By Stefan Betz Bloom
There's film noir, and there's film noir. Dark, disturbing, sexy and violent, Stephen Frears's film The Grifters falls into the latter category.
Predating the 1994-95 Quentin Tarantino-inspired glut of crime movies, The Grifters, originally released in 1990, was one of several movies based on the novels of Jim Thompson to be released around that time. Thompson, probably the best crime writer in recent memory, wrote short, taut, nihilistic novels about desperate people willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, or even survive.
Working mostly in the '60s, Thompson drained the traditional crime novel &emdash;formalized by the detective stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and the underworld fiction of James M. Cain &emdash;of its moralism, the sense that certain rules exist even if they are not obeyed, and left in its place a void.
To say that the characters in a Jim Thompson novel are amoral is beside the point; there's no such thing as amorality when there's no morality to begin with. Power, in a Jim Thompson novel, is the ultimate currency, and it justifies whatever means are used to get it &emdash;money, sex, crime, murder.
What makes The Grifters the best Jim Thompson movie, and probably the best crime movie of its type, is that Frears doesn't try to temper the novel's nihilism with any sort of sentimentality. If anything, the film version of The Grifters is even more brutal and uncompromising than the book.
This is partly cultural. Film noir is one, if not the only, genre that seems to have improved with time. Directors, under less and less pressure from studios to have their movies provide a sense of uplift, have more freedom to explore the blackness of the human heart that is, essentially, what film noir is about. Unlike a love story, where the sentimentality of an old movie only enhances the intended effect, film noir gets better the darker it gets. And The Grifters is maybe the darkest film noir of them all.
Set in Los Angeles, the movie opens with Roy (John Cusack), a small-time grifter &emdash;a con artist &emdash;getting punched in the stomach by a bartender, and gets worse from there. Roy starts hemorrhaging and is on course to die, until his mother Lily's (Angelica Huston) intervention saves his life.
Lily, in L.A. on business, works for the sadistic crime lord Bobo (Pat Hingle) fixing horse-race odds, and it's pretty clear that she's defined herself by what she does: when she calls a doctor for Roy, she takes directness to a new level. "He lives," she says, "or I'll have you killed."
If Lily doesn't have time for femme fatale mannerisms, Roy's girlfriend Moira (Annette Bening) fully compensates. Coming off like a psychotic pin-up girl, Moira has her own reasons for wanting Roy's loyalty. A good part of the movie's kick comes from watching two dangerous, predatory women fight for the loyalties of a man seemingly unequipped to deal with either of them.
As the plot develops, Lily needs Roy's money to pay off Bobo, while Moira's agenda &emdash;and Roy's role in it &emdash;becomes clear. Thompson added a subplot to his novel involving the nurse Lily hires to take care of Roy, but Frears deletes it entirely, focusing instead on the triangle of mistrust that forms among the three main characters.
As they become more and more desperate the pace of the film quickens, until events finally explode into something almost tragic at the film's climax. Frears doesn't bother with the sentimentalism of tragedy, though; he casts a glance over the scene, and moves out into the Los Angeles night.
What the film depends on are the performances of its lead actors; and, fortunately, they're excellent. Bening, who's since become one of the blander presences in modern cinema, is dynamic as Moira, her boop-oop-ee-doop voice and flirtatious manner are in stark contrast to the cold manipulations of her character.
Cusack plays Roy with the perfect mix of intelligence and hesitancy; he stumbles over his lines as if stalling for time to think of a way out of the situation he's somehow gotten himself into. He gives the film's most subtle performance in probably the most difficult job in the picture, as the center around which the rest of the plot, and the characters, turn.
If John Cusack's Roy grounds the movie, though, Angelica Huston's Lily drives it. Lily's unstoppable momentum comes more from having nothing to lose than from bravery, and Huston locates the desperation at the character's core. With her hard "g" pronunciation of "Los An-ghel-ese," Huston's all edge.
Probably the best thing that you can say about her performance is that her Lily is compelling without being sympathetic or cartoonish; maybe we understand her, but whether we like her or not is irrelevant. The final scene, a standoff between Lily and Roy in which both characters are finally shown for what they are, is disturbing and brilliantly acted, redefining the characters in their relationship to one another, as well as all that's come before in the movie.
The Grifters is both ambitious and fully realized, in contrast to Frears's more recent works, Hero and Mary Reilly (both overly ambitious films spun out of control). Frears stays close enough to the novel that the movie retains Thompson's undiluted pulp nihilism, but, taking some liberties, makes the material his own. Beautifully structured and executed, The Grifters is a great movie, transcending the genre without forgetting its lineage. It's bleakness may seem off-putting, but it's not. For a movie about con artists, The Grifters is remarkably rewarding.
