MORTAL THOUGHTS
A film review by Wayne Citrin
Copyright 1991 Wayne Citrin
Micro-summary: Alan Rudolph does a murder mystery.
Summary: A young woman (Demi Moore) gets inadvertently involved in a murder committed by her best friend (Glenne Headley). The facts come out at the police interrogation.
I'll just start by saying that Alan Rudolph is one of my favorite filmmakers, and that he's done some of my favorite films (THE MODERNS, and TROUBLE IN MIND). He always tries something unusual, and it's usually interesting. When the film started, though, I was surprised. Where was the surreal or hyperreal story line and physical setting? Where is Rudolph's production company (Geraldine Chaplin, Keith Carradine, Genevieve Bujold)? Something unusual was going on.
As I learned later, this isn't entirely an Alan Rudolph film. Rudolph joined the production a week into the shooting, when the producers (Demi Moore and Taylor Hackford) fired the original director and brought in Rudolph. Rudolph was able to bring long-time collaborator Mark Isham to do the music, but he had no hand in the story. Still, he was able to put his stamp on the film.
Cynthia Kellogg (Demi Moore) and Joyce Urbansky (Glenne Headley) are best friends. Cynthia also works in Joyce's beauty parlor. Joyce is married to James, a dangerous and violent lout (played by Bruce Willis, Moore's real-life husband). Joyce keeps talking about killing James, and, well, one day it happens. Cynthia is there, and she ends up helping her friend conceal the evidence and gets involved more and more deeply. The strain affects both women, and the friendship unravels. Cynthia isn't helped by the fact that her own husband isn't any great shakes (although he's a step above James).
All of this is revealed as flashbacks during Cynthia's interrogation. But the senior detective (Harvey Keitel) has some doubts about Cynthia's story....
The film is nicely paced, and the screenplay gives us good reason to understand why James is killed when it happens. We understand how and why a law-abiding friend can be drawn into a crime, and then find it hard to extricate herself. The friendship between the two women is believable. Their acting is good, as is that of Willis, who makes a convincing and hateful villain. The supporting characters particularly Keitel's detective and Cynthia's husband (John Pankow) are well-drawn and well-acted. The ending is good. (Won't say anything more than that.) This is a superior murder mystery.
Rudolph's contribution lies in the pacing, which is slow enough to raise the tension, along with appropriate use of slow motion and sound, vivid colors, and shiny lights reflected in wet nighttime streets. Isham's music contributes to the atmosphere. The main problem is that he's constrained by the realism of the script, which just doesn't allow many of the strange Rudolph touches (like the alternate reality of 'Rain City'/Seattle in TROUBLE IN MIND or the modern-art painted backdrops to many of the scenes in THE MODERNS). This is definitely Bayonne, NJ in the late 1980's, and there's nothing Rudolph can do to change that.
As I said before, this is a superior murder mystery, and it also shows that Rudolph is capable of handling conventional genre filmmaking if he has to. So it's worth seeing in itself. However, there are any number of directors who could have made this film. I'd rather wait for a film that only Alan Rudolph could make.
-- Wayne Citrin citrin@soglio.colorado.edu citrin@boulder.colorado.edu
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