1997 crime drama
Rating: 15/20
Plot: An undercover FBI agent becomes BFF’s with a mob underling and starts to play the part a little too well. His wife isn’t happy with him.
It’s hard to take this “true story” seriously once that lion shows up, doesn’t it?
I like this movie, despite the way it hits all the notes it’s supposed to and has saccharine score. I like it as a character study of Lefty’s character more than the story it tells with Depp’s infiltration or his family issues. Pacino really carries this movie. I don’t mean that as a barb on what the other characters are doing. Depp’s fine even though I think his accent kind of drifts in and out and his mustache, his weightlifting, or his listening to his wife’s breathing from a phone booth don’t really convince me. Michael Madsen’s fine as Sonny Yellow or Pink or Green or whatever color Sonny he is even though he reminds me of Vince Vaughn from certain angles. I also like pretty much everything Bruno Kirby says in this. “This is a fucking deformed Creature from the Black Lagoon claw I got here,” for example. I can’t watch a Hollywood gangster movie and ever think the dialogue is realistic, but of course, poetry doesn’t sound like how people talk either. Excursions in the dialogue–cancer in the prick, John Wayne’s death, etc.–are asides that add color to an already colorful story. I think my favorite piece of dialogue is this one:
Lefty (aka Half Cock, aka Horse Cock, aliases he actually seems proud of): Punch of salt.
Donnie: Punch?
Lefty: Punch. Punch of salt.
Donnie: Punch? Or pinch?
Lefty: Punch! Punch! Not pinch! What’d I say? Did I say pinch?
Donnie: Nah, you said, you said punch.
Lefty: Sometimes you don’t make no fuckin’ sense, Donnie.
It’s meaningless dialogue, and somebody who didn’t know what he was doing would have cut it from his movie. Here, it somehow manages to help us understand how this relationship is working, how it is going to work, and how it is not going to work. It foreshadows in a way that doesn’t even make sense if you put a lot of thought into it. It doesn’t quite have the punch (pun intended) of Nicholson’s chicken salad sandwich scene in Five Easy Pieces, but it’s another food-related bit of dialogue that I think does similar things.
This movie, when the wife subplot doesn’t interfere, really is built on that relationship. That’s what pulls the story, especially since the FBI people–other than Depp’s character–ineptly do their jobs and these mafia dudes seem inconsequential. Donnie and Horse Cock’s relationship creates the tension, builds the suspense, and carries the weight. I cared less about whether or not any of these gangsters were going to get busted than I did about what would happen with the friendship Depp and Pacino’s characters had created. And I think that’s what elevates this story a bit.
And man. Pacino. You almost feel like he could do this character in his sleep, a guy who’s “busting his hump” just to be another spoke on a wheel. He’s a habitual loser, and somehow, you know how it’s all going to end up for the guy. When it happens, you almost feel good for him, like it validates his existence or something. He’s like an animated version of a gangster, a loser underneath this nervous crackly shell, and Pacino creates this character not just with that rich voice he was gifted with but with all this terrific body language. Even the way he opens doors in this movie seems calculated and real. Add a ridiculous coat, a few references to shitting his pants, and face drooping, and you’ve got a memorable character that, even though the movie is named after some other guy, is easily the most interesting thing to see here.
This is a very good movie that I don’t hear much about. It kind of gets lost in the flood of similar movies, I guess. That, or the lion and the appearance of Vince Vaughn as Madsen’s stunt double throws everybody off.
