THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE
Directed by Stuart Rosenburg
Written by Vincent Patrick
Starring Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Darryl Hannah
Directed by Stuart Rosenburg
Written by Vincent Patrick
Starring Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Darryl Hannah
I would just like to mention that I do not care for the work of Michael Cimino. It isn't merely a matter of differing allegiances. I simply have never been impressed by the man's work. Most of us first heard of him as the co-writer of Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry movie in the franchise. That was the movie that gave us a pair of immortal lines intended to sound profound within the context of an anti-hippie mentality. The first was: "This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and it could blow your head clean off. Do you feel lucky? Well, punk--Do ya?" The other was: "A man's got to know his limitations." Clearly Cimino should have listened to himself because his next film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, had the chance to be a lot edgier than it pretended to be, give or take the strained relationship between Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. But he just didn't know his own limitations.
The Deer Hunter, which won all kinds of Academy Awards, was the one true fascist film that Cimino had in him. Cimino had been aiming for exactly this kind of emotionally charged bit of propaganda his whole life and as co-producer, co-writer and director, he finally put the last touch of blood on his own bones. The Deer Hunter is so virulently anti-human that one wonders how or why so many expert talents appeared in front of Cimino's camera. Meryl Streep had exactly nothing to contribute to this film, almost as if by design. And while her paralyzed silence screamed for a release, even the murky display of routine emotions as exhibited by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken were only felt at all during the film's most memorable and pointless scene, where the men are sitting around a POW camp, being forced at gunpoint to play Russian Roulette while the sinister Vietnamese threaten to shoot them if they don't.
That scene only served the plot--such as it was--in the way of all inspired propaganda by making the other guys into monsters without putting forth the actual hard work of explaining why they might have become such. But as in all Cimino product, the enemies--whether black street tough, counter-cultural violence freak, or blood thirsty Vietnamese--only exist as causation for the hero's behavior. Harry is a gun nut, not because he likes being that way, but rather because all the minorities and longhairs have left him no other choice. DeNiro and Walken aren't emotionless monsters because of the lies they were told by the people who steered them into war. No, it was all because of the Vietnamese atrocities.
So, yeah, I don't care for Cimino.
You don't want to get me started about Heaven's Gate or The Year of the Dragon. I will say that either one of these makes both Ishtar and Showgirlslook brilliant by comparison.
None of this pleasant Cimino bashing would be appropriate were it not that tonight's film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, was almost directed by Michael Cimino. The job ended up being handled by Stuart Rosenberg, the man who had earlier directed Cool Hand Luke, which Pope resembles.
The Pope of Greenwich Village is a movie that is about something not contained in its own plot. The plot is that Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) are a couple of guys looking to get out from under the old neighborhood by committing one simple little crime. That is not, as I say, what the movie is actually about. The movie is about incredible acting. There is an incredible feel of improvisation about this tightly scripted work.
Can you imagine how this scene would have been mangled if Cimino had been at the helm? The emphasis would have been entirely on the sawing off of the thumb, of Paulie swallowing the pain pills, of the hoodlums making jokes about it later. None of that would have allowed for any stretching out with the actors and stretching out is exactly what is happening in the above scene and ninety-nine percent of the rest of the movie. There's no silent soliloquies, no clever asides, no dwelling on confusion. This movie is about the freedom inherent in playing a scene with someone who knows about acting and reacting, a lot of which even spilled off onto Daryl Hannah, to the extent that I would even argue this was the first time she ever actually acted in a motion picture. I should probably mention that not everyone agrees that this is a wonderful movie. Roger Ebert praised it with faint damns by concluding the movie had nothing to do with human nature. Dennis Schwartz called it a second-rate Mean Streets. Dave Kehr called it a generic New York Street movie. Each of these observations has some merit. Still, each of them also miss the point. I think that every movie deserves the respect required to sit down and to actually have the audience sit down and attempt to connect with the film, even if that connection has to come from artificial places, such as memories that we may never have had. The young adulthood of Charlie or Paulie could not be any more removed from that of my own upbringing. Yet, if one can allow oneself to be even half as free as these actors, this movie pays you back time and again with lines that are memorable because they spilled out within a framework of friendship and nothing on this here madly spinning orb connects with an audience they way friendship does. Charlie knows that Paulie is a perpetual dreaming loser. But he accepts him, at least most of the time, because he is family. "She outgrew me," Charlie explains to Paulie about why Diane is no longer his girlfriend. "That's what WASPs do: They outgrow people." It doesn't matter at all whether there's truth to that observation. In fact, the more ridiculous the sincere observation, the better the insight we gain into the character's thinking. And that's where the real stories take place, after all. It's not in the actor's ability to fulfill the plot and it isn't about how true to the original novel the director keeps his film. What matters is how the actors convey what their characters are thinking. To that end, The Pope of Greenwich Village is a thinking person's motion picture.
The Deer Hunter, which won all kinds of Academy Awards, was the one true fascist film that Cimino had in him. Cimino had been aiming for exactly this kind of emotionally charged bit of propaganda his whole life and as co-producer, co-writer and director, he finally put the last touch of blood on his own bones. The Deer Hunter is so virulently anti-human that one wonders how or why so many expert talents appeared in front of Cimino's camera. Meryl Streep had exactly nothing to contribute to this film, almost as if by design. And while her paralyzed silence screamed for a release, even the murky display of routine emotions as exhibited by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken were only felt at all during the film's most memorable and pointless scene, where the men are sitting around a POW camp, being forced at gunpoint to play Russian Roulette while the sinister Vietnamese threaten to shoot them if they don't.
That scene only served the plot--such as it was--in the way of all inspired propaganda by making the other guys into monsters without putting forth the actual hard work of explaining why they might have become such. But as in all Cimino product, the enemies--whether black street tough, counter-cultural violence freak, or blood thirsty Vietnamese--only exist as causation for the hero's behavior. Harry is a gun nut, not because he likes being that way, but rather because all the minorities and longhairs have left him no other choice. DeNiro and Walken aren't emotionless monsters because of the lies they were told by the people who steered them into war. No, it was all because of the Vietnamese atrocities.
So, yeah, I don't care for Cimino.
You don't want to get me started about Heaven's Gate or The Year of the Dragon. I will say that either one of these makes both Ishtar and Showgirlslook brilliant by comparison.
None of this pleasant Cimino bashing would be appropriate were it not that tonight's film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, was almost directed by Michael Cimino. The job ended up being handled by Stuart Rosenberg, the man who had earlier directed Cool Hand Luke, which Pope resembles.
The Pope of Greenwich Village is a movie that is about something not contained in its own plot. The plot is that Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) are a couple of guys looking to get out from under the old neighborhood by committing one simple little crime. That is not, as I say, what the movie is actually about. The movie is about incredible acting. There is an incredible feel of improvisation about this tightly scripted work.
Can you imagine how this scene would have been mangled if Cimino had been at the helm? The emphasis would have been entirely on the sawing off of the thumb, of Paulie swallowing the pain pills, of the hoodlums making jokes about it later. None of that would have allowed for any stretching out with the actors and stretching out is exactly what is happening in the above scene and ninety-nine percent of the rest of the movie. There's no silent soliloquies, no clever asides, no dwelling on confusion. This movie is about the freedom inherent in playing a scene with someone who knows about acting and reacting, a lot of which even spilled off onto Daryl Hannah, to the extent that I would even argue this was the first time she ever actually acted in a motion picture. I should probably mention that not everyone agrees that this is a wonderful movie. Roger Ebert praised it with faint damns by concluding the movie had nothing to do with human nature. Dennis Schwartz called it a second-rate Mean Streets. Dave Kehr called it a generic New York Street movie. Each of these observations has some merit. Still, each of them also miss the point. I think that every movie deserves the respect required to sit down and to actually have the audience sit down and attempt to connect with the film, even if that connection has to come from artificial places, such as memories that we may never have had. The young adulthood of Charlie or Paulie could not be any more removed from that of my own upbringing. Yet, if one can allow oneself to be even half as free as these actors, this movie pays you back time and again with lines that are memorable because they spilled out within a framework of friendship and nothing on this here madly spinning orb connects with an audience they way friendship does. Charlie knows that Paulie is a perpetual dreaming loser. But he accepts him, at least most of the time, because he is family. "She outgrew me," Charlie explains to Paulie about why Diane is no longer his girlfriend. "That's what WASPs do: They outgrow people." It doesn't matter at all whether there's truth to that observation. In fact, the more ridiculous the sincere observation, the better the insight we gain into the character's thinking. And that's where the real stories take place, after all. It's not in the actor's ability to fulfill the plot and it isn't about how true to the original novel the director keeps his film. What matters is how the actors convey what their characters are thinking. To that end, The Pope of Greenwich Village is a thinking person's motion picture.
