces ... Look at the people Hawks found to fill up his screen.) It makes what we are looking at seem authentic, as opposed to re-created.
Casting directors have different jobs for different movies. If you're casting something like The Matrix, you will not have the same considerations as if you were casting Dog Day Afternoon. Often, it is just about the look. People are cast for their looks, I mean that is obviously the case ... and it is always better to find someone who already IS that part, who already has it in them ... than to cast potential. Stallone has talked about the casting of the original Rocky and how important it was: first of all, the budget was low, so that limited their choices (which ended up being a blessing). But second of all, he cast people who "already had it in them". Burt Young didn't have to turn himself inside out to find Paulie. He already had it in him. Just put him into the right context, turn the camera on, and get out of the damn way.
Often, a casting director will take a risk that pays off. A dear friend of mine is a successful casting director here in New York. Years ago, she had seen a fabulous one-woman show by an unknown actress named Camryn Manheim. Because of her weight, Manheim had obviously had a rough time getting cast in things ... so Manheim did the best she could, either struggling in obscurity, doing whatever job she could get ... or, finally, writing something of her own to perform. It was a hit. But again, Manheim is fat - and let's remember: it's not easy for THIN people to get work, so you can imagine the struggle for someone like Manheim. People just didn't think of Manheim when they were casting certain things - even if the part didn't necessarily call for a thin person to play it. Anyway, my friend saw her one-woman show and thought, "This chick is amazing. I need to start calling her in for things."
So she did. Any job that came up (my friend casts commercials) that she thought Camryn would be good for, she'd call her in to audition. Nothing happened. But it's a long process. You aren't going to hit a home run on the first try, so my friend kept working at it. Eventually, a commercial came along that required a car mechanic to be working on a suspended car. The mechanic would be standing, the car overhead, the mechanic's head inside the guts of the car - and then the mechanic would duck down, show his (of course it would be a he, right?? Aren't all mechanics "he"??) face, say his lines, etc. A simple commercial, albeit a national one (that's where all the money is, booking a national commercial). My friend got the idea to call Camryn in for it. Naturally, the producers and the client had envisioned a man for the part. They hadn't said as much, but it was implicit. My friend decided to pretend that she DIDN'T know it was supposed to be a man - and while yes, she called in as many big burly guys that she had on her books - she also set Manheim up with an audition (without revealing to the client that she had done so, without warning them, "Now ... I'm going to call in a woman for this ..."). My friend could just SEE Manheim in mechanics' overalls, hidden in the car, and then the surprise on the reveal of her face - that it was a woman. She thought she would be perfect for it. On the day of the audition, the casting office filled up with big burly guys, wearing battered jeans, tool belts, and boots. Sitting amongst them, was Camryn Manheim, going up for the same part. Ha!! I love it. My friend ran the casting session, ushering each actor in to the room with an introduction to the producers and clients - and so, with no fanfare, no preparation, she opened the door, and said, "Next up - Camryn Manheim." And Manheim walked into the room. After a day of seeing only men, there was naturally a weird vibe in the air, but Manheim set herself up in front of them, the camera started rolling, she started working on the imaginary car in the air, saying her lines, and she nailed it. She booked the commercial. It had taken a courageous risky casting director to see beyond the stereotype, and think, "Yeah, yeah, I know - big burly guys are mechanics ... but I know that Manheim would be GREAT here ... so let's just throw her before the client and see what happens ..." Non-traditional casting sometimes takes a risk like that, because people do have a picture in their mind of what a part should look like: she should be a blonde, he should have a mustache, the guy should be fat, he should be white ... whatever. There are some parts that obviously call for traditional casting. Driving Miss Daisy is the story of a black chauffeur and a white rich woman. That's the story. But sometimes a story does NOT call for a specific racial aspect ... why can't the best friend by Asian? Why can't the associate at the law firm be gay? Why can't that couple be interracial? Why can't these things exist outside of the plot?? That's my favorite kind of casting: a person who just happens to be gay, a person who just happens to be black ... Our identifiers, our separateness from others, is not the whole story. But again: sometimes it takes someone taking a RISK to make such casting decisions a reality. And of course - if Camryn Manheim had gone into that casting room and bombed, they wouldn't have hired her. You, as the actor, have to "show up" - even MORE so than an actor who is "perfect" for the part. You have to SHOW them that you can do it. You have to open up their minds to other possibilities. Manheim did so. She walked in there and she WAS that mechanic. She wasn't "given" that part. She TOOK it.
Having just seen Angel Heart again a couple of nights ago (get ready for a Mickey Rourke kick. If I had had a blog in the late 80s, it would have been all Mickey Rourke all the time) I was struck by a lot of different things - and I'll write more about it ... but right now, I find myself thinking about all of the faces in that film. Not just of the leads (although their faces are burned in my brain as well) but of every single person who ever shows up on screen in that film. Alan Parker, when he films on location, always holds open casting calls for the locals - and, as much as he possibly can, fills up the smaller parts with people who either have no acting experience but look perfect for the role, or people who are stars in the local community theatre, and can do a specific part that Parker needs. The boys tap dancing in the streets in Angel Heart were actually a group of boys Parker saw in New Orleans, tap dancing on the street, so he put them in the movie, and they become very important thematically. The obese sweaty guy who plays the cop investigating all the murders was a New Orleans local. He's fantastic. The woman who works in the voodoo shop behind the counter had ZERO acting experience but she has a very important scene (mainly of exposition) with Mickey Rourke, and she nailed it. Apparently, too, Rourke was very kind to her, sweet and inclusive, making her feel comfortable. She's terrific. The job of a casting director in this type of film - with diverse locations (New York and Louisiana) as well as a two-pronged theme (the typical detective story in the Raymond Chandler genre mixed with the occult) is very specific. Parker didn't want too many known faces in the film. Rourke, DeNiro and Bonet were enough - well, and Charlotte Rampling, although her face-recognition-factor to American audiences was not as strong (and even Bonet was an odd choice. She was very young and the star of the most wholesome sitcom in television history. To cast her as a writhing voodoo goddess was non-traditional and out-of-the-box thinking at its finest and most brave). For all of the rest, Parker wanted unknowns.
And so, as I watch the film, still as powerful today as it was to me the first night I saw it in college with all of my friends (and we all FLIPPED OUT about it and went out to Bickford's afterwards and talked about Rourke deep into the night), what strikes me now is the faces that fill up every frame.
It helps give the film its stamp of odd authenticity, its slightly off-kilter reality. These are not "horror film" faces, they are locals who appear to inhabit the world Parker is trying to convey. And what the faces do, ultimately, is to create a world that serves to highlight best the work of the leads. Rourke, especially. He navigates a strange space here, trying to understand, trying to see ... and without all of the startling and individual faces that were cast to make up the rest of the film, his work would not have been showcased as it should have been. As it is: he seems the most human, the most open, the least opaque ... everyone else appears to be holding on to secrets and demons (and again: this is a matter of CASTING right ... some people's faces just LOOK odder than others) ... and Rourke appears to be an open book. Of course, in light of what his character eventually realizes about himself over the course of the film, it was a perfect choice. Because he is has the biggest secret of all. It's so big he doesn't even know he HAS a secret.
I watched Johnny Handsome last night, a movie I had not seen - spurred on by my brother's comments about the film in the comments-section to this post about Mickey Rourke. What is extraordinary about this film (besides its dark pessimistic noir atmosphere) is the fact that it focuses on Rourke's face. Rourke plays a guy who was born with a genetic cranial defect, with a huge bump on his forehead, and a cleft palate ... He looks like a monster. From the get-go, this guy had three strikes against him. The world turned away from him in disgust, and so he responded in kind. In this way, it reminds me so much of George Cukor's A Woman's Face, starring Joan Crawford in one of her best performances (my review of it here). Crawford plays a woman who was badly disfigured with scars across her face. She is used to seeing people recoil when they look at her. It's not as easy as: "If you're beautiful, you're good, if you're ugly, you're bad" ... what happens when the world itself judges you, based on your appearance, and you internalize that reaction? These films are about psychology, more than their plot-points. Crawford's character gets a chance at some plastic surgery, to fix her face ... but it is only after her face is flawless and beautiful that things start to get REALLY interesting in Cukor's film. Because ... the scar was not just skin-deep. It went all the way to the heart of her psyche. So even though she is beautiful now, her expectations of the world (it will reject me, find me disgusting) still linger.
I wrote in my review:
Watch how she always, even after the operation, protects the right side of her face. She still seems to feel that the scar is there. And Crawford plays it so well that there were times when I could still see the scar, even though her skin was smooth and clear. The scar was inside. She still felt it, and therefore, so did I.
In Johnny Handsome, Rourke's character spent his childhood in foster care and orphanages. He naturally graduated to a life of crime. He lives in the shadows, in the underbelly, he is the kind of person you would look at and cringe away from. He is not just disfigured on the outside - he carries around with him (in his posture, his attitude) an expectation of disgust.
So when he gets a second chance at life - through the compassion of an ambitious doctor (played by Forest Whittaker) who thinks he can "fix" his face ... things are not so simple. He goes through a series of operations ... he works with a speech pathologist ... and eventually ... the work is complete. He now emerges looking like Mickey Rourke, circa 1989.
But what is truly haunting, in watching this film now, with its focus on Rourke's beautiful tough-guy face, pale and open, is to know what would eventually happen to Rourke's face, in the following decade. It would be ruined - from boxing matches, and horrible corrective surgery. His face now almost looks like the face of Rourke's at the start of Johnny Handsome, battered, brutal, put-together-with-tape ... it is a MASK. The first shot of Johnny Handsome is a dark noir-inspired shot - a busy rain-drenched street in New Orleans, blurry neon, crowded sidewalks ... with Johnny Handsome strolling through the middle of it, midshapen, sullen, smoking a cigarette, head hunched down, Rourke brilliantly showing how his character desperately tries to be invisible, to protect innocent onlookers from having to deal with his ugliness. He strolls towards the camera, shadows, neon ... and we know it's Rourke, we know it because he's the star of the film, but we cannot tell it is him. The couple of shots I have already seen of The Wrestler, Rourke's new movie, with him walking down the street - have eerie echoes with that earlier work - except now it is not a makeup job, with prosthetics on his forehead and nose ... It's real. It's one of those amazing art-imitating-life-imitating-art moments ... something that Rourke, with his uncanny brilliance, is naturally tapping into. Katrina Longworth, reviewing the film, writes:
Darren Aronofky’s handheld camera follows Mickey Rourke from behind for the first several scenes of The Wrestler. It’s apparently impossible for contemporary directors to use this technique without someone suggesting that they ripped it from a Dardenne film, but its use in The Wrestler feels very different from its use in, say, L’Enfant: it doesn’t produce the same sense of a tension that could break if the camera ever allowed its subject to get too far away. In fact, several times, the camera just stops while Rourke keeps moving, allowing us to appreciate the full physicality of the actor’s performance long before we ever see his face. There must be a cerebral component to the way Rourke approached becoming aging wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, because otherwise I doubt he’d have been able to so deftly navigate the character’s expansive emotional arc while still nailing all the jokes. But this performance goes way beyond the brain, or the precision with which Rourke transformed his appearance, or even the naturalism with which he performs the wrestling choreography. This is a performance that seems to start and end in the cardiovascular system, making everything Rourke actually does seem effortless. As if he’s just breathing it.
His physicality is one of the things that has always been so striking about him (we're back in the realm of Kazan's "acting is psychology turned into behavior" lesson) ... and while there is an odd grace about him, he seems uncomfortable with that grace, and determined to stuff it down and hide it. It makes him riveting to watch. He is uncomfortable with certain aspects of himself (aren't we all?) and so he walks that line in his films, his own emotions surprising him, angering him, ambushing him. He's the real deal. He's not "acting" tough. He fucking IS tough. But his hands have a strangely feminine quality to them - watch how he touches things that don't require roughness or forcing ... watch how he touches a coffee cup handle, or puts his hand on a woman's face ... these things that allow him to be gentle, and his hands look like the softest things in the world. Such a strange and beautiful contrast ... Mickey Rourke's body IS his canvas. Actors are in the business of transformation, of course ... we've got the accents, the funny noses, the costumes ... but with Rourke none of that is material. Whatever shift goes on in this actor, whatever transformation happens, goes on at the cellular level. To say that this is rare is to misstate what the word "rare" even means.
Mickey Rourke is an important actor, one of the most important of his generation, and his deliberate dovetailing of his personal story with his work (perhaps that is why he turned down the Bruce Willis part in Pulp Fiction - too close?) ... is one of the things that sets him apart, puts him on a Brando-level, a Garland-level. What is Rourke and what is not? That is a question that ceases to matter when we see him in his best roles.
There's a goosebump-inducing scene in Johnny Handsome when the bandages are finally taken off, and Rourke is allowed to go look at his new face.
Words cannot describe the transformation of emotions that goes over him as he stares at his reflection (yet another entry in my "Man in the Mirror" post-to-come). He is astonished, he can't believe it, he touches his face, he looks serious, bludgeoned ... but then light starts to dawn, and with that light, comes tears ... Tears that are not comfortable for him, he's not a "crier" ... but the pain that he has gone through having been 100% rejected by the world starts to come out ... and yet he is smiling, too ... but the smile looks like a wince ... It's almost like a tiny bruise on the skin of an apple, and when you cut the apple open you see that the bruise goes all the way to the core. That's what that smile-slash-wince reminds me of. It makes you ache to look at. At one point, he looks back at himself, and breaks out into laughter, touching his face delicately with his fingers, saying, amazed, 'I feel like I still have a mask on ..."
It's an unbelievable moment of truth, captured on screen.
Mickey Rourke is back. And his work in Johnny Handsome takes on even more resonance now, it is almost as though his own life has become the movie in reverse. He the actor may still "feel like he has a mask on". His face is no longer the face it was, and we can't help but be haunted by that memory, looking at him now ... and yet ... it is what it is within that truly matters. It is what it is inside that now may have a chance to express itself, regardless of the battered remains of his face.
Johnny Handsome is not so handsome anymore, but that could not be less relevant.
Yeah: I always thought Mickey Rourke was a genius - in the truest purest sense of the word - from the first time I saw Angel Heart. Or - let's say: I'm not into the whole "next Brando" thing because I believe actors are originals ... Brando was Brando, Rourke is Rourke ... but in terms of the level of the gift - so far and beyond what his peers are bringing to the table ... Yes. I have always put Rourke in that pantheon. His backing out of the scene left the way clear for Russell Crowe to take over ... and yet Rourke, by his very absence, continues to dominate. Isn't that always the way.
In Diner, he is a delight to watch. Brando-ish in his inventive-ness, his freedom, his specificity. That over-the-top yet totally-connected Method-y performance ("Kid," he says, with a wry already tired smile, when he discovers his best friend is still a virgin, "you gotta lot to learn ...") is still startling and juicy to watch today. Rourke had an internal mechanism that kept him from pushing too much ... and he also had a fearless non-literal approach to things which make certain moments POP off the screen (like pouring the sugar down his throat). I am still excited watching him work.
He's the genuine article - and even his straying from the path of his own talent is essential to understanding him, it was a true impulse (although frustrating for those of us who love him), it came from the depths of his soul. He's not a careerist. Brando never was either. They get lost. They get distracted. They do other things. Life is long. Life is messy. Not a straight line. These men are so gifted that they are careless with that gift ... the genius is so innate that they don't treasure it - why should they? It's like having blue eyes, why congratulate yourself for it? Or, more on point, the acting talent of those two men can be seen as being akin to having perfect pitch or a photographic memory or being a prodigy of some kind. Being that good at something is not always accompanied by an overflowing feeling of gratitude and humility. No. That is the provenance of the more mediocre folks, who KNOW how lucky they are, who maybe are not as good at whatever it is... they have to work harder for lesser results - so they hover over what they have and are thankful (or bitter, depending on the person). Whatever it is: they are CAREFUL with whatever small gift they have been given. Geniuses are notoriously clumsy and careless with their own brilliance because it comes so easily to them (we're moving into Salieri/Mozart territory here) ... At times it seems like the gift (for whatever it is) comes from outside of themselves - it's almost like an accident - and so while it may be irritating to see someone throw a career out the window - it is part and parcel of the journey of these types of people (throughout history, I might add).
Rourke's 5 minute cameo in The Pledge is one of the most powerful pieces of acting I have ever seen - hands down - it was almost unwatchable in its intensity, I looked away at one point to give that character his privacy with his own grief ... the camera seemed too invasive, the pain he was experiencing too acute (more like agony) to be witnessed - and while I thought that movie was quite good - it is only his scene that I really remember.
I don't think too many people are "geniuses" at acting. I think people sometimes hit a genius moment by being cast in a perfect part at the perfect time. I think there is a kind of on-again off-again relationship with genius (which is typical in other disciplines as well). I also think there is skill, and perhaps a gift of imagination, and craftsmanship (all wonderful things) - but only a few people (Duse, Rowlands, Brando, Judy Garland at times) are maestros. Untouchable in their authenticity. Rourke is one of them. I saw it from the start.
Can't wait to see The Wrestler.
Go read the whole thing - pretty wonderful analysis, I think.
I just had to put in my two cents about The Pledge which is not mentioned in the piece.
I've been a fan for over 20 years now! It hasn't always been easy - I've had to watch a lot of crap, not to mention soft-core p0rn (some of it rather enjoyable - but still, a bit sad because it was HIM doing it).... but that's okay. Once I love you, I love you for good. I rarely "turn" on someone - especially not because of private or personal behavior which spills out into tabloid fodder. I don't care about any of that. I care about Pope of Greenwich Village and Diner and Angel Heart and The Pledge and Sin City. It's the GIFT I cherish. Regardless.
It's about time you got the props you deserve.