Now Showing: Flawless • End of Days

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Flawless
Acting Showcase Philip Seymore Hoffman and Robert De Niro
Stretch Their Acting Muscles

by Cole Smithey
(Dramatic Comedy) With Flawless director/writer Joel Schumacher (St. Elmo’s Fire, Falling Down) springs back from his miserably received last film 8 Millimeter to present an acting showcase for Philip Seymour Hoffman (Boogie Nights, Happiness) and Robert De Niro (Analyze This). Nonetheless the script itself is nothing special on its own merit. Walt Koontz (De Niro) is a retired security guard living in a low-rent tenement apartment in Manhattan’s East Village when a shoot-out in his building causes him to reach for his gun. Within seconds, Walt suffers a crippling stroke that eloigns him into a near-suicidal state of remorse. Rusty (Philip Seymore Hoffman) is Walt’s flamboyant drag queen neighbor who agrees to administer singing lessons to help improve Walt’s badly damaged speech and thereby his lacking self esteem. There are a couple of silly ancillary sub-plots about a large amount of missing money stolen from neighborhood criminals and a drag queen contest but the scenes between De Niro’s and Hoffman’s struggling characters make the movie tick.

The adage that opposites attract is strongly at play in Schumacher’s somewhat exploitative story of two lonely men at diametrical odds attempting to reconcile their physical selves with society. While Walt is a conservative man’s man who used to dance the Tango with his borderline prostitute girlfriend before his stroke, Rusty is a street-wise drag queen who does stand-up comedy, sings at a local club, and gets beaten up by his wife-cheating boyfriend. Walt hates “faggots” and Rusty views men as necessarily violent types who are inherently cruel to protect their macho status. Scenes where the two men curse each other out in virulent tirades have a cartoonish pandering quality that Schumacher uses once too often in hammering home his characters’ built-in differences.

Robert De Niro has become a pinnacle example of a workaday actor able to lift the merit of whatever material he has to work with. In spite of marginal scripts like Analyze This and Flawless, De Niro’s mastery of craft and concentration is in itself a force of nature that commands fascination. His representation as a stroke victim is painfully accurate. Appropriately, Philip Seymore Hoffman is an actor whose open round features and pensive voice constantly give off flickers of unspoken motives and half-hidden thoughts. Hoffman is the kind of actor that audiences could rightfully pay to watch read the New York City phone book. He knows how to transmit clues in his body language and vocal tone that penetrate the guts of an audience. You don’t know what to expect from one second to the next with Hoffman. Even as his performance as Rusty, a pre-operation transvestite, in Flawless seems somehow a logical outgrowth of his repressed homosexual character in P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Hoffman stands as a rare kind of malleable actor’s clay that screenwriters could build stories around. He has an acting scope and physical range that puts him in a unique class of versatile actors like Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket, Men In Black) or the late J.T. Walsh (Red Rock West, A Few Good Men). It’s clear that improvisation played a part in some of the humorous scenes between Walt and Rusty, and perhaps even in Hoffman’s brilliant monologues about Rusty’s troubled past.

Flawless is an odd cup of tea that will fill a cinematic niche for gays and drag queens while missing the mark entirely with some audiences. MGM’s low-key ad campaign signals the production company’s insecurity in marketing the film. The movie comes nowhere close to the hilarity of Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman (1997) because Flawless sets out an agenda of representing a dark look at urban harshness. Guns, blood, threats, and mayhem weigh Flawless down with too much meanness for the sake of divisive dramatic tension. Although Schumacher has been making movies too long to ignore the director’s most important job: casting.

End of Days
Millennial Thriller Melange Schwarzeneger Races With Satan
For A Noisy Eve of Destruction

by Cole Smithey

Strange Days, Seven, American Werewolf In London, The Exorcist, and Rosemary’s Baby are just a handful of thrillers that End of Days borrows heavily from to rev up its visually over-elaborate telling of Satan’s (Gabriel Byrne - Stigmata) millennial attempt to procreate with Christine York (Robin Tunney - The Craft), a twenty-year-old female anti-Christ. This fateful coupling will necessarily incite an apocalypse stiffly referred to as the biblical “end of days.” Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger - Terminator 2: Judgment Day) is a widower and ex-cop now working as a security specialist hot on the trail of Satan in the interest of protecting Christine and all of humanity. The resulting game of cat and mouse between the Devil and the big Austrian hulk has every requisite explosion and blood spitting fury that audiences have come to expect from a Schwarzenegger action fest. Unfortunately there are unforgivably bad performances from actors in minor roles and some of the special effects are transparently phony; as in a scene where an obviously scaled down model of a wrecked subway car flashes repeatedly from the screen.

In a grasping attempt to fill End of Days with as much catastrophic imagery as possible screenwriter Andrew Marlowe has desperately filled his script with piecemeal details from every predecessor of the horror genre he could think of. By pasting together fragmented horrific, black comedy, and action elements Marlowe subverts the horror genre into an action film that’s entertaining to watch but too unfocused in its theme and style to engage an audience beyond mediocre suspense. End of Days barley avoids turning itself into one long chase sequence by a punctuation of grotesque imagery reminiscent of David Fincher’s Seven (1995), bizarre hallucinations and mano y mano confrontations between Jerhico and Satan.

Director Peter Hyams (2010, Timecop) handles the super-action of End of Days with slick over-explosive fire and brimstone that makes you feel like someone has tugged your roller coaster safety strap too tight so your ride will feel more ominous. It’s a heavy-handed visual style that obviates an audience accessibility to any emotional empathy with the film’s characters beyond the kind of emotional identification that children have with plastic toy action figures. Although Hyams is given severely flawed material to work with, he further muddles End of Days in his lack of visual restraint in shaping the action by degrees. Some amount of blame must also fall on editor Steve Kemper’s (Stigmata, Face/Off) shoulders in his efforts at over-pacing scenes by extending action sequences instead of keeping the movie lean and determined.

A post modern trend in American cinema says that rap music’s habit of “sampling” from all that has gone before is not only permissible but essential in giving knowing winks to the audience. It places an editorial “we” before every idea and takes full advantage of the worst American speech habit of saying “like” before every other word. This kind of screenwriting waters down the gene pool of good film writing by telegraphing every plot twist and repeatedly kicking the audience out of the flow of the story.

While a lack of character and relationship shaping is endemic to the action genre, the practice is antithetical to the genre of horror and ruins the power of great horror (like the Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby) to convey social import and personal revelation. End of Days is painful proof that there are narrative rules that are just as certain as musical rules governing which notes can be played without turning music into noise. At a budget of 100 million dollars, End of Days is a very expensive lesson in how jamming together too many references and playing too many wrong notes not only makes the players look inexperienced but it makes the audience look for the nearest exits.