NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Paramount) Starring: Andy Garcia, Ian Holm, Lena Olin, Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Liebman, James Gandolfini. Screenplay: Sidney Lumet, based on the novel "Tainted Evidence" by Robert Daley. Producers: Thom Mount and Josh Kramer. Director: Sidney Lumet. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 115 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There are a couple of things you can generally count on finding in a Sidney Lumet film: people in positions of power or influence who become corrupted, and the noble crusaders who oppose them. In a career spanning six decades, Lumet has trained his camera on the back-room workings of power in America, creating gems like TWELVE ANGRY MEN, SERPICO and NETWORK in the process. Recent years, however, have found Lumet telling the same cynical story of perverted criminal justice over and over: PRINCE OF THE CITY, Q&A, GUILTY AS SIN. NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN is not a bad film. It's just a terribly familiar one, one which Lumet races through so quickly that it leaves little more than a blur of crooked cops and shattered naivete.
Andy Garcia stars as Sean Casey, a young New York prosecutor who gets handed a career-making case. Notorious drug dealer Jordan Washington (Shiek Mahmud-Bey) stands charged with the murder of two police officers, and the wounding of a third who happens to be Sean's father Liam (Ian Holm). The district attorney (Ron Liebman) thinks this connection makes Sean perfect for the case, which would appear to be a slam dunk even for an inexperienced prosecutor. The surprise comes when Jordan's lawyer, civil rights attorney Sam Vigoda (Richard Dreyfuss), mounts an unexpected defense. Jordan, he claims, was acting in self-defense against cops he had been paying off for years, but who now planned to kill him for refusing to pay more. As Sean follows up on the accusations of police corruption, he finds them leading him into dark corners where the line between justice and the law gets very indistinct.
The best moments in NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN come early in the film, with a superb montage of Sean learning the hard facts about his new job. One judge chuckles at Sean's suggestion that a $500 bail for a poor black woman is too low; another judge dozes off during an earnest summation. The day-to-day workings of the legal system may never have looked as mundane and depressing on film.
That's all interesting stuff, but it's nothing particularly new. TV programs like "Law & Order" have turned the technicalities and small compromises of crime and punishment into effective drama without turning them into the stuff of morality plays. NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN is about Sean's fall from grace, which is both overly melodramatic and a bit disingenuous. If the indignities we watch Sean suffer in the first fifteen minutes aren't enough to puncture his idealism, he's already more saint than civil servant.
Sean's character might have made more sense if watching NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN didn't feel like a drill from a speed-reading course. Weeks of narrative time fly by in seconds, Jordan Washington's trial is over in an anti-climactic ten minutes, Sean and one of Vigoda's assistant counselors (Lena Olin) become soul-mates overnight, and Sean is elected district attorney almost before he is ever a candidate. The unpredictable rhythms Lumet injects in NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN would be welcome of they didn't come at the expense of a well-developed protagonist. Andy Garcia is an actor of limited range even when he has a detailed characterization at his disposal. Sean Casey, for all his moral turmoil, is little more than a prop in a film so over-burdened with plot that he gets carried along in its wake.
There are some interesting performances in NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN, notably Ron Liebman's flamboyant work as the animated, angina-waiting-to-happen D.A. Morgenstern, which make many individual scenes in the film worth watching. Even those performances, however, are subjugated to the idea of the story. The rules are only there to be bent, Lumet informs us. If he hadn't already told us the same thing before -- and better -- NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN might have been a more engrossing experience.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 cop pleas: 6.
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