*** (out of ****)
Starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rosselini, Wings Hauser, Laurence Tierney, John Patrick Lloyd, Penn Gillette, and Frances Fisher
Directed & written for the screen by Norman Mailer, from his novel
1987
110 min R
A friend of mine was away at college. He called me and said “I’m going to the video store. What should I rent?” I recommended David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” About four hours later he called me again. The first words out of his mouth were “what the hell was that?”
Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” doesn’t approach “Lost Highway’s” level of, um, abstraction. But I’m still not going to try to translate it, interpret it, or figure it out. “What the hell did I just watch?” is a reasonable reaction to a film. The “what the hell was that?” movie is a perfectly serviceable genre, usually located at the intersections of deadpan comedy and something like blood-soaked horror or blood-soaked noir. When Mailer wrote “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” in about two months in the mid-80s, he seemed to be writing the sensationalist potboiler to end all sensationalist potboilers. Near the end, the hero’s father is dumping corpses and severed heads into the ocean when a feeling on the wind tells him someone he met earlier might be bisexual. The tricky part is, by the time you reach this part of the novel, the wind telling people things makes about as much sense as things can make.
Mailer’s own film adaptation of “Tough Guys” is a little too ‘80s and not baroque enough to quite capture and mystical, foggy aura of the novel, although Mailer gets in some good over-the-top moments. To say that it works would be generous, but to say that it doesn’t work would be to miss the point. “Tough Guys” just exists, there it is. You may end it by exclaiming “what the hell was that?” You may debate, deep in your heart like my wife did, whether a scene is either brilliant or really bad. But you won’t be bored.
A plot summary, you say? Where do I start? At the center is a struggling writer named Tim Maddin (Ryan O’Neal) and around him are overlapping and entwining concentric circles involving entire tapestries of improbable coincidences. There are severed heads, cocaine deals, a briefcase full of money, constant sex talk, white trash bimbos on rampages, hidden stashes of weed, a mad police chief, flashbacks within flashbacks, swingers, double entendres in church services, and infidelity as an Olympic event. Everything is fueled by alcohol, from the moment Tim finds the seat of his Jeep covered in blood to the moment he discovers the mad chief (Wings Hauser) married his ex-girlfriend (Isabella Rosselini) to the moment his wife wants him to kill her ex-husband. Oh yes, and he went to school with the ex-husband (John Patrick Lloyd), and he and his ex-girlfriend met his wife while answering an ad in a dirty magazine, and the mad chief—well, there’s no real explanation as to why his path should ever cross Tim’s. But there he is and he really likes to maintain eye contact.
All this takes place in a remote New England seaside town, where everyone’s a character, and across the bay from where 18th century pirates used to crash passing ships. Ambience blows through the town in heedless gusts and everything is lit much more brightly than you’d expect, considering all the coke-snorting decapitations going on. Other major players, besides the town and the ocean, are O’Neal, Hauser, Rosselini, and the rest of the good, large cast, who play everything sincere. If they acted as if they were in on the joke—assuming there is a joke—we’d be utterly lost. Watch O’Neal take some bad news—“Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!” Are you supposed to laugh or not? I love it when movies do that; I usually laugh. As Tim’s father is Laurence Tierney, known best to younger audiences as the bulldog crime boss from “Reservoir Dogs.” As in that movie, he bites out every word like talking is an affront to his manhood, and he displays a capacity for cruelty that, while daunting in real life, seems about right for “Tough Guys.”
So what’s the point? Mailer himself, on the DVD, describes “Tough Guys” as a horror story disguised as a tough guy story. Who’s the monster? There is no monster. The horror is waking up one morning to discover that nothing makes sense anymore, that all the circles are closing in, that people you thought didn’t know each other are best friends, and that all your secrets are on the verge of becoming public knowledge. Then, just like that, everything’s back to normal. What do you say to such a thing? “What the hell was that?”
Finished October 28, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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