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.

Out of Sight

"It's like seeing someone for the first time. You can be passing on the street and you look at each other and for a few seconds there's this kind of recognition. Like you both know something, and the next moment the person's gone. And it's too late to do anything about it. And you always remember it because it was there and you let it go. And you think to yourself, what if I stopped? What if I said something? What if?" – Jack Foley

This bit of dialogue from Out of Sight (1998) perfectly captures the essence of the relationships between the characters in this film. It is about the what ifs and the what could have beens. What the characters do and, more importantly, what they don't do directly determines their fate.

As the film begins, Jack Foley (George Clooney), a career bank robber, escapes from a Florida prison with the help of his loyal accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames). In the heat of the moment they kidnap a beautiful Federal Marshall named Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). She and Jack are stuffed in the trunk of her car as they make a hasty retreat. Trapped in such a small, confined space Jack and Karen have nothing to do but engage in idle chitchat. Even though they are on completely opposite sides of the law there's a spark, an initial attraction that blossoms into something more as the film progresses and their paths inevitably cross again.

Out of Sight is based on the book of the same name by Elmore Leonard. He had wanted to do a bank robber story for a long time. Several years ago, he saw “a picture in the Detroit News of an attractive young woman who was a Federal Marshal standing in front of the Federal Courthouse in Miami. She held a shotgun which was resting on her cocked hip and as soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a book.” Danny DeVito bought the rights to a previous Leonard book, Get Shorty, for his production company, Jersey Films. After the success of that film, he bought the rights to Out of Sight.

Screenwriter Scott Frank had a tough time adapting Leonard’s Get Shorty and didn’t want to do it again. However, he found himself in a situation where he needed the money. He liked Out of Sight and thought it would be easier to adapt but it turned out to be even more difficult than Get Shorty! For example, Frank found that Leonard told “his stories purely through the dialogue, whereas in a movie the old adage is ‘show, don’t tell.’ It’s the opposite and so it’s very, very tricky to convert that into a movie.”

The film came to George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh at a time when both of their careers had reached a critical junction. Clooney was coming off the commercial and critical train wreck known as Batman and Robin (1997). Soderbergh had completely shunned the mainstream with the one-two punch of Gray’s Anatomy (1996) and Schizopolis (1996). Both men were looking for a hit that would put them back on the map. Soderbergh had already made two films for Universal and one of its executives, Casey Silver, offered him Out of Sight with Clooney attached after original director Barry Sonnenfeld dropped out. Soderbergh was close to making another project and was going to pass but Silver told him, “These things aren’t going to line up very often, you should pay attention.” By the filmmaker’s own admission, he “had to go chase this. I had to audition for it. I had to talk to Jersey Films, I had to talk to Clooney…I had to go in and say I really feel like I know how to do this.”

Soderbergh and Frank achieve a perfect mix with Out of Sight. The film’s pace moves with effortless ease and self-confidence. The know when to slow things down and savor the moment as well. As Frank proved with his excellent screenplay for Get Shorty (1995), he perfectly understands Leonard's distinctive cadence and the speech patterns of his characters. Cinematic adaptations of books are almost always inferior because so much has to be cut out or changed to fit into a two-hour film. However, Leonard's books are tailor-made for movie adaptations because they are very visual and almost entirely dialogue and character-driven — ideal for the screenplay format. Out of Sight is one of those rare movies that is actually better than the book.

Soderbergh and his cameraman, Elliot Davis, paint their film with a specific color code. The bright colors of the Florida scenes — especially the prison sequences with vibrant blue and the bright yellow prison uniforms worn by various characters — provide a nice contrast to the second half of the film which consists mainly of a gun-metal blue color scheme. The Detroit scenes have a cold, metallic feel to them and this really comes out.

After a string of so-so films, George Clooney finally hit paydirt with Out of Sight. With his movie star good looks and suave charm, he is perfectly cast as the smooth talking criminal. This may be his finest performance to date. For Clooney what attracted him to this role was the chance to play a character that evoked his cinematic heroes of the past. “When I was growing up the heroes for me were the bankrobbers — you know, the Cagneys and the Bogarts, Steve McQueen and all those guys, the guys who were kind of bad and you still rooted for them. And when I read this, I thought, This guy is robbing a bank but you really want him to get away with it.” Clooney’s style of acting is perfect for this role as he plays Foley with the right amount of laid-back charm. This is typified by his character's introduction — the most pleasant, non-violent bank robbery ever committed to film. Clooney has such a likable screen presence that you want to see his character succeed.

Conversely, Jennifer Lopez is his perfect foil as a smart, tough law enforcement officer who can't help but fall in love with this charismatic criminal. She is a very attractive woman but not above wielding a shotgun to apprehend a fugitive. There is a genuine chemistry between the two actors that makes their romance work. And it is this relationship that gives Out of Sight its depth. There is more to this movie than snappy banter and a hip soundtrack. Incredibly, Sandra Bullock was originally considered to play Karen Sisco opposite Clooney, however Soderbergh said, “What happened was I spent some time with [Clooney and Bullock] - and they actually did have a great chemistry. But it was for the wrong movie. They really should do a movie together, but it was not Elmore Leonard energy.”

A killer cast supports the two lead actors. Steve Zahn, an underrated character actor, is perfect as Glen, a stoner screw-up who looks up to Jack but is a royal pain in the ass. Dennis Farina plays Karen's laid-back dad who buys his daughter a handgun for her birthday and just wants to see her married to a lawyer or a doctor. Albert Brooks is Richard Ripley, a bumbling white-collar criminal type who is in way over his head and sports a truly awful toupee. Don Cheadle plays “Snoopy” Miller, a tough guy-wannabe that is a classic schoolyard bully. Rounding this cast out is Ving Rhames, Jack's tough, God-fearing partner in crime.

David Holmes' catchy R&B score comes in and instantly transports the viewer into this world. He mixes in his own brand of funky electronica with old school tunes from the likes of the Isley brothers and Willie Bobo. From the atmospheric noises in the background to Holmes' superb trip hop beats, this is a great sounding movie.

Despite its lackluster performance at the box office, Out of Sight received widespread critical praise. It was clearly a career turning point for both George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh. Clooney said in an interview that “Out of Sight was the first time where I had a say, and it was the first good screenplay that I’d read where I just went, ‘That’s it.’ And even though it didn’t do really well box office-wise — we sort of tanked again — it was a really good film.” Clooney went on to success with O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001). Soderbergh saw Out of Sight as “a very conscious decision on my part to try and climb my way out of the arthouse ghetto which can be as much of a trap as making blockbuster films. And I was very aware that at that point in my career, half the business was off limits to me.” The film’s critical reaction gave Soderbergh a foothold in Hollywood that led to the commercial success of Erin Brockovich (1999) and Oscar gold with Traffic (2000).

Out of Sight is a film about making choices and taking chances despite the sometimes inevitable, painful consequences. It is also an entertaining look at a collection of colorful characters and the exciting world they inhabit. This is a smart, sexy and wonderfully stylish crime thriller that was ignored by audiences (due to lousy advertising and an even worse release date) but garnered strong critical reaction (winding up on many Best Of lists that year). Fortunately, Out of Sight has been re-discovered on video and recognized as one of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations ever put to film.

SOURCES

Andrew, Geoff. "Again, with 20% more existential grief." The Guardian. February 13, 2003.

Bautz, Mark. "Sight and Sound." Entertainment Weekly. June 25, 1998.

Croatto, Pete. “Bringing Elmore Leonard Into Sight.” Creative Screenwriting. July 2013.

Decha, Max. "America's Most Wanted." Neon. December 1998.

Jones, Belinda. "Rockumentaries..." Empire. January 1999.

Malcolm, Paul. “Back in Sight.” L.A. Weekly. July 1, 1998.

"Steven Soderbergh Interview." Mr. Showbiz. 1998.