FROGS FOR SNAKES
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. TSG Pictures Director: Amos Poe Writer: Amos Poe Cast: Barbara Hershey, Robbie Coltrane, Harry Hamlin, Ian Hart, John Leguizamo, Lisa Marie, Debi Mazar, Ron Perlman, Clarence Williams III
When Loews was about to open the big, new Kips Bay Theater in midtown Manhattan, the company's ad campaign emphasized that the building would serve the city's eight million movie critics. If everybody's a critic, we're all actors as well. We've been putting on acts ever since we were little kids, performing for our parents. When we become adults we don't all try to become professionals, but it seems that way. After all, a profession that leaves 96% of its staff unemployed at any given time is overcrowded to say the least. Some of us say that we'd give our right arm to play the part of Cyrano, or Juliet, or Agamemnon, but the less masochistic among us would "kill to get the part." Writer-director Amos Poe takes that last exclamation literally and in so doing fashions an imaginative neo-noir comic romp that is alternately bloody and mirthful, unfeeling and sentimental, expressive and frosty. What a pity that as a story "Frogs for Snakes" does not gel, as the imaginative indie features a stunning performance by Barbara Hershey in the role of the only member of an acting class that can actually enact a scene convincingly. She's bogged down by a plot that for all its brevity is more convoluted than "Pulp Fiction" while at the same time possessing its share of engaging surprises.
As Eva, Barbara Hershey appears all things to all people. By day a waitress in a lower-Manhattan diner, she spends her nights alternately working as a violent collector for a loan- shark and as a burnt-out student in an acting class. With a five-year-old son in tow, she longs to get out of the rat-race, to move to a small home on Long Island, get a job somewhere, and give up the hip, stressful milieu that makes New York the world's most exciting city. The ex-wife of gang boss Al Santana (Robbie Coltrain), she continues to work for the man by maiming his deadbeats while for his part, Al considers himself more an impresario than a mafioso. Al, who runs an off-Broadway theater, is currently casting for David Mamet's "American Buffalo." Never mind how shallow some of his fellow mobsters appear: all fancy themselves to be contemporary Marlon Brandos. When they're not killing or crippling deadbeats, double-crossers, and especially those who are competing with them for the precious three roles in the play, they are practicing monologues in their desperate desire to strut their stuff on Al's miserable stage.
At times you'll not know for sure when the actors are continuing their conversation or entering into monologues, so closely are life and art blended into director Poe's tangled, meandering plot. Nor is there much justification for some of the murderous actions, particularly one that takes place in a bar--a shootout that reminds us of the turbulent scenes that took place in Dodge City saloons between songs performed by a chanteuse named Kitty.
The cast seem to be having fun, though. John Leguizamo as Zip is somewhat more passionate about his Marlon Brando impersonation than about his sexy liaison with Eva, while Debi Mazar as Simone resembles every director's groan of a loser: a vindictive bimbo who is among those who murder the competition for time on the stage. Eva's decision to take off from the Big City and head out to New York's lighthouse country down east does not seem convincing. She's too hip to last a month vegetating in a Long Island shack, as he ex, Al, puts things. Hers is a dazzling performance, all the more so because she stands out among the losers to do their best for Poe to sound like frustrated thesps. On the whole, the cast strain so much for amateurism that the movie as a whole comes across as though from a neophyte director's overly ambitious excesses. The title of the movie is from Sonny Boy Williamson's 1957 song "Fattering Frogs for Snakes," which has the lyrics, "It took me a long time to find out my mistakes. It took me a long time to find out my mistakes, but I bet you my bottom dollar, I am fatterning no more frogs for snakes." Or so Eva feels as she leaves her corrupt life behind.
Rated R. Running Time: 92 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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