Real Realism

ABOUT ten minutes into Cutter's Way, something strange happens. What's gone before has been strictly cinematic--scenes that have become familiar on the screen as part of movie life. Richard Bone trades a few remarks with an older woman he has half-heartedly laid, and then he's down in the hotel lobby, lighting the obligatory cigarette, striding cockily out the door, refusing to pay the valet who wheels him up his old Healy. We've seen all this before, and it has become so familiar we don't even give it a second thought. They used to apply the term "bigger than life" to the movies, and scenes such as this have that quality, though "different from life" is perhaps more apt a term. It simply feels like a movie. Not that it's over produced, but things are just a little too smooth, the timing is a little too perfect for it to be anything but a cinematic fanatasy. If you fall into one of these situations on your way home from the movies, your first reaction would be: "It's like being in a movie."

Which isn't to say we've been cheated by most of the so-called realistic movies of the past ten years--only coddled in a perverse way. The movies that would show us the seamy underside of America have usually spoken movingly in the vocabulary of a director's own peculiar vision. No one can deny Scorcese's genius, but how real is Taxi Driver? Mean Streets is realistic in the sense that it's harsh and gritty, but it's a victim of its own vision. Everything has to be hard-boiled, New York is a jungle. Life is a bitch. What passes for realism is more often than not a steamy fantasy with all the grotesqueries left in. They are, in most respects, not so much real life as parodies.

Cutter's Way starts like this, too--and it will feel the need to fall back on it in the end, but after the first ten minutes something utterly different begins.

Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) walks into what we take for his house late in the night and finds himself enmeshed in one of those late night drunken conversations with the woman there, who, though it's not important, we're led to believe is his wife or lover. What matters is the uneasy alliance. The conversation is half bullshit and half frustration. Maybe it's a breakthrough and maybe it's the Beam. It goes on just a little too long and it doesn't get anywhere. It's 2 a.m. life, and you realize that you've been here before and when you were, the last thing on your mind was that it seemed like a movie.

THE story of Cutter's Way, as told by the press, is another one of those taken from Hollywood. Film (then titled Cutter and Bone) is released: film is panned by the incomparable Vincent Canby (who is to movie reviewing what the emperor's new clothes were to haute coterie): film is withdrawn only to be released later by the United Artists Classics division with a whole new ad campaign and is hailed as a nearly lost masterpiece. Art prevail over management, they would have it. And they're practically right.

Set in the lushly irrigated hills of Santa Barbara, the movie focuses on three characters, all half-hearted refugees from the mainstream. They haven't fled to anything else of course: it's a defensive maneuver, and the result is a certain disconnected status. Cutter (John Heard), is a vet who's lost a leg, an arm, and an eye in Vietnam, a man who's tongue is too quick--sometimes it's hilarious and sometimes he should just shut up. He has no social graces, but his venom is directed out there somewhere--a romantic who has retreased to snideness since romance died. Richard Bone is a lazy Ivy League, ostensibly working around a marina selling boats, but more often than not hopping from one matron's bed to another, a bored and listless stud. What little structure there is in their lives is provided at Cutter's house--a cramped, cozy bungalow on a suburban street in Santa Barbara and by his wife. Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), a companion and sometimes earth mother for the two men.

The first remarkable thing about this film is it's air of lazy progress. Cutter and Bone know each other so well that very little is set up in the usual Hollywood ways. In some respects, they have no sacred cows--Cutter's cynicism gives him the leeway to breach any subject, from the sexual tension between him, a cripple, Bone, the stud, and Maureen, the long-suffering wife, and yet still stay within the realm of a "joke." Cutter is immensely likable, immensely smart, and you realize that what's different here is that very rarely have we seen characters on the screen who are as smart as the audience is--as smart about books, bullshit, and about the days when simply getting out of bed is hardly worth it. They also know the same things we do about diversion--that in the world, unlike movies, beginnings, middles, and ends just don't happen with any sort of regularity. Things just sort of blend in to each other, and it's hard to tell the difference.

This sensibility, indeed the whole pace of the film, is so original that one immediately realizes that one is in the hands of a master. It always seems to be late afternoon in the film, that lazy peculiarly Southern California lighting, or else it is a misty night. The surfaces are always reflected in some gas-lit glow--a shadow of the "real" California of travel posters and television shows. Director Ivan Passer has given his characters enough personalities to be interesting (Cutter is constantly mimicking Ahab), but more often than not he resists making them fit together too neatly.

In some ways, though, Passer ends up working against himself. For beneath the relationships between the three protagonists, the plot grinds on, involving a murder that Bone has been a partial witness to. Bone suspects that a wealthy oil man mighthave done the slaying, and Cutter--claiming the world is short on heroes and with the victims's sister as an accomplice--sets out to ensnare, via blackmail, the oil man. All of this is seen through Bone's eyes, and the uncertainty he has about his own testimony makes the who whodunit air tenuous. Maybe it's all just Cutter's fantasy. Maybe life can be a detective movie. Maybe they're all victims of fantasy. Bone's reluctance to go along with the deal slows the film down somewhat, and the result, depending on your mood is either discordant or unsatisying.

STILL, it's obvious that Passer could have made a thriller. He clearly has the talent. It's clear too, that he could have made a "relationship" piece about Cutter and Bone and Mo. When Bone and Mo finally do sleep together while Cutter's off playing detective, the entire scene is filled with such delicacy--never in a film has there been a better exploration of unfaithfulness with all its anticlimactic manifestations--that it's clear Passer is something of a visionary. Or more importantly, he's a visionary without epic pretensions. Perhaps it's his intent all along to refuse the easy ending and the easy transition. Perhaps it is not so much inability to make a satisfying film, as it is that he wants to break the whole cycle of expectations the audience has had. Perhaps he's just a bit ahead of himself.

Save for one or two which don't work, however, the performances are extraordinary. Bridges plays the languid stud with perfection. His Golden Boy is the perfect quirkly foil for Cutter's sometimes maudlin, been-to-hell-and-back humor and disrespect. Cutter uses his maiming to control people at times, but he knows he's doing it, and it becomes, like Bones' good looks, just another method of dealing. And they know this. They've read the same psych books we have. To see Cutter coquettishly discussing "duty" to get out of a drunk driving rap is to see how pathetic movies like Coming Home were. Cutter's injuries are part of his life and more safe from exploitation or degradation than someone's laugh or the school someone when to.

And ultimately, it's this quality of keeping the characters complex and bored Americans--not Bergman's cartherisized Swedes or Scorcese's narcoticized totems--that makes Cutter's Way so extraordinary. Not since Taxi Driver has an American film been so successful at showing us American in a whole new light, and hever has one managed it with such control of its self-conscious and cinematic form. Passer has come closer to making a masterpiece than anyone in the past few years.