Second Chances: The Crying Game (page 2)

SECOND CHANCES

christopher funderburg

THE CRYING GAME
page 2

The film:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have it. Mark it down: the first Second Chances where I found out I was 100% wrong. The Crying Game is fucking brilliant. It's on the level with Mona Lisa and The Miracle; they even form a trilogy of sorts. The opening shot of The Crying Game is the most Neil Jordan-esque shot imaginable: a low rent carnival on the edge of a boardwalk. The same setting factors heavily into The Miracle and Mona Lisa; there's something indelibly Jordan-ish about the camera tracking slowly along a boardwalk with colorful tents, neon lights and tilt-a-whirls peppering the background. The intersection of "low rent" and "fun" has always been a Jordan specialty: seedy nightclubs, chintzy tourist traps, porn shops, prostitution, drugs, neon green margaritas with miniature umbrellas and maximum tequila. This informal trilogy is marked by the sleazy combination of pop culture and low tide. All three films are even anchored by pop standards that take on a sinister glow reflecting off of the sex and murder and desperation that rolls in over the boardwalk like a thick fog. Mona Lisa and The Crying Game both get their titles from those pop standards,* The Miracle's jazz heavy plot revolves even more directly around "Stardust." Jordan employs the familiar songs complexly, their melodramatic pop sensibility not simply functioning as blunt irony, say, the way David Lynch utilizes Blue Velvet. Nor is it the gleeful, almost sarcastic counterpoint of a pop tune in an entirely inappropriate context, a tactic now over-familiar from the work of Quentin Tarantino and his legion of shitty, shitty imitators. The songs are deeply felt; their words sincere, but a wisdom or maybe a bitterness prevents them from over-taking the mood of film. They curdle. But they curdle because at some point they were believed in. Jordan has always dealt with literal apostasy, but it's clear he's also a pop apostate, a believer lost to his faith in romantic songs. When Stephen Rea betrays the IRA in The Crying Game, he turns his back on country, love and religion, rejecting them for uncertain, nebulous reasons. What makes his betrayal meaningful is that his faith is deeply felt. The bitterness, the irony of the trilogy's pop standards only takes on meaning because Jordan clearly believes in the power of their romantic sentiments. The Mona Lisa smile of Cathy Tyson's enigmatic prostitute, the explosive improvisations from an exhausted standard like "Stardust," the fact that there is always more to learn about the crying game. The songs are almost interchangeable: Jaye Davidson's Mona Lisa smile. Bob Hoskins first with kisses, then with sighs. More than just the songs, elements like the Day-Glo Virgin Mary statues in Mona Lisa or the dream sequences from The Miracle could seamlessly be transposed into The Crying Game. The film feels like the completion of a thought that began with Bob Hoskin's unstable newly-ex con bringing flowers home to a wife who wishes he had stayed in prison and a teenage daughter who doesn't even recognize him.

The Crying Game is divided into two segments of unequal weight. The first half hour or so plays like a modest one-act theater piece. Loosely based on Frank O'Connor's short story "The Guest of a Nation," the sequence takes place over the course of a week during which a British soldier played by Forest Whitaker is captured by the IRA and comes to be friends with one of his captors (Fergis, played by Stephen Rea), a man who may eventually have to kill him. The next hour or so of the film follows Rea's character after he narrowly escapes the British Army, abandons the IRA and begins to shadow (who he believes to be) Whitaker's girlfriend. The twist, actually revealed well before the end of the movie, is that Rea begins to fall in love with the girlfriend, only to discover that she's really a man. Before long Richardson shows up and demands that Rea pay penance to the IRA by committing a high-risk assassination, forcing Rea to consider just how much it's truly possible to sever his intense connections to his country, his brothers-in-arms, his religion, his lover, his heterosexuality. The previously unknown Jaye Davidson stole all the headlines as "Dil," the transvestite object of Rea's desire, but for my money Whitaker makes the film. Without his sharp performance, Rea's following anguish and confusion would seem silly or maybe just without significance. When Whitaker thinks he's going to be killed, he pleads for Rea to make sure that Davidson knows he was thinking of his true love even then; it's heartbreaking. Whitaker doesn't get as much screen time as Rea or Davidson, but his generous, lovable, devastating performance sustains the film. Rea's murky motivations and obscure emotions are the subjects of the second half of the movie, but his cryptic behavior and impenetrable reactions would be a real chore to endure without being fueled by the potency of Whitaker's performance. Still, Davidson was the find** of the film, a middling nobody working in the fashion industry who Derek Jarman apparently met at a party and recommended to a casting director. He's perfect for the part: sensuous, coy, charming and beautiful. The role would seem to require an unknown actor and finding one to deliver a performance of this caliber is Jordan's coup. Davidson's tawny skin and black curls reminded me of Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa, another relative unknown in a tough, crucial role. Also, they both played prostitutes. So, there's that.

Rea, Davidson and Whitaker all received deserved acclaim for their work, but the film has a secret weapon, too: Jim Broadbent. Any film is better off for featuring the star of Another Year, Life is Sweet and Topsy-Turvy, but Jordan's film particularly benefits from Broadbent turning a stinker of a plot device (the wise, advice-spewing bartender) into something hugely entertaining. It's the type of small part that can sink a film by being too conveniently important but Broadbent as a font of bored, jokey wisdom kills the role. Broadbent is notable because there are not necessarily great performances all around: the IRA boss and Dil's abusive lover are performances so perfunctory that I can't even figure out which actors delivered them. They're small parts, so it's fine - Broadbent's excellence just highlights what a legendary actor can do with even a minor part. More problematic is Miranda Richardson as Rea's lover/IRA compatriot. Richardson's not necessarily bad, just very one-note: when she reappears in the second half of the movie with a vampish hairdo and a designer dress, she becomes purely a villain, a jilted lover who craves violence and retributory humiliation above all else. It's logical enough and works ok, but there's no nuance to it. You can't expect Rea to regret his decisions because her rages are just too grotesque: he made the right decision to get away from this lunatic. It would have been a nice layer to have some emotional attachments to her and the script feigns at it, but Richardson's performance stops it from being felt. It's abstract, theoretical; his betrayal loses a touch of its weight because of it. All in all, it's a minor problem and as far as plot machinations are concerned, the character works: "she's out for blood and he's backed into a corner... well, he's fucked now" is felt. Her performance's deficiencies are probably more obvious because Rea's work with Davidson and Whitaker kicks the doors in. Also unfortunate: Richardson doesn't come across as attractive in the movie because Davidson is so much hotter of a woman than she is.

The film missteps significantly only one other time - with the hazy, recurring dream imagery of Forest Whitaker dressed up for cricket, running into a throw. It's weird to compare this silly image to the genuinely brilliant dreams of The Miracle, like the one in which the main character's father suddenly bursts into flame. Oh well, sometimes Jordan has it (The Miracle, The Butcher Boy, In the Company of Wolves) sometimes he doesn't (In Dreams, Breakfast on Pluto, The Crying Game.) It's a minor point, but I've been wracking my brain to see if I could understand just exactly why I totally dismissed the film. It can't be as simple as that I was poisoned by the marketing campaign, could it? I hate being a negative proof. It's just as bad as being the detested thing itself. Watching the film again, I can see that my charges of the film being "the type of mediocre artwork designed to get nominated for awards and all too ready to congratulate itself for dealing with 'controversial' material" were idiotic. In fact, the unpalatable subject matter and graphic depiction of homosexuality were more than enough to get almost every studio to pass on the film - funding for the movie even nearly dropped out during production, whence it was kept afloat on a shoestring budget. There's nothing about the script and its handling of difficult subjects like IRA terrorism and the fluidity of human sexual that Jordan could have reasonably expected to appeal to Academy voters' sensibilities in 1992 - the Hollywood machine was just getting attuned to gay characters in noble suffering films like Philadelphia.*** There's almost nothing there that could have been expected to appeal to a paying audience's sensibility for that matter, either. It's interesting to watch the film having had two decades to get acclimatized to the central gimmick. Strangely, I'm not sure Jordan intended to fool anyone. The film's big selling point plays like an afterthought. It comes with roughly 35 minutes remaining in the movie, there's comparable screen time in which the audience knows Davidson is a man as to when he's presented as a woman. And even the presentation seems to indicate that maybe Jordan wasn't so concerned with pulling a fast one: Davidson is shot in unforgiving close-ups from the get go. The camera gets in close on his face, the hard lighting playing up every shape and angle of his soft but undeniably masculine features. Jordan gives you plenty of time to consider Davidson's mug and make no effort to hide anything about his physical nature. I was a bit stunned when my Colombian wife who had never heard of the film said almost immediately of Davidson, "He's a transvestite?" Because of the aggressively scrutinous framing and unflinching presentation of Davidson's physicality, I'm not sure Jordan really intended to trick us. Sure, the camera crawls slowly down Davidson's body to the big reveal of his naked penis, but Davidson's wistful, tender "Oh, I thought you knew" belies that maybe this shouldn't have been a complete shock. Certainly, seeing just how carelessly Jordan handles the mannish elements of Davidson's physical presence (and has him lip-sync a melodramatic pop classic in a bar pointedly full of dudes), it surprised me that he was able to pull off the trick on such a wide scale back upon its initial release.

It feels nice to give the film that credit: Jordan isn't worried about spoiling his trick and doesn't sacrifice things like story or emotion or compositional beauty just to pull off a gag. He's making his movie and if you're fooled, you're fooled. If you're not, you're not. The film works great either way. It's nice to know that Jordan really doesn't need to atone for the sins of a bunch of corporate marketing strategists. His film is his film. The story of Jordan's career makes sense with The Crying Game re-contextualized: this isn't his first mainstream sell-out; it's another noir-tinged declaration of agnostic apostasy. The Crying Game plays the way Mona Lisa and The Miracle play: idiosyncratic vision, idiosyncratic artist, top form. After the unexpected (completely unpredictable) smash-hit success of his weird, personal little IRA transvestitism thriller, he gets thrown fully into a Hollywood system that had already been completely unkind to his vision (the results being the awful High Spirits and We're No Angels.) His follow-up film was a Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt/Anne Rice sexy vampire gothic blockbuster, the type of high profile project that reeks of the inevitable shittiness of money-hungry producers trying to class up a low-rent shitbomb by marshaling in whatever flavor of the month Serious Artist is on hand and mildly suited to the task. I'm sure it made a boatload of money for everyone involved. From there, a prestige project about a subject near and dear to Jordan's heart. The result is another turgid award-baiting biopic (Michael Collins), one that is best suited to use by lazy teachers trying to get students to learn about the fight for Irish independence. They're both projects he couldn't have reasonably been expected to turn down, both movies you can understand how he talked himself into. Next up, The Butcher Boy. He's still got it. "It" is not box office success, of course. That's two flops in a row. He goes staid and Hollywood with a supernatural thriller. In Dreams. 3 flops in a row. Was there ever a reason suits should be giving him money? Why was The Crying Game even a hit? He goes staid but art cinema. The End of the Affair. Modest hit. He's now in purgatory between art cinema and Hollywood. Has any director gone from outsider to insider and back with their vision intact? Jordan has not proven to be the exception that tests the rule. I've always thought of The Crying Game as the film that ruined Neil Jordan and I guess that's true, it undeniably warped the tenor of his career. But this film itself can't be blamed. It's a great movie. A great movie, but the end of an era. Make no mistake about it, though; the era to which it belongs also produced Angel, The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Miracle. It's of those films. It's the final piece in one of my favorite runs a filmmaker has ever had. Forget the gimmicks. Forget the coy taglines and the smirking punch lines. Forget the marketing machine and the Oscar campaigns and the Miramax stink. Forget the noise. The Crying Game deserves better than all that. So what, you know the twist? You don't know even half the story.

- christopher funderburg -
7/8/2011

* Boy George's extraordinary rendition of "The Crying Game" was his biggest hit in years, but the song was written by Geoff Stephens and originally recorded by Dave "No, not him" Berry in 1964. Jimmy Page played guitar on it. The best song in the movie, though, is Lyle Lovett's excellent cover of Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" that plays over the end credits.

** Davidson only acted in one significant film in the wake of his Crying Game success: he played the Egyptian Sun God Ra in Stargate. The story goes that he hated acting and didn't even want to do that movie, so he demanded what he thought would be an outrageous sum to appear in the film, $1 million. The producers accepted which makes me curious how much French Stewart got paid to play a badass military thug in the movie. By most accounts, Davidson was a huge pain on The Crying Game set and an absolutely monstrous jackass during the filming of Stargate. As good as he is in The Crying Game, I'm not sure I'm sad about his abbreviated career. His work in The Crying Game feels like the very definition of a semi-talented amateur cast in the perfect role. He's very raw and unpolished and I'm not sure there's any reason to think he could have done anything special outside of the context of "Dil." Careers have been based on less, but it very much seems like "right guy for the right role," not the discovery of a fantastic new acting talent. That he's amazingly awful in Stargate supports this theory.

*** I was surprised to read that The Crying Game actually suffered a bit of a backlash from the gay community. Watching the movie, I thought "I can't believe such an interesting gay character appeared in a mainstream film in 1992 - roles that good don't even get written now for gay characters." Apparently, though, there was a bit of a Cruising thing going on where the gay community lamented that their onscreen representative was not exactly morally upright. Combined with the aforementioned "She's a dude! It's so fucking sick!" vibe going around audience, I can understand their position. Still, this isn't Cruising or Silence of the Lambs where homosexuality is explicitly linked to deviancy, degeneracy and serial murder - Davidson's Dil is a flawed but very appealing character, the movie hinges on an audience sympathizing with Rea's conflicted attraction to him. Dil is clearly the most innocent and open-hearted character in the film, even if he is a prostitute and a drunk.

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