Body Heat
Lawrence Kasdan (1981)
The film provided early opportunities for William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Mickey Rourke (it was Turner’s first screen role). With hindsight, it’s no surprise that this trio went on to better things – or that Lawrence Kasdan, already a highly successful screenwriter (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark), didn’t develop the stellar directing career predicted for him in the early 1980s, although he had varying degrees of success with The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist and I Love You To Death in the course of the next decade (with William Hurt in all three). In Body Heat, Kasdan seems mainly concerned with demonstrating how much he knows about forties film noir. The picture seems aimed primarily at other members of the cognoscenti – or at least those who aren’t infuriated to find their enthusiasm for the genre reduced to a private entertainment of spotting the specific references that Kasdan uses. (Of course the film might also be reasonably entertaining to an audience that hadn’t any idea of its sources or pretensions. There’s no information on Wikipedia about its box-office performance but it surely didn’t do badly.) For someone like me who can see that the storyline and main characters derive largely from Double Indemnity but not much else beyond the more obvious emblems of film noir, Body Heat is pastiche of a pretty inert kind.
In any case, Kasdan uses features of the genre only for as long as they suit his purpose. The writing of the dialogue in the early stages has a competitive edge. In scenes involving the main character Ned Racine (Hurt), a Florida lawyer, and his work associates, the competition to top the one-liner of the last person who spoke is between the characters. In this situation, the structure of the dialogue is reasonably believable and it’s certainly pacy, even if it grates on your nerves. As soon as Ned meets the ‘fascinating’ Matty Walker (Turner), Kasdan seems to get into an almost abstract competition with himself to sustain a flow of hard-boiled repartee. Hurt and Turner are so self-aware delivering these lines that you almost expect one of them to say, ‘Why are we talking like people in a crime film made 30 years ago?’ (Maybe this does just about happen when one of his remarks causes her to laugh and splutter sherry over her immaculate white dress – one of the film’s best moments.) The writing isn’t enjoyable by this point because you can already sense its main purpose is to demonstrate the writer’s cleverness. Once the affair between Ned and Matty gets underway and is presented with the physical explicitness of a 1980s film, the Chandleresque exchanges are – so to speak – put to bed, never to re-emerge. (The story takes place in a heatwave and the bodies in sexual action show the sweat of their efforts – although this too soon enough becomes not much more than a stylistic detail.) Kasdan’s storytelling is competent but, because the material has no life of its own, the narrative seems to unfold mechanically, as a series of required elements. John Barry’s score makes a very odd contribution to all this. At the start, the swooping, yearning melodies are familiar but, if they’re a pastiche of anything, they’re a pastiche of John Barry. Then the music goes through a phase of sounding like sketches for the lovely score he wrote for Out of Africa a few years later. It eventually becomes strangely impersonal, generic crime film music. Still, I liked the fact that Barry didn’t seem to have succumbed to the stylisation that Kasdan seemed to want to impose on the material.
Because she’s now so familiar it’s impossible to experience what impression Kathleen Turner might have made at the time of the film’s release but, after the Amazonian verve of her first entrance, she seems to become so self-conscious about playing a femme fatale that not much sense of a character comes through. She is, however, fully convincing as a sexual athlete. That William Hurt isn’t quite in her league in this respect – and that Ned ups his daily fitness training once their liaison is underway – seems the best joke in Body Heat. Hurt, perhaps because his looks don’t suggest any kind of screen archetype, is more humanly expressive than Turner but he seems basically miscast as a man as stupid as Kasdan’s script seems determined to present Ned as being. There’s no real spark between Hurt and Turner. This becomes clearest in the scene in which they unexpectedly meet at a restaurant and end up having a diner à trois with Matty’s immensely rich and slimy husband Edmund, who evidently suspects them of having an affair. There’s no atmosphere in this sequence beyond mild social awkwardness – there’s much more crackle between Hurt and Richard Crenna as the vile Edmund, when he and Ned are left together after Matty has gone to the ladies’ room. You’re convinced that this encounter is enough to persuade Ned to go ahead with helping Matty murder her husband. Ted Danson is hideously hyperactive as Ned’s work colleague. Mickey Rourke, as an arsonist who helps Ned with the preparations for the murder, has only two scenes. You’re aware, of course, that part of the impact of his performance will simply be your reaction to how much he’s changed between here and The Wrestler – not just the looks, the voice too. But Rourke does steal the show: he seems to be the only actor who’s approached his role as if it were freshly conceived rather than a component in a stale, knowing game that Lawrence Kasdan is playing with himself. Rourke directs what he’s saying to William Hurt and connects with him (Hurt returns the compliment) – and registers something original and individual.
21 March 2009