An anatomy of fraudsters’ work life gives us a chance for dark comedy, before opportunity to reconnect with family counterbalances the story’s seamier side
[This was edited slightly in the late afternoon of July 31.]
Director Ridley Scott, who seems to be considered one of the greatest visual stylists working today, directed this film as a between-big-projects little project, and it doesn’t often get mentioned when a list of his oeuvre is trotted out when a new release of his is reviewed. Of course, he broke ground in the horror-film genre with Alien (1979), and his Blade Runner (1982), which has been released and re-released in a couple recut versions, is a landmark science fiction work (which I have never seen—and would like to). Other films of his include Gladiator (~2001), starring Russell Crowe, who has appeared in a number of his films. His most recent film, the science fiction Prometheus, is something of a “prequel” to Alien, and the first time he returned to that franchise in more than a decade. Interestingly, when you read his Wikipedia biography (see link above), you get the sense that, while he has worked to branch out into different genres over the decades, he seems most noted for his science fiction and other more fantasy-related or history-related work, and it seems to be the fans of this who most conspicuously act as his “guardian” with his Wikipedia biography.
Director Ridley Scott, who seems to be considered one of the greatest visual stylists working today, directed this film as a between-big-projects little project, and it doesn’t often get mentioned when a list of his oeuvre is trotted out when a new release of his is reviewed. Of course, he broke ground in the horror-film genre with Alien (1979), and his Blade Runner (1982), which has been released and re-released in a couple recut versions, is a landmark science fiction work (which I have never seen—and would like to). Other films of his include Gladiator (~2001), starring Russell Crowe, who has appeared in a number of his films. His most recent film, the science fiction Prometheus, is something of a “prequel” to Alien, and the first time he returned to that franchise in more than a decade. Interestingly, when you read his Wikipedia biography (see link above), you get the sense that, while he has worked to branch out into different genres over the decades, he seems most noted for his science fiction and other more fantasy-related or history-related work, and it seems to be the fans of this who most conspicuously act as his “guardian” with his Wikipedia biography.
Yet among his more “down-to-earth” films is Thelma & Louise (1991), which has become regarded as something of a groundbreaker in its own right. It stars Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as a couple of rebellious and, later, crime-committing women on the run; it is a road-buddy movie that has represented a (tongue-in-cheek) version—to women—of a kind of feminist; or at least the film came to exemplify a new genre called “feminist road movie.” (I will try to look at this movie with an eye to reviewing it separately.)
So it may come as something of a surprise that Scott directed Matchstick Men, a deceptively low-key effort about con men—and a young con woman—operating together, though not always to each’s interests, in Los Angeles. (The book the film was based on had their location in Tampa, Florida, but Scott had the production done in the Los Angeles area, partly for convenience and because of its visual possibilities that he felt germane to the film; in hearing his comments related to this in his DVD commentary, one is persuaded of the idea that the particular city wasn’t of much significance—West Coast was just as good as Florida.)
Though I’ve never been to Los Angeles, decades of film viewing and other “mass media” sources make me quite able to recognize what city this story is in, and I think L.A. adds to the irony of the story in that a place that is so much a “city of dreams” of a kind, and of so much sun—the movie was shot from mid-July through early October 2002—is the setting for a grifter story that is sometimes darkly funny, sometimes droll or poignant. In environs that seem to coddle those who want a smooth, slightly upper-middle-class life, the two main con men embrace their own version of “the pursuit of happiness” in a way that amounts, in the movie’s more editorial handling, to a sardonic look at American life. That is, we can dress in nice business clothes, and have a home with a glinting pool in the backyard, listen to “midbrow good-life” music like Sixties-era Frank Sinatra and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass; and we can even receive the bounty of a delightful-seeming, blonde, never-before-seen daughter coming rambunctiously into our lives. But it can all be quite hollow if we happen to be a neurotic mess, leading a life of career dishonesty and voluminous personal foibles and self-excusing, until the call of deep family values and, contrarily, a con game rather nastily pulled on us finally get us to see the light (amid the not-always-illuminating L.A. sun).
Nicolas Cage plays a seasoned con artist named Roy Waller (though he uses aliases when pulling some jobs), and he suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder—for example, doing counting rituals when locking windows and doors, and getting into fanatical cleaning fits at times—and he also suffers from something that seems like Tourette’s syndrome, with his facial tics and vocal hoots. He is, as he says, afraid to go outdoors…and only can function normally, or keep himself looking normal, when he is pulling con games and does such banal stuff as shopping in the supermarket. He does take medication, but this is apparently on the sly, from someone whom we can’t tell is a real doctor or not; and who knows how well the med works.
His partner, played by Sam Rockwell, is Frank Mercer, a young man as uninhibited and boundary-pushing as Roy is “uptight” and severe; so the two make an “odd couple” (the Neil Simon variety), but perhaps in this case, opposites healthily attract and, in any event, their love of the con, and the fact that some cons take partners, keeps them together on a stabilizing “business” level. Rockwell is especially vivid as Frank, with his hip, fluid movements, irreverence, and wardrobe that makes you think that—his fun conversation aside—if you could smell him, he’d be wearing the “foreign-accent pimp” kind of cologne, which you get on your hand from the unctuous sales-type who shakes your hand, and you smell it intermittently the rest of the day, each time making you gag. (Rockwell is also interesting as the lead actor in George Clooney’s first directing effort, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind [2002], an autobiography of Chuck Barris, creator of The Gong Show and a piece of work in his own right.)
When we first see Frank and Roy at work, they are running a rather low-level bait-and-switch scheme out of an anonymous office building, which is duly demonstrated for us in this pinpoint-acted, well-edited movie.
The mean, small con these men routinely perform is spelled out
Frank calls people on the phone, and tells them they’ve won a prize, a water filtration system—and this is part of their supposedly having entered a contest; and if they’re dupes enough, as a further step in the “contest,” he gets them to send his “firm” a check to buy the filtration device, because it isn’t free; as the dupes won’t know, this will be for a much higher price than the filtration device is worth on the retail level, but…. The ultimate prize, which they can only qualify for if they send the check, is an overseas vacation trip. Now that sounds good! The check is (part of the specialness of the whole situation) picked up by a courier, and as Frank tells the “customer,” an added inducement is that the sale is “recorded as a business expense,” thus they thereby forgo paying sales tax on the prize. Good deal, huh?
Then, at least in the illustrative case the movie presents, Roy and Frank go to a prizewinner’s home, posing as Federal Trade Commission agents (complete with “ID badges”), and say they, the customers, have been defrauded. Then, following the “agents’” solicitous questions, because the “customer” did not send the check through the mail, the “agents” can’t pursue the “scammers” for mail fraud; so instead the customers can only have the “scammers” investigated via a trace on the check. If the “customer” goes along with this, she or he fills out a “form” for this purpose, including bank account number, and the “agents” head off. Then, Roy and Frank later siphon more money out of the “customer’s” bank account.
Later, we find that Roy has over a million dollars in a safe deposit box, and we don’t know if he has made all this from this particular scheme; but this one certainly seems an effective, however mean, a “way to earn a living.”
Then Frank tells Roy he encountered another shady sort, Chuck Frechette, whom Frank feels they can con out of a lot of money; Roy isn’t interested at first.
Then one day, Roy accidentally spills his medication down the kitchen sink. He goes into fits of compulsive cleaning of his apartment, holed up in it for days. Frank tries calling him… to no avail. Frank finally checks him out at his house; and on finding Roy’s unmedicated condition, along with Roy’s regular “doctor” having fled town for whatever reason, Frank urges Roy to see a particular psychiatrist he knows about. Frank, trying to be kindly while also trying to restore some sanity, says (in a friendly moment of self-justification) that Roy has money to retire on, while Frank doesn’t; Frank can’t have a partner who is all weird twitches, etc. So, time for tough love. Accommodating him (while a momentary basket case anyway), Roy ends up seeing the psychiatrist, Dr. Harris Klein, played by a level-seeming Bruce Altman.
With new medication (as he thinks it is) in his system, and largely back to normal behaviorally, Roy feels his owes Frank one. He agrees to join Frank in pulling a “long con,” or a con aiming toward a huge amount of money, on Chuck Frechette. Now the real fancy plot of the film is on. They go to a gentleman’s club, the apparently real L.A. place the Spearmint Rhino, where they pique Chuck’s interest in working together on an ostensible con. But of course, Roy and Frank are working to put one over on Chuck.
The more mysterious aspects of the “long con” and its target
I described the initial, water-filtration-system con game in detail partly because the later big con that Roy and Frank will pursue against Chuck as a main plot component involves another, seemingly more formidable shady sort, and there is a certain amount of obscurity about this shady sort.
Some things we do know. Chuck doesn’t work with the mob; Ridley Scott or someone else commenting on the DVD says Chuck owns a chain of laundromats; meanwhile, obviously to us, he seems a solo practitioner in his less-legitimate work, and dresses nicely and drives a fancy car, somewhat the “successful man” that Roy is. Chuck is played by Bruce McGill, whose flexibility had him as a southern sheriff in My Cousin Vinny (1992). For Matchstick, McGill has the right look of a somewhat oily, well-fed, self-respecting package of a man who can maybe appeal to other ambiguous high-rollers, and who can kill time at a pole-dancing bar, but would immediately set the teeth on edge of less money-oriented, more decent people (“What does he do for a living—or don’t I want to know?”). As a commenter (Scott?) says on the DVD, Chuck “can be one of the wiseguys.”
In the making-of doc, it becomes clear that Scott generally seems in good part to provide a lot of intuitive planning in carefully plotting out the production aspects of a film before principal photography starts; but on some story details, he can seem rather fuzzy at times, which of course may not practically matter as long as the writer, a more detail-oriented producer, and/or the relevant actor are understanding enough of this detail. For instance, in making astute casting choices (he is globally intuitive while unspecific in certain ways), he wants the actor who plays Chuck to dress well and such, but ultimately, he says, the man has “a screw loose.” That’s inadvertently funny to me, because it’s a rather haphazard conceptualization that seems to echo the more general fact that it’s a little unclear what Frechette does as his “living.” Wikipedia writers, like those on the movie’s page (second paragraph in the plot description), seem not much better on this; they refer to Chuck as an “arrogant businessman,” which I think is too simplistic.
Chuck’s most aimed-for (criminal) work, as I’ve never been able to fully figure out (after seeing this movie several times), seems to be a money launderer or some other kind of grifter who can get access to a large amount of money. What’s interesting about this is that, almost as if the writers didn’t want to promote social mayhem by illustrating more than they had to of big-time cons, the obscure side of Chuck is somewhat like the opaque oddness of the land-purchase deal that becomes part of the source of the downfall of William H. Macy’s character in the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo (1996). Even though the Coens could be realistic and exacting about spelling out plot-informing contexts of middle-class life, the type of way the Macy character tries to involve his father-in-law and the latter man’s partner in an investment deal seems hard to figure out in some ways, if you look at it if it were to happen in real life; specifically, he wants them to bankroll a land-purchase deal with the partial aim to desperately make some money for himself, and where they, contrarily, tell him they’d rather buy the piece of land in question (as an investment) than be partners with him, not directly as a reflection on him. But then, you figure that, in real life, a lot of legitimate deals, and some not-so-legitimate, can be hard to puzzle out by outsiders until they ask a lot more questions of the persons involved (or the persons involved end up under arrest and in the newspapers), and then the larger aspects of a scheme become clearer.
So maybe in Matchstick Men Chuck is a “super-grifter”—someone whose line of work is somewhat in the shadows, to us as well as to Roy (and less so to Frank), thus making him even more fearsome, for purposes of this story.
Notable production: Story of dubious types is rendered with color and detail
So far, we have a story that seems a relatively cynical look at American life, or a story that might be a fair enough case study but would be rather cynical to be considered as representative or “relatable” for everyone: this being stretched to signify the sun-highlighted, on-the-move doings of people for whom material success is an end that justifies any means. We may laugh at the con-game aspect—similarly to how we can find Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) amusing, though its character Frank Abagnale, Jr., would never top most people’s lists of the best Eagle Scout kind of role model. And the flagrant display of Roy’s neuroses add a layer of human deviancy of a different sort—here Nicolas Cage could either entertain you with the intricacy of his performance, which it did me initially, or it could rub you the wrong way, as I myself find it gets a bit wearying with repeated viewings. This “clinical display” plus Roy’s seeing the psychiatrist, who seems initially on the up and up, could be appealing enough to some people who like psychological themes.
We can stop to note that the film was prepared—in “pre-production”—fairly quickly (in two months), by Ridley Scott’s production team, which seems like a crack team similar to that of other sharp directors, like the Coen brothers. How the script was selected is a story of almost amazing chance and practical adaptation, but Warner Brothers was the studio attached to the project; and a certain important amount of reworking of the script was done, especially to its end, to satisfy different principal parties, not all of whose story goals/visions matched. (Further, the DVD commentary by various parties suggests that shaping of rather large aspects of the story, especially as to making it more family-values-oriented, went on through some time into postproduction, showing that the technical pre-production work may have been methodical, but the story was something of a shuttlecock in terms of some of its basic aspects.)
Casting and on-location set choice and the like were done in a fairly disciplined manner. Then filming went on in the summer and early fall of 2002, with Scott favoring only a few takes per shot. The summer heat and familiar L.A. environs perhaps helped the actors be pretty intensely on-point and street-wise. Indeed, the actors all bring their respective talents to a type of role that always strikes me as interesting—actors (sometimes) playing at being actors, as con artists are in some sense. So you don’t have someone being a businessman or the like; the actor is someone “playing at” this to some extent. So with this story background, and the quick shooting, spontaneity and a certain earthiness become important, enriching components of the performances.
This plus the sheer detail-oriented nature of the shooting—all the little facts of on-the-road life, screwing around in the office, lumping through the supermarket, etc.—and the sharp, quick pictorial editing make for a vivid and colorful look at “Americans being themselves through constant motion in the material world,” so to speak. This is not a world of practiced manners in drawing rooms in some centuries-old Parisian townhouse. The film was also in post-production for an unusually long time—it originally was to be released in spring 2003, then was held back to September 2003. This gave extra time for fussing with the soundtrack music—scored by Hans Zimmer—and the “source music,” including songs by Frank Sinatra, Herb Alpert, more modern fare, and much else. This plus sound effects make for an unusual rich aural ride of a movie.
Thus we get a film that is a sort of romp about small people, in a rather sordid tale (as I’ve described so far), which might seem overbaked in terms of its shooting and postproduction work, but I think instead it is a work whose con artist story is made more “edifying” by being to a large extent a sly snapshot of how we live our lives on the fly and amid a framework of the “ends of success” comprising everyday consumer goods and lifestyle options. And today, even high-level bankers and numerous other technical lines of work seem mired in suspicions of, or actual findings of, fraud, gross mismanagement, and the like. So Matchstick Men could be considered a prescient parable, using ostensibly subcultural and deviant characters, of the current crisis in American life—the falling away from authenticity we have undergone.
Well, if this seems a hyperbolic reading of the film, we’re not done with what it is about. My “hyperbole” may become more justified. Perhaps the film’s most interesting aspect is how Roy starts to find the affinities in himself for redeeming family life, when his new psychiatrist, Dr. Klein, claims to have located a daughter Roy never knew he had, after the doctor has called Roy’s ex-wife at his request. Dr. Klein says that Angela, Roy’s 14-year-old daughter, wants to meet him. And Roy, nervously, agrees to.
To be continued.
