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I hate to go through a week without anything good to recommend, so here's an unequivocal endorsement: if you have to see something vengeance-themed -- or even if you don't -- check out the film director Steven Soderbergh did between Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich. Although its October release didn't extend to local screens until the Upstate Film Society recently ran it (shameless plug: if you really want better access to non-blockbuster movies, and want to see them in a theater the way God and Cecil B. intended, support the UFS) at the Carmike, The Limey has just come out on video.
Terence Stamp stars as Wilson, a steel-eyed, taciturn Cockney criminal who's at once debonair and working class, with a murderous, all-business stare that could slice through cinder block. Out of jail and friends, he jets from England to L.A. to look into the death of his estranged daughter Jenny, armed only -- initially, anyway -- with a newspaper clipping sent by her friend Eduardo (Luis Guzman). Showing up at his door thoroughly unannounced, he unsheaths a no-nonsense habit of purposefully understating the obvious ("So, you're home then.") to convince Ed, who is no stranger to jail himself, to help out. They trace her death to a wealthy, reformed-hippie music promoter (Peter Fonda) who has enough to hide that he's willing to pay to get Wilson snuffed too.
It's a relatively simple plot, but one which is enthusiastically realized via careful scripting (by Dark City writer Lem Dobbs), superb direction, and outstanding acting. From the opening frame -- a black, empty screen, Wilson's voiceover "Tell me about Jenny," and the sudden punch of The Who's "The Seeker" -- Soderbergh uses a melange of images that unfurls more like thought than traditional narrative. Shots bounce quickly around in time like a wandering mind, but always just a little in front of or behind the actual sequence of events; you're sometimes not sure if what you're seeing is what's happening now, or something that just happened or is about to happen, or something Wilson merely would like to happen. Meanwhile, monologues shot from several slightly different angles are seamlessly edited together to give the effect of watching someone from all around a room at once. In lesser hands it could be confusing, but Soderbergh makes it work somehow, even mixing in scenes from the 1967 film Poor Cow, about a band of criminals whose number includes a fellow named Wilson, played by -- Terence Stamp.
Who is...good lord, the guy is like an force of nature in this movie: raw, unsophisticated, and implacable. With absolutely no hint of pretense or dishonesty, he moves deliberately from task to task, way more scary than Arnold's Terminator not because he's superhuman, but because he's extreeeemely determined. When in one, and only one, scene he concedes the barest hint of a smile at a memory of Jenny, the flood of humanity pouring through that one little crack makes him all the more menacing. His penchant for Cockney rhyming slang -- "I'll go have a butcher's." "A what?" "A butcher's. Butcher's hook. A look." -- lends sincere charm that conveys volumes with a few simple words and a glance.
The supporting cast isn't too shabby either. Guzman, who was good as a quirky thug in Out of Sight, and recently played one of the game-show contestants in Magnolia, is excellent as the put-upon Eduardo, fearing for his hard-earned rehabilitation but unable, out of fear and compulsion, to deny Wilson help. Meanwhile, Fonda could almost be the contemporary version of his Captain America from Easy Rider, gone legit but with a latent weakness for the big score. Completing the counterculture, road-movie feel is Barry Newman, who helped anchor the cross-country chase subgenre of the 1970s in Vanishing Point, as Fonda's bodyguard. Also along are indie born-again heroine Lesley Ann Warren, and Bill Duke as a DEA agent who anchors one of the film's more entertaining conversations.
It's too late now, but I retroactively add The Limey, Soderbergh, Stamp, and Guzman to my 1999 nominees for Best Film, Director, and Lead and Supporting Actor. I've got a box of 6,000 or so Oscar ballots that showed up mixed in with a batch of census forms for Knockemstiff, Ohio, misdelivered here last week; think it would do any good to fill them out and send them in? A
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