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The Big Easy
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Note:
For the full polemical context that underpins this review, see the entry on
Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal
Jacket (1987) – both were written
on the same day in September 1987, to appear on the same printed tabloid page.
Under
circumstances that will have to remain mysterious, I happened to read, once
upon a time, the script (by Daniel Petrie, Jr) of The
Big Easy. It was a floating “property”, like any other, earmarked for no
director in particular. On the page, it was tight, elliptical, solidly crafted;
its theme of police corruption was treated with the purest Stanley Kramer
liberalism. A good telemovie, maybe. But I happened to mention to those who had
hired me for consultative advice that it could be a lot better in the
transformative directorial hands of someone inventive like … say, Jim McBride.
Then,
eventually, The Big Easy arrived on the big screen as something I could never
have believed it would become: the new Jim McBride movie! (Did I inadvertently
help get him the gig? I’ll never know.) It’s always a long time between drinks
for McBride; the infrequency of his films makes their qualities of epiphany all
the more striking and precious.
Breathless (1983),
his masterpiece, gave me the kind of revelatory buzz that cinephiles live for. McBride stages the dazzling vision – as Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl (1958) once did for the Cahiers
du cinéma set – of mise en scéne revealed in all its intricacy and splendour. Mise en scéne,
and nothing else; not plot, or theme, or symbolic character types especially.
Just the electricity of staging, cutting, image-sound relating, and above all,
the materialising (the fleshing out, bringing alive) of moments, behaviours,
settings. A pure cinema neither empty
nor full; simply perpetually brimming.
I
could get drunk on The Big Easy. For me here in 1987, it stands as the
antithesis of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). One is closed,
the other open; one robotic and square, the other funky and squiggly; one in
love with death, the other with life. McBride’s art is one of lines, angles and
moves that go in every conceivable direction at once. Best of all, this art is
based, first and foremost, in the bodies and quirks and exchanges of the
actors; no one gives the sense of getting closer to a scene, a situation or a
bit of business better than McBride.
What
you get high on in The Big Easy is the New Orleans milieu – its accents,
lived spatial co-ordinates, and behavioural particularities brought incredibly
to life – and the eroticism passing between Dennis Quaid (as Remy), Ellen Barkin (as Anne) and the world; the new AIDS proviso which
has virtually every mainstream filmmaker devising ever more elaborate ways of
not consummating screen romances suits McBride’s juicy, edgy sense of deferment
just fine.
The
narrative’s ending is perfunctory, as terminations to the open-plan flight of a
termite artist usually are. But I am inspired to make a Big Claim: that anyone
who can’t see in The Big Easy a model of both art and craft of fictional
filmmaking doesn’t know very much at all. There are however, chances for all of
us to improve our sensibility. For, as McBride himself no doubt believes: where
there’s life, there’s hope.
MORE McBride: David Holzman's Diary, The Wrong Man, Great Balls of Fire © Adrian Martin September 1987 |
