Blood and Wine

Director Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson had a number of memorable collaborations in the 1970s (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens) and worked once together during the 1980s (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and again during the 1990s (Man Trouble). Towards the end of ‘90s, they made a nasty little neo-noir called Blood and Wine (1997). Much like filmmaker Robert Towne, Rafelson is a survivor of the ‘70s still using his reputation from that decade to make modestly budgeted, character-driven films – the kind that established his career in the first place. Blood and Wine is easily the best film from the later part of his career.

Alex Gates (Jack Nicholson) is a wine merchant in a dysfunctional marriage with his wife Suzanne (Judy Davis) and her slacker son, Jason (Stephen Dorff). He’s also got a sexy mistress named Gabriela (Jennifer Lopez) on the side and not above stealing from some of his high-end customers. In fact, he’s casing one house in particular with a diamond necklace worth a million dollars. His partner-in-crime is a low-life Brit named Victor (Michael Caine).

From the opening credits, Rafelson establishes the harshness of this world as Jason and his friend Henry (Harold Perrineau Jr.) catch and kill a shark on the beach for money. The almost nonchalant way that Jason puts the animal out of its misery speaks volumes about the rules that govern this world. Jason still lives with his parents who seem to be married but the magic is clearly long gone. Suzanne’s first line spoken to Alex says it all: “Nice to have you home, just for the novelty.” He offers up an excuse and she responds sarcastically. Suzanne probably has a pretty good idea of what he’s really been up to but is too tired to care or do anything about it. Judy Davis does a nice job of conveying her character’s world-weariness, like when she responds to his promise, “Things are gonna turn around,” with, “That’s your theme song.” They’re a couple clearly going through the motions.

Rafelson masterfully introduces us to all the characters and establishes their relationships with one another in the first 20 minutes. Then, he lets the various plot developments play out. As with most noirs, the fun is anticipating who will double-cross who as no one can be trusted because they all have their own agenda that doesn’t fully reveal itself until the film’s climactic moments. It’s a shell game of sorts as we figure out who’s playing whom and why. For example, Gabriela is fired from her nanny job and gets involved with Jason. Is she being sincere or is she playing an angle?

This is Jack Nicholson in one of his less showier roles, as if hooking back up with his old friend brought the character actor out in him again. It’s a meaty role that eschews the charismatic movie star parts he does in films like As Good As It Gets (1997), for much darker material. Alex is driven by greed and it gradually consumes him and Nicholson does a good job of conveying the effect it has over his character. Alex has his own wine store but business must not be too good as he’s broke. He may wear nice suits and have his own business but deep down he’s a simple thief, casing the safe of one of his wealthy clients and having an affair with their beautiful nanny who may or may not be in on the job. However, Alex is an amateur, which is why he’s in league with Victor, who, despite his crappy health, is a lethal, experienced criminal. Like many doomed noir protagonists, Alex dreams big – taking his cut of the job and running off with Gabriela to live a fabulous life. The reality is that at home his wife is still coping with an injury and is addicted to painkillers.

Michael Caine is excellent as a really nasty piece of work – an ex-convict lacking the social skills that Alex’s calculating, smooth operator has. Victor is a chain-smoker even though he’s one coughing fit away from keeling over on the spot. He is driven by his lack of time. He knows that he’s dying and Caine does a great job of conveying his character’s increasing desperation. With his painted on black hair and moustache, the veteran actor plays a world-class sleazoid and manages to all but steal the film away from Nicholson.

Along with Backbeat (1994), Blood and Wine is easily the best thing Stephen Dorff has done in a diverse if not uneven career. He plays the stepson who helps out with his stepfather’s business even though he’d rather spend his time fishing, which is his true passion. At first, Jason seems like a lazy twentysomething but as the film progresses, additional layers of his character are revealed and like everyone else, there is more to him than there seems. He is the only true innocent in the film but he soon gets caught up in Alex’s dirty dealings after his stepfather and mother have an argument that turns violent. The arc of his character is a fascinating one as he goes from an idealistic dreamer to a vengeful son.

Watching Blood and Wine is a sober reminder of just how interesting Jennifer Lopez was to watch on-screen before she started doing an endless stream of romantic comedies. She is quite good as a Cuban immigrant who risked her life to leave her native country and start a better life in the United States. She will do anything to stay. Lopez plays the role of vulnerable girl but she’s really a femme fatale, manipulating the men to get what she wants.

Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson had been trying to get Blood and Wine made since 1992 but the studios weren’t interested in a downbeat thriller filled with amoral, scheming characters. Rafelson realized that he would have to go the independent route. He managed to secure a modest, $11 million budget but it soon doubled when he persuaded Nicholson to come back on board – with his usual fee, natch. However, the actor wasn’t just in it for the money. Making Blood and Wine offered him a chance to reunite with Rafelson, whom he had made several films together, but also it was a change of pace from studio films like Mars Attacks! (1996). Rafelson said at the time, “I don’t know if he gets that many opportunities to play roles that challenge him.”

Blood and Wine received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Michael Caine’s performance: “Here he is convincing and sardonically amusing as a wreck of a man who chain-smokes, coughs, spits up blood and still goes through the rituals of a jewel thief because that is who he is.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “In fact, the real filial tenderness takes place between Nicholson and Caine. The two old curtain chewers display a real affection for one another as buddies linked as fellow losers, even if one is a 'respectable’ businessman and the other a lowlife who coughs up blood.” In his review for the Toronto Star, Peter Howell wrote, “Blood and Wine is hit-and-miss, and occasionally slips into rote drama. But other times, it cuts to the bone of human desires and fears.” The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey wrote, “Nowadays, every noir caper film seems to be a campy pastiche of references, but Rafelson and Nicholson get back to dirty basics of the genre: a whole universe of greed, lust and pain.”

In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “And with its bleary humid atmosphere that evokes the march of time as a procession of tipsy tequila sunsets, it is wonderful at sustaining a mood of end-of-the-road tropical dissipation.” However, the Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “Blood and Wine has neither the red cells nor the vintage to make the experience potent enough.” In his review for USA Today, Mike Clark wrote, “The movie’s own payoff is compelling enough, but the project has a weightless feel that limits involvement.”

Caine and Nicholson make a fun team to watch as the former sleazes his way through Blood and Wine with his greasy black hair and dry sense of humor that plays well off of the latter’s increasingly desperate schemer. Alex is an amateur crook who thinks he’s a professional while Victor looks like an amateur but is a pro. As the film progresses, Alex takes more damage and Victor’s health gets increasingly worse. They’re quite a broken-down pair of crooks that banter back and forth like an old married couple. Rafelson does not forget that ultimately this film is driven by its characters and lets us get to know them and their motivations so that we are personally involved in their respective fates. By the end of Blood and Wine plenty of the former rather than the latter has been spilled. This film has been seen as the conclusion to an informal trilogy of films about the decay of American values and an examination of troubled families that began with Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Like those films, Blood and Wine features a deeply dysfunctional family only this time one of its members is driven to extreme behavior for money. Rafelson shows how Alex’s actions have ramifications, affecting those around him, tainting everything with awful results.

SOURCES

Howell, Peter. “Everything Old is New Again.” Toronto Star. February 19, 1997.

Merzer, Martin. “Days of Wine and No Poses.” Sunday Telegraph. February 9, 1997.

David Cronenberg Blogathon: Naked Lunch

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared over at Tony Dayoub's blog Cinematic Viewfinder as part of his fantastic David Cronenberg Blogathon. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you check out all the wonderful submissions and links that he's posted.

Widely regarded as unfilmable because it defied normal narrative logic and for containing some of the most perverse, often disturbing passages of sex and violence ever committed to the page, William S. Burroughs' seminal novel Naked Lunch was the ideal project for filmmaker David Cronenberg. In many respects, the themes and subject matter the book explores parallel many of the preoccupations of his films: the merging of flesh with machines, human transformation, and secret societies. One only has to look at an early film like Videodrome (1983) to see Burroughs’ influence — the mix of pulpy exploitation with high concept ideas. The characters in Cronenberg’s films, like the characters in Burroughs’ fiction, are morally ambiguous. It is not as easy to identify with them as it is with characters in more mainstream entertainment.

As Cronenberg was the first to admit, a conventional adaptation of Naked Lunch is impossible as it would be banned in every country. So, he wisely merged key elements from the book along with bits and pieces from the author’s early novels, chief among them Junky and Exterminator!, with aspects of Burroughs’ life, tempered with black humor as we are taken to surreal places. The end result is a fascinating collaboration between two like-minded artists and a film that is ultimately about the writing process as it defines the film’s protagonists much as it did Burroughs – writing acts as a catharsis, a way of dealing with guilt.

Ornette Coleman’s freaky, free-form jazz complements Howard Shore’s ominous score to create a film noir vibe right from the start which is in keeping in tone with Burroughs’ early work that often parodied badly written pulp crime novels. When he’s not spraying for bugs at people’s homes to pay the bills, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) hangs out with his friends, and fellow writers, Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell) who are introduced arguing about the writing process. Hank (a thinly-veiled riff on Jack Kerouac) argues that to rewrite is to betray ones own thoughts as it disrupts the flow of words while Martin (a stand-in for Allen Ginsberg) counters by saying that one should rewrite so that they consider everything from every possible angle in order to produce the best work possible. Hank sees this as censorship and a betrayal of one’s own best, honest and most primitive thoughts. When asked for his opinion, Bill simply replies, “exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill is in danger of losing his job because he keeps running out of bug powder. It seems that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is shooting it up. When he confronts her about it, she deadpans, “It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” Pretty soon she’s doing so much of it that all she has to do is breathe on a cockroach and it dies. Bill soon starts shooting up bug powder too and begins to imagine giant talking insects that tell him he’s actually a secret agent. He’s instructed to kill his wife who happens to be a rival agent for Interzone Incorporated, a shadowy organization. The boundaries between what are real and what are Bill’s elaborate hallucinations become blurred, leading him into the mysterious realm of Interzone where everyday objects, like his typewriter, transform into mechanized insects that talk to him. The line between what he is writing and what he is living becomes blurred beyond recognition, much like Max and his relationship to television in Videodrome.

In real life, Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in 1951 while they were living in Mexico City and it was this tragic incident that motivated him to become a writer as a way of dealing with the guilt over what he had done. He said, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” Cronenberg understands what a pivotal part this played in Burroughs’ life and incorporates it into his film. In a nice touch, there is a scene where Bill goes to a pawnshop and trades in the gun he shot Joan with for a typewriter. It’s a symbolic transition from one phase of his life to another.

Bill uses drugs to escape the horror of what he has done and his mind creates an elaborate alternate reality known as Interzone where he is a secret agent that writes reports (a.k.a. his book) about his “mission” on a creepy bug/typewriter hybrid that gets aroused by his forceful typing. He travels through a shadowy world where he is reunited with Joan, this time around a femme fatale type, Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands), a suave businessman that sexually preys on young men, and the notorious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who initially seems to want to help Bill but turns out to be the powerful puppetmaster of Interzone.

Thankfully, Cronenberg retains Burroughs’ dry, sardonic sense of humor as well as touching upon his self-loathing about being homosexual. He’s aided in these endeavors by Peter Weller’s excellent performance as Burroughs surrogate Bill Lee. No stranger to fantastical genre films (see RoboCop and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai), the actor nails Burroughs’ unique cadence – the lazy drawl and the dry wit. Hearing him recite several amusing stories right out of Naked Lunch, coupled with his tall, gaunt appearance, only reinforces how well cast he was in this role. Weller also does a good job conveying the lonely desperation of a strung-out junkie and the almost zombie-like state he achieves when zonked out of his head on junk. Along with her role in Barton Fink (1991), Judy Davis plays the doomed muse of a writer consumed by his obsessions. As Joan Lee, Davis is quite good as an almost vampiric drug addict complete with sallow complexion and haunted look. As Joan Frost, Bill’s Interzone version of his wife, she’s healthier and more confident but the end result is still the same.

In 1984, producer Jeremy Thomas met David Cronenberg at the Toronto Film Festival where he had bought the rights to Stephen Frears’ film The Hit (1984). Thomas had heard that Cronenberg wanted to do a film adaptation of Naked Lunch and he wanted to produce it. This wasn’t the first time someone expressed an interest in turning the book into a film. In 1971, long-time friend of William S. Burroughs and painter and writer, Brion Gysin wrote a screenplay. Antony Balch was going to direct and Mick Jagger was going to star in it but the project never got past the planning stages. Burroughs said of this version that the script was “long burlesque and includes a series of music-hall comedy songs.” In 1972, television producer Chuck Barris, of all people, gave it a go with writer Terry Southern as the proposed screenwriter but it too went nowhere (the mind boggles at what those two would’ve come up with!). In 1979, Frank Zappa approached Burroughs with the notion of doing Naked Lunch as an off-Broadway musical but again this never materialized.

After Cronenberg and Thomas met, the producer optioned Burroughs’ novel. That same year, Cronenberg met the legendary author at his 70th birthday party at the Limelight Night Club in New York City. He had seen and admired several of Cronenberg’s films and also had an affinity for many of the themes they explored. Burroughs said, “when I heard that David was interested in doing the film I thought … he’s the one that can do it if anyone can.” The next year, Cronenberg, Burroughs and Thomas traveled to Tangier, the city where the book was written, in order to retrace its creation.

Cronenberg and Thomas began the process of adapting the book into a film in 1985. Not surprisingly, they had a difficult time getting financing for the film because of the book’s notorious reputation of being unfilmable. Cronenberg said, “a literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country in the world.” During the five years of the film’s development, Cronenberg kept in contact with Burroughs and explained that the film would be about the act of writing Naked Lunch. He finished the first draft of the script in 1989 while on location in England, acting in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990).

He gave the book’s fragmented collection of set pieces a more traditional narrative structure. While the Mugwump creatures are a Burroughs invention from the book, the insect typewriters were created by Cronenberg to bring to “the screen things that can’t be shown in a mainstream movie.” In addition to drawing from Naked Lunch, he also incorporated elements from other books by Burroughs, like Exterminator!, Queer and Letters to Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs read the script around the Christmas of 1989. He called Cronenberg and told him how much he liked it. The filmmaker finished the script in June 1990 and then scouted locations in Tangier with Thomas, production designer Carol Spier and director of photography Peter Suschitzky.

While working on the script, Cronenberg received a letter from actor Peter Weller. He had heard about the project while making RoboCop 2 (1990). Weller was a big fan of both Burroughs’ books and Cronenberg’s films. In his letter, he inquired about any involvement with the project. The two men met in New York City nine months later and the actor landed the lead role. To prepare for the film, Weller met Burroughs several times in the fall of 1990. When Judy Davis read the script she was so horrified by it that she threw it against the wall. She ended up reading it eight times and talked to Cronenberg on the phone before she agreed to do the film. She said, “I felt there was something I could learn as an actress through doing it, through facing my fears.” She did not read the novel but did read a lot about expatriate American writers and perfected an American accent.

One week before principal photography was to begin, the Persian Gulf War started and the three-week shoot in Tangier was canceled. Cronenberg rewrote the script over the weekend and decided to shoot the film entirely in Toronto over three months in 1991. According to the director, the film became “more internalized and hallucinatory, so that one understands by the end of the film that Lee never really leaves New York City.”

For the film’s special effects, Cronenberg reunited with Chris Walas and his company, responsible for the gruesome effects on the remake of The Fly (1986). Cronenberg met with Walas nine months before principal photography to discuss his ideas for the film. Three months later, Walas and his team submitted their designs to the director. When Peter Suschitzky first read the script, he felt that it should have an expressionistic look reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) but Cronenberg wanted his film to look normal because the “craziness is interior.” To reflect the film’s dark subject matter, Suschitzky suffused the film with shadows and gave it a “sense of romanticism … a slight sickness that you find in late Romanticism in German literature and art between 1900 and 1930.”

Before the film came out, Cronenberg was misquoted in The Advocate as saying that Burroughs was not a homosexual and the magazine told its readers not to expect much from the film. The director tried unsuccessfully to contact the article’s author. Naked Lunch received predictably mixed reviews from critics. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Peter Weller’s performance: “Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of Robocop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “David Cronenberg’s highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing — even the film about writing.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but she did praise Peter Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called the film, “tame compared with its source.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a “lack of conviction.”

Burroughs saw the film and liked it, saying, “of course, it’s a Cronenberg film. I think he’s done a great job. Nothing at all what I would’ve done, but that’s as it should be.”

Ultimately, Naked Lunch is a hallucinatory nightmare with no escape for its protagonist. Try as he might, Bill cannot escape what he did to his wife as much as he can escape who he is – a junkie and a homosexual. There is some sense that by the film’s conclusion he has come to terms with what he’s done and who he is. Everything else – Interzone, etc. – is just window-dressing or, rather, Bill trying to work things out. Writing provides a way for him to come to terms with the guilt he feels. Think of it as writing as a form of catharsis and finishing Naked Lunch offered some kind of closure on a painful part of his life. Cronenberg’s film, along with Barton Fink, are two of the most fascinating films about writers and writing as they explore what motivates one to write. In those two cases it comes out of a great pain and an inner turmoil that, at least in Burroughs’ case, leads to some kind of redemption.

SOURCES

Indiana, Gary. “The Naked Lunch Report.” Village Voice. December 31, 1991.

Snowden, Lynn. “Which Is the Fly and Which is the Human?” Esquire. February 1992.

Weinrich, Regina. “Naked Lunch: Behind the Scenes.” Entertainment Weekly. January 17, 1992.

The Ref

If you’re tired of the non-stop parade of saccharine Christmas specials or the glut of sappy seasonal programming on the Hallmark and Lifetime Channels, then may I recommend The Ref (1994). Directed by the late Ted Demme and starring his pal, comedian Denis Leary, this film is a wonderfully acerbic comedy with a heart that actually delivers on its zany premise of a small-time cat burglar forced to pose as a marriage counselor to a bitterly dysfunctional couple on Christmas Eve. For once, hilarity does ensue.

We meet Lloyd (Kevin Spacey) and Caroline Chasseur (Judy Davis) discussing their sex life (or lack thereof) to their marriage counselor (B.D. Wong). Caroline complains that they haven’t had sex in a long time and when they did it was a routine, going-through-the-motions act. She even has dreams of her husband castrated and being served up buffet-style. Lloyd is disgusted with her admissions and is clearly not thrilled with discussing the intimate details of their sex life with a stranger. His contempt for her hangs so thick in the air that you could practically cut it with a knife. Lloyd and Caroline have issues that could give the couple from The War of the Roses (1989) a run for their money.

Meanwhile, Gus (Denis Leary) is breaking into an expensive-looking house only to get sprayed with cat urine when he trips an alarm connected to the safe he’s trying to crack. He’s then attacked by a dog and beats a hasty retreat. In a nice touch, Demme shows us just how tough the dog is when Gus whips a pool ball at it which the canine catches in its mouth and then crushes with its teeth. On the run from the police, Gus takes Caroline hostage while she’s in a convenience store and forces her and Lloyd to go back to their house where he plans to hide out until the heat cools off. Gus gets a preview of what he’s in store for when, en route to their house and despite being held at gunpoint, Lloyd and Caroline continue to argue amongst themselves. An exasperated Gus mutters, “Great. I hijacked my fucking parents.”

Lt. Huff (Raymond J. Barry), the town’s police chief, has his hands tied with deputies who are inept and hopelessly inexperienced. The town elders (led by Robert Ridgely as a pompous blowhard) are breathing down his neck because they’re worried about the thief running loose in their nice, affluent small-town. You really feel for the chief who is stuck with incompetent deputies, is bullied by the rich townsfolk and muscled off the case by the state police. Raymond J. Barry wisely doesn’t play him as an idiot but as a guy good at his job but surrounded by idiots and mired in local politics.

Once home, Lloyd and Caroline’s teenage son Jesse (Robert J. Steinmiller, Jr.) shows up. He is a burgeoning blackmailer currently framing one of his teachers (J.K. Simmons) at the military academy he’s attending with incriminating photographs. Things get interesting when Lloyd’s mother (Glynis Johns), a real piece of work/battle axe, and her bossy daughter-in-law (Christine Baranski) with her family show up for dinner. Gus poses as a marriage counselor. Naturally, much of the film’s humor is derived from the thief’s blue collar attitude colliding with this snobby family.

The real villain of the film isn’t Gus but Lloyd’s shrew of a mother. She’s always complaining or telling others what to do and the real fireworks occur when Gus puts the woman in her place. The Chasseur family dinner is one of the film’s major comic set pieces as everyone wears these ridiculous headpieces consisting of a crown with several lit candles on them. Lloyd, Caroline and Gus try to maintain a facade of normalcy while the thief attempts to bluff his way past Lloyd’s mother’s nagging questions. Kevin Spacey has a blast feigning happiness in an obvious way and Judy Davis is a lot of fun to watch as her character gets progressively drunker, almost as if she’s auditioning for a lead role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Denis Leary plays ... well, himself, or at least the angry guy persona from his stand-up comic routine at the time. Nobody plays pissed off quite like or as well as Leary, like when he chews out his sad sack accomplice Murray (Richard Bright) over the phone, slamming the receiver repeatedly on a countertop for effect. Leary also gets some of the film’s choice lines, like when he breaks up the incessant bickering between the Chasseurs by telling them, “You know what this family needs? A mute!” Leary’s bitter thief speaks his mind which inspires Lloyd and Caroline to open up and finally get down to the root of their problems. Leary is gracious with sharing screen time with the other actors and Demme knows when to let Spacey and Davis take front stage while Leary observes. Despite the marketing that placed an emphasis on Leary, The Ref is really about Lloyd and Caroline as they learn to finally listen to each other.

Spacey and Davis don’t play Lloyd and Caroline as just superficial, materialistic WASPs but two people who, at one time, had real dreams and aspirations (like running a restaurant) but over the years life hasn’t worked out as they would have liked. Occasionally, you can see this regret play across their faces and it takes Gus to finally confront them for the Chasseurs to deal with their issues. Only a year away from acclaimed turns in Seven (1995) and The Usual Suspects (1995), Spacey turns a solid performance as a frustrated man dominated by the women in his life. Matching him at every turn is Davis, who had a great run in the 1990s, as his disappointed wife.

The Ref was written by Richard LaGravenese and his sister-in-law Marie Weiss, inspired in large part by their own families. The dinner scene, in particular, came from their own experiences. LaGravenese said, “Both Marie and I are Italian Catholics who married into Jewish families, so we do have those big holiday dinners.” Furthermore, he said, “Families always have these unspoken dramas, and at holidays everyone is supposed to sit down and pretend that none of that is going on. Part of the fun in writing the dialogue was completely breaking down the veneer and finally having everybody say what they wanted to say.” Weiss actually began writing the script in 1989 after she and her husband moved from New York to California. Inspiration came from an argument she had with him and she thought, “wouldn’t it be great if there were a third party to step in and referee?”

Weiss wrote several drafts and consulted with LaGravenese in 1991. They took the script to Disney. The studio approved the project within 20 minutes. Made for less than $12 million, the film was produced by the most unusual candidates: Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, known for making some of the most popular Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s. Simpson described the film’s tone as “biting and sarcastic. Just my nature.” LaGravenese spent a year rewriting the script until he finally got “tired of doing rewrites for executives.” Nine months later, Demme and Leary, fresh from working together on No Cure for Cancer, a stand-up comedy special for Showtime, expressed an interest in the project. This prompted LaGravenese to re-enter the fold. He worked throughout the production and even beyond when test audiences responded poorly to the film’s original ending – where Gus turns himself in – and a new one was written and shot in January 1994.

The Ref did not perform as well at the box office as Leary would’ve liked and he blamed how the studio marketed it. He said, “They did me like the MTV guy. And they shortchanged what the movie was all about.” The film received mixed notices from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers praised the performances of Spacey and Davis: “They are combustibly funny, finding nuance even in nonsense. The script is crass; the actors never.” In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James praised Leary: “For the first time he displays his appeal and potential as an actor instead of a comic with a sneering persona.” However, the Washington Post’s Hal Hinson was not so taken with the comedian: “A stand-up comic trying to translate his impatient, hipster editorializing to the big screen, he doesn’t have the modulation of a trained actor, only one speed (fast) and one mode of attack (loud).” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman felt that the film was “crushingly blunt-witted and monotonous in its celebration of domestic sadism.”

Gus is sick and tired of rich people that think they’re entitled to everything and isn’t afraid to call them on it. He can’t understand why these people are pissing and moaning about their trivial problems when they have so many things going for them but The Ref goes to great lengths to humanize Lloyd and Caroline. In this respect, the film does something that few Hollywood films have the balls to do: draw attention to the differences between the upper and working class. Demme’s film also shows that not everyone is happy during Christmas. Being with family, especially those you don’t like very much, can be a trying experience and test anyone’s patience as old grudges and bad memories surface.