Directed by Steve Kloves
Written by Steve Kloves
Starring Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, Beau Bridges, Ellie Raab
USA, 1989
STORMY WEATHER
The Fabulous Baker Boys is carried, mostly, on the shoulders of the stunning trio performance, the music the actors play and sing, and the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Steve Kloves’ script seems rather incidental because this is not great writing, and he doesn’t seem very sure of himself as a director, probably because this was his debut as one. He leaves in bits and pieces we could’ve done without, like Jennifer Tilly’s blonde-roots routine, and he doesn’t know how to handle time or how to build up momentum when it comes to the unraveling of the Baker Boys. It’s not a very good movie; it’s too inconsistent to be, and Kloves takes the opportunity to write a few sermons so his characters can preach to each other like in the soul-searching, self-serving monologues from Broadway plays that usually get famous and end up being forced upon high school theater students. At one point, a woman cries, “I'd find myself at the end of the night with some creep and tell myself it didn't matter. And you kid yourself that you've got this empty place inside where you can put it all. But you do it long enough and all you are is empty.” None of the three wonderful leads are any good at delivering this kind of thing.
The two Bridges brothers, Jeff and Beau, never really stood out to me as good actors. I forget what Jeff looked like in The Last Picture Show, or what he played. I only discovered his great talents in bad movies like The Big Lebowski and The Contender and I’m even more pleased with his work here. His hair is scruffy and long, like the dog and neglected child his character cares for in his shabby apartment, and yet I’ve never seen him so magnetic. As Jack, the great piano player in a duo of washed-up musician brothers who’ve been playing together for more than three decades, he’s also distant and detached in that “isolated genius” sort of way. Beau plays Frank, the practical half- the competent musician, the lame joker with a family to feed back in his suburban home.
Michelle Pfeiffer, an unforgettable presence, is probably the most dirty and down-and-out she’s ever been in a movie, but she’s also probably the sexiest she’s ever been. Her Susie Diamond waltzes into the two men’s lives stubbornly and vulgarly when they hold auditions for a female singer to liven up their act, but when she opens her mouth to sing “More Than You Know” (a more illuminating interpretation, I think, than Ella Fitzgerald’s version, the only other one I’ve heard), it’s an act of alchemy. Pfeiffer (who does the vocals herself) is not the greatest singer in the world, and she’s no Billie Holiday, but in this movie she delivers performances that remind you of Holiday. She’s got that tough, romantic, disillusioned, I’ll-get-by way of singing nailed, if not the creative phrasing, and she uses this mood in her acting too. She does what you’re supposed to do with standard traditional pop; these simple songs were meant to be lived and roamed in, but with an elegance that matches the structures and lyrics and melody.
The way Ballhaus photographs Pfeiffer reminds me of the way he did in The Age of Innocence; she’s unruly and alluring and her messy hair is like Countess Olenska’s defiant curly tendrils. Susie splits up the brothers when her sexual (and/or romantic?) relationship with the aloof, brooding genius goes sour. In one sequence, Frank has gone off to tend to personal business at home and the two left-behinds get playful and tantalizing. Later, the chanteuse is twisting and turning on the smooth black piano in her red gown, making love to Jack with “Makin’ Whoopee” the way that Ballhaus is making love to the actors, under white illumination. We never see the sex between the two characters; it’s just too unsexy for this movie.
I’ve never been in a club or lounge but you get the feeling, as a young kid, that these are glamorous places, with smoke and liquor and jazz commingling. The photography is less positive about these places; even the more upscale settings are less attractive than you would imagine. The Baker Boys are stuck in a time when nobody really wants to hear those old showtunes and pop numbers; no matter how creative the performer is, how many ways are there to arrange and interpret this material? Frank doesn’t mind because it’s all just business, but Jack wants to do jazz piano, something he can sink his teeth (or fingers) into.
The movie is about music, particularly American songbook material, and the plot comes right out of the lyrics of these pining songs. Pfeiffer’s suffering girl-of-the-city is the protagonist of Rodgers and Hart’s “Ten Cents a Dance.” Set in Seattle, these people are hardened romantics out of Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard”; they are addicted to cigarettes and booze and performing because, as the cliché goes, they’re lonely. Is this the same group whose heartache spawned the grunge scene in the early ‘90s? Did Seattle and America go from restrained passion to shoe-staring catharsis? Certainly, this semi-enjoyment of melancholy and the idea that it gives birth to real art is the place from which both The Fabulous Baker Boys and Nirvana came from. And the movie suffers a little bit from the laziness of this attitude and the lack of uniqueness in approaching it yet again. It even emphasizes the cliché that music is communication, which has always been obvious and true, but at least it does it in a sexy, gloomy way.
Michael Ballhaus understands this smoky, hazy sadness- the sadness in Porter’s uncharacteristic “Ev’rytime We Say Goodbye,” in Rodgers and Hart’s half-comic “It Never Entered My Mind,” in Arlen and Mercer’s “One for My Baby,” and even in the Gershwins’ swinging “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” The final shot is conventional but moving, one of those life-goes-on statements in which we see Pfeiffer walking away to work and Jeff Bridges watching her, then slowly moving to his car, as the camera and audience swoon. Even Pfeiffer, in voice-over, can’t wait to transfer her bittersweet love into song; before the credits start rolling, she’s already into “My Funny Valentine.”
By Andrew Chan [AUGUST 8, 2001]