Back to Black

Chastened by the reception of a certain red-lettered heroine's heartrending tale, the director of such wide eyed spiritual triumphs as The Mission and City of God--just look at those titles--has gone blackly cynic. In Roland Joffe's twist-filled but flawed new feature, religion serves only to provide a respectable front for the depraved or to highlight its golly-gee practitioners' cluelessness. But that's not the main thrust: In this noir comedy, lust, greed, jealousy, betrayal and just generally people's worst sides stand in mocking contrast to any form of decency (i.e. gullibility).

Plot twists upend and make old-hat whatever seemed the height of evil and deception just a scene ago. So, opening scenario only: Vanity realtor Sandra Dunmore (Patricia Arquette) is sleeping with her husband Jake's brother, Ben (Don Johnson), but since Ben and Jake (Dermot Mulroney) stand to share a bell-ringing inheritance, Jake and Sandra consider offing Ben, who is also idly condescending to pursue his insecure secretary (Mary-Louise Parker). When they do kinda-not-accidentally bump Ben off (a balcony), the sarcastic, haggard Sgt. Pompano (Ellen DeGeneres) turns up, with a Dudley Do-Right (and, of course, God-fearing) colleague, Billings (Ray McKinnon).

Insert here a quotation from a Shakespearean comedy about illusions and switcheroos. Except that here it's relentlessly morbid and with little song and dance to the loud-and-clear cynicism. After getting flak for his platitudes, Billings confronts Sgt. Pompano with his suspicion that she doesn't think spirituality and hard-nosed policing (reality) can coexist. It's not that she doesn't think they can, but that it doesn't matter--they're no threat, he's just another rube, another biped bovine.

In fact, Joffe owes a little of the tone to the Coen Brothers, borrowing both an occasional snappy inventiveness of language (e.g. Billings' dissection of humans' "homeostasis") and a general tactic of grounding anything lofty--ideas and ideals, or here just decency--through bizarre, often inappropriate juxtaposition with the mundane. For the latter, think of The Big Lebowski's Walter and The Dude solemnly scattering their friend's ashes from a Quaker Oats box, into the wind. Thus DeGeneres' Pompano wolfs a corndog while questioning the distraught wife of the murdered. Or Billings at an autopsy, blood-sprayed by a being-buzzawed skull, protesting, absurdly, "Whoa, whoa, whoa" as if it were kids with a Super Soaker.

Insufficiency, in other words: Joffe's pessimistic portrait almost gloatingly deflates pretensions to humanity and spirituality under the onslaught or ever more ruthless desires and their conniving human servants. As the sex scenes tally up, even the audience gets called on our lewd desires: we see an isolated cabin and hear, ah, the unmistakable sounds of full-on lovemaking--a duet for bedsprings and moans--but are red faced as the real scene turns out to be someone on an exercise bike.

But let's bring the review down to earth. While the movie is generally well-written, often funny, only the final twists allow things to just squeak into an ending before turning irredeemably tiresome. Everyone seems overly confident in the script's zinginess and protean plotting--and therefore gets lazy-ass on us.

Sleepwalking through yet another movie, Arquette apparently thinks we'll write off as oh-so-nourish her flat, "understated" delivery; she also misguidedly subscribes to the Uma Thurman "the more tired you look, the sexier you must be" school of seduction. She doesn't play her character's kooky quirks--addictions to self-help tapes and The Sound of Music--as nearly as creepy or unnerving as they should be, reducing them to novelty, pop-recognition bits.

Speaking of easy gags: Don Johnson, banking on a Burt Reynolds inability to covert our knowledge of his washed-up career into a slimy on-screen persona (what this implies about our judgment of people and stars is somewhat disturbing). Unfortunately, Johnson's acting skills aren't quite up to par (Tin Cup...never mind): his comic timing stinks and sinks one scene after another, not disastrously, since his character's smoothness is meant to fall short of his lust.

As the Most Jaded Police Sergeant in the World, DeGeneres does her usual deadpan routine, often mistaken for a dry reading of the script...gets tiresome, even more quickly because the set piece one-liner barbs evoke a senile or non-acting star (Brando or the Beatles) who can only film one line per take. Although the numbing sarcasm seems so sick that it ultimately becomes appropriate.

What can you do? This is a film where Arquette's character does "secret" surveillance for murder planning while wearing a highly reflective, marathon-runner-type foil-warp dress.

But I give Joffe the benefit of the doubt: enough points to a very bitter, saddening satire behind the entertainment, particularly the film's wrap-up, which takes the idea of a know-it-all detective to one logical conclusion. A persistent dialogue between camera movements and angles also suggests more (and I'm not just talking about how every other scene starts with Arquette's legs and moves up). And Mulrooney's conflicted character gives us an occasional flash of honest hope: a P.R. exec in his brother's firm, he cannot stop wisecracking about the hypocrisy and yet, weak, himself gets caught up in lies.

It's got sex, twists and comic nastiness, and so people will like it. But I'm still more intrigued by the scene where Arquette's Sandra, brandishing all the cash she supposedly has, hopes to fast-talk an old lady into a cheap sale...and gets directed to an ATM down the street. We break through to this bit character, one of those extras who are usually just like us, or at least as dumb, and what do we get...but more of the same. Uh-oh.