Wild Kudos at Way of the Gun

by Michael Ware

Christopher McQuarrie's tight, mean, and great THE WAY OF THE GUN (****) applies a purist's sledgehammer to the post-Tarantino world of cutesy gangsters, pop guns, and burger monologs that degraded a whole genre to the condition of trite drag act. The best straight-up crime flic since THE GETAWAY, it's a formidable accomplishment that intrudes on Sam Peckinpah's hardbitten psychosis and nails the spirit cold. Punctuated as it is by plentiful nasty stings and terrific action set-pieces, the pic's unsavory aura itself seems to take a beating, acquiring a fairly original sense of screwy charm. How can you not admire a movie that opens with a main character shouting "you better shut your girlfriend up before I come over there and f'ck-start her head!", right before both protagonists get the crap beaten out of them by an enraged mob? It's not something you'd see Will Smith do in a major studio movie (I would almost send kudos at Artisan for not imposing V-chip-friendly character rewrites the way a major would, but then they did dump the film and let it die). The script elements are driven into place like some profane rosary of chiseled archetypes: unaffectedly cool kidnappers, a pregnant woman as the loot, a cold-blooded money man (the father-in-waiting), the pinkerton-like assassins, the prince of darkness bag man, the chase, the set-up, the super-violent payoff/bloodbath/gunfight-with-senior citizens-- all of it saved from USA-Channel pretension by a perfectly-judged veneer of playful satire that never undercuts credibility, indeed, reverses the Tarantino brand of expected order by slamming the clichÈs back into reality (check that beautiful moment of Parker diving into the ONE EYED JACKS fountain, a forearm-full of real-world glass shards and hilarity). McQuarrie acquits himself completely, a perfect example of a filmmaker targeting his idols and bagging them, staying true to himself in the process and bringing a nuanced instinct for pace, tension, and explosive interpersonal disturbances.

McQuarrie respects his form, keenly aware that all the contrived plot conventions there are won't make a film come to life without investing in the heart of its characters' deepest motivations. The noir sets in by the first shot with Dick Pope's gamy, unshowy, widescreen photography that seems to baste the stock in inky blacks and leaves faces toned with a pungent sense of exposed flesh and unspoken emotion broiling inside the thinnest skins on earth. What's this I keep reading about reprehensible, UNLIKEABLE characters? Since when did Daytime Drama criteria dictate a movie's value? (Since Capitol Hill hearings made it newly trendy and hip to be square?) Whatever, McQuarrie directs his cast to carve out pulsing human beings. Longbaugh and Parker (named for the original Butch and Sundance, the violent offenders, not the glitzy William Goldman fantasy) are summoned out of the shite by Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe like dazed but fierce gas station-Leone warriors driven to act out intrinsically stupid but desperate ploys to force themselves just to be. Minimum wage or a life of crime: WILD BUNCH motivation hatched in the absurdist world of FIGHT CLUB. Del Toro's Longbaugh ("Karma is merely justice without satisfaction") presents a perfect Pike Bishop-wannabe front that exudes a fascinating interplay of cold-bloodedness, and brain-exploding emotional dithering, lethal with a comic remove. James Caan's Sarno is a great performance bringing poetic depth to a broken down, yet eminently dangerous survivor. Juliette Lewis' whacking-you-in-the-face portrait of a woman at childbirth proved volatile enough to drive most of our esteemed male movie critics over to NURSE BETTY and ALMOST FAMOUS-"uhh, C section, gross-this sucks! One star!" (and if that wasn't it, I'd have to respect them even less.)

This movie banks on its concealed yin-yang of cross-motivations, from having its killers coping with the predicaments imposed by a pregnant woman put up for cash (death, life!)-in the process achieving a rather beautiful realization of human connection (feelings!)-- to the conviction of a first-time director bent on kicking a denatured genre back into shape and retrofitting it with a heartbeat. There's more actual direction in 12 frames of this than in all of last year's Best Picture Oscar-winner.

Joe Kraemer's clenched-fist of a score is tight, honed to a minimum of expressive forces. The album's liner notes admit to an affinity for that "ragged, untainted sound" in the scores of Jerry Goldsmith, David Shire, Lalo Schifrin, and Jerry Fielding done in the 1970s. This score easily coexists in nature with any of those: Fielding's THE KILLER ELITE, and THE MECHANIC, Goldsmith's CAPRICORN ONE, RIO LOBOS, HIGH VELOCITY, even ALIEN, or Shire's understated character sophistication in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. It's less an imitation than an individual assertion of that grit-encrusted, ambivalent style, and virtually a full-frontal assault on the emotion-manufacturing, droning clichÈ-placement trend of the moment. The feel is hardcore as it digs into the sinews of exactly what the movie is about, with instrumentation ranging from up-front solo playing to gradually enveloping orchestra (check some terrific glissando writing and incisive violent disturbances). Kraemer's authoritative opening cue ("The Setup") over black screen and titles is a powerhouse statement of tympani ringed with a searching guitar figure, cut into by an aggressive Latinate percussion motif associated with the bodyguards. It's a tough-minded, intricate deployment, announcing some serious shite going down. Most scores are now mixed loud, but this one (along with Goldsmith's HOLLOW MAN to name the only other example I'd bother to cite) brings its own volume by exerting serious force issued from a specific psychology. A repeated rising minor chord figure throughout the film pushes the situation into a powerfully empathetic feeling of repressed emotional connection, a sense of conflict within the music repped by a tricky minor/major dilemma as f'cked up as the kidnappers left bloodied and humiliated at the end, everything just out of reach and ringing with mordant echoes of Fielding's WILD BUNCH chords. Kraemer takes the ground occupied by his predecessors by blasting away at the same existential poetry languishing deep in the American mythology, and leaves it languishing!

The Milan CD is capped off with an original song containing important instructions. Album rating is ****

Until that day, then!

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com