A kidnapping in the desert
By David Ansen
March 9, 1990
Tense, sexy thriller does Jim Thompson proud The scummy, treacherous world of the late thriller writer Jim Thompson exerts a fatal attraction for moviemakers. Directors as various as Sam Peckinpah ("The Getaway") and Bertrand Tavernier ("Coup de Torchon") have filmed Thompson's twisted fictions, and soon we'll be seeing Stephen Frears's "The Grifters." For the moment, however, the Thompson movie to beat is After Dark, My Sweet, a mesmerizing chamber thriller that re-creates Thompson's tilted, paranoid vision with unsettling grace. Director James Foley and his co-writer, Robert Redlin, perfectly capture the moral instability at the core of Thompson's books, which are often narrated by psychopaths. When you can't trust the tale-teller, everything about the tale becomes dangerously I ambiguous. In "After Dark, My Sweet," the I audience knows no more than the protagonist, Kid Collins (Jason Patric) a scruffy former boxer and escaped mental patient. And we're not at all sure about him. Is he crazy, punch-drunk, a liar, a naif, a hero? "Collie," as he's called, meets Fay (Racilel Ward), a hard-drinking widow, in a bar in the desert town of Indio. She takes him under her broken wing, and introduces him to "Uncle Bud" (Bruce Dern), a small-time chiseler and former cop who ropes Collie into a plot to kidnap the son of a wealthy Palm Springs family. Are they setting Collie up for a fall? Is Fay's attraction to the ex-fighter for real? Can any of these losers be trusted? Nobody talks straight: the brittle, bitter Fay is all teasing double talk; the slimily gregarious Uncle Bud keeps you guessing about his true allegiances; and Collie himself is a volatile mixture of opportunism, violence and virtue. Yet these lowlifes keep us riveted; their tangled dance of attraction and self-destruction becomes a nasty paradigm for the doubt that resides in all human relationships. "After Dark, My Sweet" is one of those projects that seems to bring out the best in everyone. Nothing Foley's done in the past prepares you for this. "Reckless" and the Madonna comedy "Who's That Girl?" were best forgotten, and he smothered the intriguing crime drama "At Close Range" with art-house pretensions. Here he resists the temptation to overstylize Thompson's blunt, black style: he keeps action taut but gives his actors breathing space to work out their feint-andjab rhythms. Patric, who seemed like just another handsome kid with cheekbones in "The Lost Boys," is a terrific Collie. Unshaven and looking like John McEnroe in a dazed funk, he uses his crestfallen pathos to cagey effect--he suckers his foes into the ropes. Dern--funny, repellent and pathetic--hasn't been this good in ages, and Ward is everything you'd want in a film noir good/bad girl, her frayed glamour both hard and haunting. The tarnished desert atmosphere is freshly imagined by cinematographer Mark Plummer and production designer David Brisbin: they don't fall back on hackneyed film noir conceits. Like a hot Santa Ana wind, this sexy, unsentimental thriller makes your senses tingle. Source: Newsweek; 9/3/90, Vol. 116 Issue 10, p67, 2/3p, 1c |