Subsections below:
Particulars, and one estimable outside criticismSome explanation of the plot—which could maybe help newcomers like it
The five in the lineup get drawn into a clever, explosive plot
Spacey’s spice
[Edit 6/14/14, with End note.]
I’ll try to keep this as short
as I can, because I think there are a lot of real fans of this film, which don’t
include me; but I think this film is worth a look on this blog. It gets three
and a half “bones” (stars) in the Videohound
review compendium, and two and a half stars in the Leonard Maltin. I’m inclined
to agree more with Maltin.
##
This film was in a library of VHS tapes at a house in my
neighborhood where I spend some time, from which I select some films to review
for this blog. (This method, actually, puts the lie to your possible notion
that some of the films you’ve seen reviews of here I was making well-planned
indirect—and “politically relevant”—statements with. Actually, some were chosen
largely because they were in this house—and they were interesting to me for a
variety of reasons. If the owners of the house had different tastes, who knows
what this would have meant for this blog.)
I watched The Usual Suspects a few times, first fully on VHS, then fully in a
DVD version from a library. (I’ve since watched it three full times, I think,
splitting a third viewing between the two formats.) I had a hard time getting
my mind around the story at first; but after I appreciated the chief
story-unfolding trick that results in a surprise ending, I found subsequent
interest in seeing how one of the characters (who is frequently seen)—let’s
call him the Easter Bunny—turns out to be another character only mentioned by
name (and seen only in a blur when he’s talked about secondhand, in a possible-myth-conveying
way)—let’s call him Santa Claus. (This is just a placeholder name, to slow down
my giving away the ending. You can call the two characters, for all I care, the
Frickin’ Jersey Mountain Bear and Mendham Fats.)
Yes, this is a film regarding
which, if you’re in my “reviewer” shoes, you may find you decide whether to
issue a major spoiler, and I will try not to fully do this—while, actually, my
ability to comment fully on what would spoil it for you actually undercuts my
fully commenting on what is the truly interesting thing in the film.
This is because when you know,
after you’ve seen the film once already, that the Easter Bunny is Santa Claus, then
you marvel at the actor portraying the Easter Bunny—particularly how he hides
his Santa Claus identity, down to various little details of his mannerisms that
we might not really take note of on the first viewing; and this is all that
really makes the film worth seeing more than once. Because—is it me?—I felt
that except for this aspect, the film is a fairly standard crime/suspense thing
(full of as much coyness and “smoke” as clarity that serves a satisfying
ending) without a whole lot of “redeeming social value,” while it has a set of relatively
tasty characters and nice production values. (Scenes seem to be set up on the economical
side, but with lighting, camera angles, and color schemes throughout a shot
presumably showing the director’s hooking and enlivening style; this film gives
a good film-school education in how to light and color-balance a shot without
digital jiggery-pokery.)
Particulars, and one estimable outside criticism
This film was directed (and
partly produced) by Bryan Singer (none of
whose other works I’ve seen—and he has done some X Men films). Its script—which won some accolades in its day,
including an Oscar for original screenplay—was done by Christopher McQuarrie, who gets noted as estimable by critics. The film
also co-stars Kevin Spacey, in the first role
that won him an Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor. You would think that all this
would mean this is a fine film. And it did seem to me fairly well made for what
it is, though it has (what is evident now) a 1990s “professionalism” about it—a
quality where the craft of assembling the shots, and the evident multiple takes
of performances, seem to outrun, a little, what meaning-related “juice” or emotional
resonance there is to the story. (I’ve noticed this in a number of films from
that decade.) But I had a hard time seeing this as a great film.
Leonard Maltin comments—and I
see his point fairly well—that the script may be too clever for its own good,
and that something revealed at the end would tends to negate all the earlier
part of the story. I would like to comment on this aspect, but I promised not
to give too much away. I will say this: when you see the film more than two
full times, you can appreciate what the story is trying to unfold, but you also
grant something to the thought that the story is too convoluted for what seems “deserved
by”—or what we deserve from—a fair amount of the story of cheap behaviors
(crimes and scams) that it is delivering. (That is, needing to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958] more than once would seem
to be, for many careful viewers of films, emotionally and intellectually
rewarding. Not entirely so, here.) For such a suspense story as The Usual Suspects, was such convolutedness
needed?
I think the one thing that
justifies it is that when you see that the Easter Bunny is Santa Claus, then
when you re-view the film to see if that can really be true, you are impressed
by how Kevin Spacey, as the ostensible Easter Bunny, does his darnedest to come
across as such a weird wimp of a person—with prissy ways of talking and verbose
flights at times, and complete with almost-hammy display of a foot (and hand) handicap.
He may feel so certain that he is going to throw the most astute cop off about
his really being Santa Claus, and he certainly fools us on first viewing.
Some explanation of the plot—which could maybe help newcomers like it
It doesn’t hurt much to explain
some of the structure of this film. The first scene has the tail-end of a
violent bunch of doings at a shipyard. Men are dead or dying; one of the last
men alive is killed by an apparently unharmed man, in fedora and trenchcoat or
such, walking insouciantly around, with face not shown. An explosion follows
the unharmed man’s setting off a stream of gasoline or the like into rapid burning
from a lit cigarette. The immediate investigation of this mess is in the film’s
present day.
Pretty quickly we are taken—in a
narrative arcing back—to a situation, from the not-too-distant past, where five
men are placed in a police lineup, one of them suspected to be the criminal of
interest in a crime I didn’t quite get (and it may not matter). These five men
are later in a cell, and they start, with some initial rubs and/or reluctance
among a few, to work (in the direction of crime) as a group. One of them, Dean
Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), is an ex-cop who
has been involved in crimes for some years.
In the “present day,” two
cop-like sorts are working on the shipyard case: David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), a customs department investigator (who
also has no love for Dean Keaton), and Jeffrey Rabin (Dan Hedaya), a regular police investigator (I think). Relevant
to the shipyard mess, Kujan leads the interrogation of one of the five men who
were in the police lineup weeks or so earlier, who was also found at the
shipyard scene, Roger “Verbal” Kint (Spacey). He is the only man surviving the
shipyard mess (though there is another man, a Hungarian [who needs a
translator] in the hospital, badly burned; slowly through the film, clues are
drawn out of him by another investigator).
The film shifts back and forth
between the “present day” post-shipyard investigation, which carries its own driving
suspense, and the experience of the five men in the lineup, who gradually (in a
sense) progress to being involved (minus one of them) in the shipyard
situation. The older-day stuff is largely or entirely narrated in the present
day, most or all to Kujan, by “Verbal” Kint.
If you understand all this, you
can have a handle on the film’s story. I still am not giving away the central
surprise, and what makes it interesting to watch on a second viewing. If I
didn’t tell you this stuff, then if you saw it for the first time, you might
feel as I did, as if to say, “What exactly was
this story? Am I supposed to care about this?”
The five in the lineup get drawn into a clever, explosive plot
The older-time stuff progresses
the three basic phases: first, a scheme where, on plans laid in important part
by the clever “Verbal” Kint, and with most retributive motivation supplied by
ex-cop Dean Keaton (with his glowering eyes), the five attack a bit of, and
expose the whole of, a supposed underground “service” perpetrated by the New
York Police Department, which entails providing a “taxi service” to local big-time
drug/other-goods (?) criminals. This gives the crooks cover with transport
through the city in police cars, in return for substantial bribes to the transporting
cops, etc. The five lineup men trap one set of them with vans on a street,
smash the police car’s windshield, take the money and dope/goods, and set the
police car on fire. The press has been alerted, and other cops arrive to
respond per their usual duties. All action/conflagration, popcorn-movie stuff.
There is a subsequent subplot
involving a fence located in California, named “Redfoot” (Peter Greene, who played the tough-guy-accented heavy in the
Jim Carrey film The Mask [1994]). Redfoot
is known by one of the five, McManus (Stephen Baldwin),
who, as a long term practice that started before the current ad hoc arrangement,
partners with another of the five, a street operator named Fenster (Benicio del Toro, here annoying/amusing with a
mannered, Black-cum-Latino way of talking [see End note] and a foppish way of dressing and
comporting himself; Del Toro cuts a more impressive figure, I think, in later
films such as 21 Grams [2003]).
Rounding out the set of five guys
who met in the lineup is Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollak).
In the second phase of the story,
Redfoot gets the five involved with another scam-of-sorts in which they try to
rob some shady sort in a parking garage (note, in this locale, the lighting
scheme; Singer seems good with tarting up dingy locations that are good
backgrounds for action). The five end up getting stuck with having killed two
men unexpectedly and with fake (?) drugs in a briefcase.
The third phase of the story
involves the five getting involved—again, with help from Redfoot—with a
supposed lawyer named Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), a Germanic-sounding sort, ambiguous of face,
who reveals himself to represent one Keyser Soze, a big-time heavy—a major,
mysterious, grossly fearsome gang leader of sorts—whose name comes up in
different contexts (often summoning fear in listeners) with all the anecdotes
of sleazy activity going on. (“Verbal” Kint has a goodly amount of things to
say about him during the interrogation by Kujan.)
Once the five meet with
Kobayashi, the latter conveys that Soze feels the five (or four of them, minus “Verbal”)
owes him in light of their having unwittingly trespassed on some of his own
illegal activity; but they can make it up to him by getting involved with a big
operation—meaning their potential to win “long money,” I think (I don't know all the relevant terms here; not my field of expertise)—that will turn
out to involve the shipyard mess the film started with.
At first the five try to catch
and kill Kobayashi in an office complex—though, in a key twist, they find that
Kobayashi is involved in some (genuine?) legal transaction involving Edie
Finneran (Suzy Amis), a legit lawyer who
is the girlfriend of Dean Keaton, and who end up being—as the implication
clearly is—Kobayashi’s insurance that Dean Keaton and his cohorts will do as
Kaiser Soze has required (i.e., lest the girlfriend be killed). (And of course,
this factor puts the one little droplet of “romantic juice”—a token of the
American central value of the monogamous/heterosexual relationship—that this
film otherwise lacks as basically a big, woolly story of “men behaving badly.”)
This is the best I can figure
out the plot, from watching the film more than two times. A lot of it sounds
like melodrama and action stuff you could get in a second-rate but well-tooled film,
or even on some installment of the dense, portentous sort of cable TV series
that is such an “in thing” nowadays. It may sound like something you wouldn’t
want to see more than twice, or would take in for merely close-to-empty entertainment.
Spacey’s spice
But what really makes this film
worthwhile is the role played by Kevin Spacey, and all his little quirks as he
fills it out. Because, you know, he is key to the surprise twist at the film’s
end. A friend of mine from high school has a father who is notable in town—I won’t
give him away—who had an expression for a suggestion in a male’s personality of
possible homosexuality (I don't mean to be invidious here): a “hint of mint.” “Verbal” definitely gives off a “hint
of mint,” and this helps the performance in the way that Anthony Perkins added
grace notes to his Norman Bates in Psycho
(1960) with his effeminate (and boyish) mannerisms: what could add more
dimensionality on the one hand, and a smokescreen to throw us off as to a
character being a “baddie,” than some “hints of mint”?
When you see how Spacey performs
in the film, you are fascinated by how he is actually trying to convey, at so
many turns, that—to re-enlist my own smokescreen—the Easter Bunny is not really
Santa Claus. This is the one thing that makes the film worth seeing more than
once, along with maybe your just wanting to figure out the story more.
Other than this, the film is
pretty much an entertaining enough way to kill a rainy Saturday afternoon, but
maybe not much more.
End note.
Clarification 6/14/14: What I meant was not that the ethnic styling in itself was annoying, but that, as is apparently a sort of comical character flourish, Fenster sometimes first talks in an odd mumble, and then has to repeat his statement (at the request of someone else), which then sounds clearer. Whether or not the mumble has an ethnic "accent" to it (and the mumble is what strikes me as a bit annoying), when he speaks more clearly, the ethnic styling actually makes it amusing, to me.
End note.
Clarification 6/14/14: What I meant was not that the ethnic styling in itself was annoying, but that, as is apparently a sort of comical character flourish, Fenster sometimes first talks in an odd mumble, and then has to repeat his statement (at the request of someone else), which then sounds clearer. Whether or not the mumble has an ethnic "accent" to it (and the mumble is what strikes me as a bit annoying), when he speaks more clearly, the ethnic styling actually makes it amusing, to me.
