Sidney Lumet (1986)
This Los Angeles-set thriller-romance gets off to an uncertain start. Alex Sternbergen, an alcoholic, on-the-skids TV actress, wakes up in a double bed next to a man who’s been stabbed to death. She was so drunk the night before she can’t remember who the man was or how she got into his bed. Numb with shock, Alex tries to make friends with a cat in another room in the apartment. The numbed, quiet desperation in her gestures to the cat works well but, after frantically phoning her ex-husband, Alex exits the scene of the crime and tries to exit LA itself, and these sequences are mechanically hectic. Then we get the opening titles – merely but annoyingly interruptive a good ten minutes into the film, with the story well underway. The day-glo colouring of Los Angeles (lit by Andrzej Bartkowiak) is, not for the first time, intriguing. It’s as if Sidney Lumet, whose usual terrain is New York, is viewing the city with an outsider’s eye and is himself intrigued. But the thriller plotting in James Hicks’ screenplay is never up to much. Alex, on the run from the police, finds it remarkably easy to stay well ahead of them – even though she’s wanted on suspicion of murder, this is presumably being announced in newspapers and on television, and she keeps appearing in less than private places.
Fortunately for the film and the viewer, Alex is played by Jane Fonda. You know her acting is going to be exciting from the moment she pleads for an early flight at the airport – making up a sob story but fired by genuine desperation to get out of LA. When she doesn’t succeed and heads back into the city, she bumps into and gets a lift from a man called Turner Kendall, who turns out both to be an ex-cop and, when he hears her story, to believe in Alex’s innocence. Jeff Bridges is Turner and the contrast between his relaxation and Fonda’s calibrated tension makes for a partnership that’s dramatically and romantically effective. You could say that playing a washed-up actress is a gift for a top-class one – that anything over the top can be ascribed to the character’s desperate attempts to be histrionic at any opportunity. But Fonda does this in a peculiarly compelling way: the brittle Alex keeps reverting to dipso type, and makes a drama of her anger and misery as a vengeful reminder of what she used to get paid for. Fonda suggests so convincingly that Alex can’t believe, and wants to deny, what’s happening to her that she often makes a virtue of the script’s implausibility. There’s a great moment when Alex and Turner are getting to feel more for each other and she stands waiting for him to put his arms round her. The camera doesn’t move from her and Bridges but Fonda seems gradually to shrink into something very small, very badly in need of protection. For his part, Jeff Bridges suggests very well a buried past that Turner is quietly anxious to keep that way. Both actors are witty, in utterly different ways. Early on, Alex gets the idea that Turner is racist: later on, he takes more care to avoid saying things that will fuel her misunderstanding. Bridges times perfectly these cautious swerves away from the wrong word.
Lumet is often a fine director of actors but he doesn’t have many successes here with most the rest of the cast. It’s hard to believe that Raul Julia, as Alex’s ex-husband Joaquin, and Fonda were ever a couple, even in a marriage of convenience. Joaquin, a hairdresser, now has designs on another woman (Diane Salinger), a rich heiress from old money. This subplot makes little sense and a formal dinner with the heiress’s parents and their friends makes for a particularly hopeless scene. Kathy Bates comes through strongly in a cameo as a neighbour in the apartment block where the murder took place. The music by Paul Chihara is hyperactive but occasionally scary.
2 July 2011
