BILLY BATHGATE
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1991) ** (out of four)
Dustin Hoffman is undoubtedly one of the best actors of the past thirty years, but even the best stars appear in mediocre films at times. I'd compare Hoffman's role in this movie to Al Pacino in CITY HALL. His performance is decent even though he's relegated to a supporting role and the movie is mostly boring. Another similarity between the two films is that both focus on a young man who looks up to the veteran actor as an idol. Pacino was the mayor that the deputy mayor (John Cusack) looked up to in CITY HALL and Hoffman is the mob lord that Billy Bathgate (Loren Dean) idolizes.
Bathgate realizes that, in Great Depression America, his only real chance for monetary success is in the organized crime game, which he enters after Dutch Schultz (Hoffman) notices him juggling four balls at once (and, yes, he is fully clothed at the time). Suddenly he's able to give out dollar bills to his friends and family, with the admonition to, "Go out and buy yourself something nice." BILLY BATHGATE is about as cliche-ridden as a movie in this genre can be. I was waiting for the phrase "dirty copper" to come into play somewhere along the line.
The plot has Schultz distracted by his upcoming court trial for tax evasion. Bathgate has to look after the mobster's girlfriend (Nicole Kidman) in the meantime. Kidman plays a married woman who is just coming out of an affair with a double-crossing mobster (Bruce Willis) who's now making love to the ocean floor. Bathgate becomes her third extramarital conquest, after he teaches her the secret of juggling balls. This time, that does have a sexual connotation. To put it another way, it's Prohibition but he's slipping her a longneck anyway.
BILLY BATHGATE was a box office bomb for a reason. It's just not a good movie. Besides being poorly paced and thinly plotted, the ending still doesn't resolve much. You're almost as surprised to see the credits roll as you are relieved that the movie's over. Even big stars make mistakes sometimes. It's just too bad these three didn't learn their lesson after BILLY BATHGATE. Hoffman went on to do the bland HERO, Kidman starred in the boring Irish epic FAR AND AWAY and Willis, well, does the name HUDSON HAWK ring a bell?
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