THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD
A film review by P. Milan
Copyright 1995 P. Milan
The new wave of gangster films, spearheaded by Quentin Tarantino, keeps on growing. Once, young filmmakers wrote and directed these kind of films in homage to Martin Scorsese; now things have grown more and more outlandish in tribute to Tarantino's warped sensibilities.
Gary Fleder's THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD walks a line between the two. The film stars Andy Garcia as Jimmy the Saint, a kindly gangster-turned-legitimate businessman who runs Afterlife Advice, in which the dying record their last thought so that their children can refer to them in years to come. The business is failing, so to raise money, Jimmy's forced to come out of retirement and work for The Man With The Plan.
As played by Christopher Walken, the Man is a paraplegic don, who conducts his business from a wheelchair. (Walken must be the only actor who can project menace while moving only his head.) The Man sends Jimmy on an "action"; capture the new boyfriend of his son's former fiance, and convince him that marriage would be a very bad idea.
Jimmy assembles a crew of like-minded individuals; Franchise (William Forsythe), who now runs a trailer park; Pieces (Christopher Lloyd), a leprous criminal; Easy Wind (Bill Nunn), an out-of-town player; and Critical Bill (Treat Williams), a certified psychotic.
As must be obvious, nothing goes as planned; by the end of the "action," the boyfriend *and* the fiance lie dead, and the Man With The Plan has hits out for all five members of the crew. Jimmy's forced to scramble around, trying to save his boys, protect the woman he loves (Gabrielle Anwar), rescue a prostitute friend from the streets (Fairuza Balk), and in general, keep from getting killed.
All this plays out with a mix of absurdity and profundity. For every over-the-top touch (Critical Bill is first sighted in the basement of a funeral parlor, using a corpse as a punching bag), there's a moment of quietude and clarity. Christopher Lloyd's final speech is one of the best of these moments.
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD is certainly dark- humored, especially in respect to Critical Bill and a hitman named Mister Shhh (played by a fairly menacing Steve Buscemi), but it also has a genuinely affecting love story between Garcia and Anwar. The performances are first-rate across the board, especially Garcia, Walken, and Williams, who deserves a John Travolta-style resurrection for his work here.
My one big problem? Just this; I'm a Warren Zevon fan. How in the hell do you write a movie called THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD and *not* put in the Zevon song of the same name? Ah, well.
-- Tick pmilan@fsc.edu
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