Tag: Ray Liotta

Hannibal (2001)

Anthony Hopkins rides again in the terrible Hannibal

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter), Julianne Moore (Clarice Starling), Gary Oldman (Mason Verger), Ray Liotta (Paul Krendler), Frankie R Faison (Barney Matthews), Giancarlo Giannini (Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi), Francesca Neri (Allegra Pazzi), Zeljko Ivanek (Dr Cordell Doemling)

For Dino De Laurentis, The Silence of the Lambs was always the one that got away. Owning the movie rights to the Lecter character, de Laurentis allowed Orion, producers of The Silence of the Lambs, to use the character name for free. De Laurentis was desperate to make his own Hannibal Lecter film, to cash in on Lambs success – so much so he would have put any old crap on the screen so long as it was connected to Lecter. Perhaps Thomas Harris wanted to test that out with his novel Hannibal, a blatantly for-the-money piece of pulp.

Hannibal is everything that Silence of the Lambs is not. Where Jonathan Demme’s film was subtle, insidious and unsettling this is brash, gory and garish. Harris’ serial killer works always circled around the possibility of tipping into a sort of Poesque-Gothic netherworld. Hannibal dives in head first, reinventing its central character as a sort of Robin Hood of murderous psychopaths and introducing everything from vengeful faceless paedophiles, to Dantesque murders and man-eating hogs. The plot, such as it is, sees Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) living under an assumed identity in Florence. Back in America he is being hunted not only by Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) but also Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, unbilled under a host of make-up) who wants revenge after being hideously disfigured by Lecter. Will Lecter turn the tables on these adversaries?

Both Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster were offered more money than they knew what to do with for this film. Both turned it down, citing the book – and its grotesque and bizarre outcome that see Lecter and Starling becoming lover-killers together – as the major factor. Foster in particular was out-spoken about how she saw the books extremity as a betrayal of the work she did with the character in the first film. 

No such concern for Hopkins though, who took a bumper pay cheque to return. Hopkins always said Lecter was an easy role to play – basically a creepy voice and a lot of actorly tricks – and it certainly makes it easy for Hopkins to coast through the part here. Really Hopkins treats the role no differently from the countless chat shows where he had been asked to say “Hello Claressse”, the only real difference being he was paid about $20million to do it here. This is Hopkins on unthinking autopilot, in a film that tries to play up the black comedy but instead becomes a ludicrous, offensive farce, drowning in blood.

Ridley Scott directs and his painterly visuals and mastery of the epic shot strips comes at the cost of the very things that made the original film so involving and tense. The Hitchcockian suspense and intimacy of Demme’s direction is jettisoned. Instead everything is a dialled up to a brightly coloured 11. The entire film mistakes gore, blood and overblown, cartoonish villainy for horror. Watching people being mauled by wild hogs, or some more unfortunate being lobotomised and made to eat his own brain isn’t scary it’s more gross. And because nothing feels remotely real in this film, it doesn’t even carry much impact.

The entire film is based around the fact that it’s Hannibal we’re paying to see – especially Hopkins reprising the role – so by Jiminiy we better work a little bit to make this lethal killer from Lambs into something a bit closer to an anti-hero. So instead, Lecter is rejigged as a sort of charming, amoral cannibal. The sort of guy who prefers to eat the rude and unmannered, who loves art and is only really dangerous when provoked. The film carefully gives us reasons to dislike everyone Lecter kills, and slowly falls in love with his sinister magnetism. 

This reduces Julianne Moore – in a truly thankless task – trying to both forge some sort of identity for Clarice from the story that is both unique and a continuation of what Jodie Foster did so well in the first film. It’s not entirely her fault that she fails. This is a film that depowers Clarice, that goes as far as it dares to turn her into a moth around Hannibal’s flame. The film backs away from the romance of the book (even if the film hints at it enough), replacing the eventual ending with something almost as stupid but at least doesn’t turn Clarice into a brain guzzling serial killer.

The plot flies around two arcs, one set around Hannibal in Florence the other on his return to America. Both carry no resemblance to the real world. The first does at a least have a decent performance of nervy greed from Giancarlo Giannini as the Italian detective who (wrongly) feels he can go toe-to-toe with Hannibal. The second revolves around Gary Oldman’s (unbilled – due to an argument over billing or a sly joke, depending on who you talk to) repulsive Mason Verger, a villain so revoltingly gothic you can’t believe in him for a second.

The film looks good and has a decent score, but it’s basically a claret splashed mess that can’t decide whether it’s a horror or some sort of black comedy. It settles for being nothing at all. A truly terrible movie, where everyone is there for the money and I imagine no one thought about the movie for a second once their work on it was done.

Marriage Story (2019)

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver are an estranged couple in Marriage Story

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Scarlett Johansson (Nicole Barber), Adam Driver (Charlie Barber), Laura Dern (Nora Fanshaw), Alan Alda (Bert Spitz), Ray Liotta (Jay Moratta), Azhy Robertson (Henry Barber), Julie Hagerty (Sanda), Merritt Wever (Cassie), Wallace Shawn (Frank), Martha Kelly (Nancy Katz)

It’s a scenario that more and more marriages in our modern world head towards – divorce. And it’s never easy to separate from something that has dominated your life for years, and the more that bonds two people together, the harder to pull them apart. As the film says, “it’s not as simple as not being in love any more” – and the complex emotional bonds that form between people, and the inability we have to switch these on and off like lights, are what drive Noah Baumbach’s film, heavily influenced by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson) is a former child-star who has built a career as a respected theatre actor in tandem with her husband Charlie Barber (Adam Driver), an acclaimed and visionary theatre director. Living in New York with their young son Henry (Azhy Robertson), their marriage is dissolving with Nicole frustrated at Charlie’s selfishness, just as Charlie is angered by what he sees as her refusal to take full responsibility for her career choices. As mediation fails, Nicole returns to LA for a role in a TV series, taking Henry with her. With divorce papers filed in LA, the couple engage in a cross-state legal battle for custody and finances, with their positions increasingly weaponised into hostile encounters by their respective legal teams. No one is coming out of this one unscathed.

Baumbach’s film is tender, sympathetic and offers a fine line of arch comedy and even farce (at points), that works over time to be as even-handed as it possibly can. The film’s sympathies are aimed not solely at husband or wife, but at the couple themselves wrapped up in the hostile, money-spinning world of divorce where, it’s strongly implied, the only real winners are the lawyers making thousands of dollars spinning out clashes as long (and as aggressively) as possible in order to cement their positions and keep their industry going.

The film is a solid denunciation of the entire industry that has grown up around divorce, where it’s seemingly impossible to find any arrangement alone without lawyers giving it a legal force, or to come out without that process consuming most of the wealth of the couple. Even worse in this case, the main battle-ground becomes the rights of each parent to access to their son, Henry’s college fund disappearing into a legal battle and the child becoming the centre of both fraught attentions and an unseemly competition for affection between both parents, effectively offering bribes for preferential responses from their son. All in order to prove that their link to him is the stronger.

The tragedy of all this – the way the system seems designed to turn personal relationships poisonous and bitter – becomes Baumbach’s focus. Brilliantly the film starts with a voiceover from both Nicole and Charlie in turn, over a montage, stressing the wide list of things they loved about their partner in the first place: part, it is revealed, of a mediation session that ends in disaster and Nicole’s walkout. But the closeness, the bond, the intimacy of these two people is revisited time and time again in the film. Legal dispute scenes and lawyer confrontations are followed by perfectly friendly home visits and regretful conversations. Legal meetings are bizarrely punctuated by coffee with conversation from the lawyers suddenly turning light and breezy. Then, as events hit a courtroom, moments like Charlie’s failure to properly install a car seat are spun out by lawyers as evidence of his risky disregard of his child’s safety while Nicole’s glass of wine after work becomes incipient alcoholism. 

For a film about divorce, it’s striking that it’s the process of divorce that turns the couple’s relationship increasingly toxic (culminating in a brutal scene where each throws increasingly personal and cruel abuse at each other for other five minutes). Sure there are resentments and anger at the front, but these are kept under reserve and still allow the couple to chat and negotiate amicably when they’re by themselves. As soon as the lawyers are involved, the mood steadily turns worse and worse. 

This is part of the film’s attempt to present the couple even-handedly. I’d say it only partially succeeds at this – with a 55/45 split in favour of Charlie, who is presented as the most “victimised” by the system, as the New York man having to prove he has a link to his now-LA-based-son. While Nicole does get a fantastic monologue (brilliantly performed by Johansson, full of regret, apology, anger and confusion) where she outlines Charlie’s selfishness, distance and probable (later confirmed) affair to her lawyer, the focus soon shifts to Charlie’s travails in the system. It’s him hit by a blizzard of demands from court and lawyer. It’s him who is separated from his son. It’s him who pays the biggest financial burden. It’s him who takes the biggest blows and has to bend his whole life to try and claim a residency in LA. It’s not a surprise Baumbach marginally favours his surrogate, but it does leave you wanting a few more scenes – especially in the latter half of the film – for the impact on Nicole.

However you keep on side with both halves of the couple thanks to the superb performances from Johansson and Driver. Johansson is both fragile and acidly combative, a woman who feels she has led someone else’s life for far too long. Driver is a bewildered gentle giant, but carrying a long streak of self-justifying self-obsession, clearly believing himself the only victim, but deeply hurt by the situation he finds himself in.

Supporting him are three very different lawyers. Laura Dern is on Oscar-winning form as Nicole’s brash, confident, ruthless defender with a smile so practised it’s hard to tell when it’s false or when it’s true. Alan Alda is endearing – but also gently out of his depth – as Charlie’s more conciliatory first lawyer (in one brilliant moment, Charlie interrupts a lengthy joke from Alda’s Bert during a sidebar with the frustrated put down “sorry Bert am I paying for this joke?”) while Ray Liotta channels De Niro roughness as his fiercely competitive second lawyer.

Marriage Story is a bittersweet, superbly made, moving but occasionally strangely funny story of a couple falling out of love and trying to find the way of converting that into a functioning co-parenting friendship. Throughout it’s not the couple, but the system making money from their dysfunction, that’s to blame in this marvellously written and superbly played drama.

Goodfellas (1990)

Pesci, Liotta and De Niro embrace the life of crime in Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Ray Liotta (Henry Hill), Robert DeNiro (Jimmy Conway), Joe Pesci (Tommy DeVito), Lorraine Bracco (Karen Hill), Paul Sorvino (Paulie Cicero), Frank Sivero (Frankie Carbone), Frank Vincent (Billy Batts), Tony Darrow (Sonny Bunz), Mike Starr (Frenchy), Chuck Low (Morrie Kessler), Frank DiLeo (Tuddy Cicero), Samuel L. Jackson (“Stacks” Edwards), Catherine Scorsese (Tommy’s mother), Michael Imperioli (Spider), Debi Mazar (Sandy)

If there is one film loved more than any other in Martin Scorsese’s filmography, it’s probably Goodfellas. It’s a seismic high-point, not just in its genre – the greatest gangster film ever made since The Godfather Part II – but in film-making, it’s influence and legacy seeming to hung over everything ever since, not least the next-great gangster epic The Sopranos (with which it shares a whopping 27 actors, most notably Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperoli, Frank Vincent and Tony Sirico). But, on top of all that, Goodfellas works so well because it is a masterpiece of both style and substance, a superbly inventive film that uses all the tricks of cinema to tell a fascinating and brilliantly paced morality tale.

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster”. So says Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), our Irish-Italian guide (and those heritage distinctions are very important in this world) who joins the wrong crowd as a teenager in the 1960s and winds up a strung-out, cocaine-addicted wreck in the 1980s caught by the cops and turned for states evidence, fleeing to an obscure life in witness protection with his long-suffering wife and sometime-accomplice Karen (Lorraine Bracco). Along the way though, Hill loves the glamour and greed of the gangster life, it’s excitements and boys-club rules, guided by his mentor the terrifyingly ruthless Irish-Italian Jimmy “the Gent” Conway (Robert DeNiro), psychopathic fellow gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and menacingly quiet capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino – never better). 

Scorsese’s film is an electric celebration of movie making, partly why it’s so beloved of film buffs. Scorsese marshals all the weapons in his considerable arsenal as filmmaker. We get jump cuts. We get freeze frames (each marking a significant moment in Hill’s life). We get sharp editing. We get unreliable narration. We get dizzyingly brilliant long-shots and tracking shots (none more so famous than Henry and Karen’s arriving at a club – from travelling from the back door, through the kitchen and into the best table at the club all in one wonderful shot). We get Scorsese’s brilliant use of music, his perfectly placed camera, his brilliance in knowing when to hold his shots, his mastery of lighting (an early hit is so bathed in red it feels like digging a grave in hell). This film was the master at his ultimate height, inspired by everything from the New Wave to old-school 1930s gangster films.

He was also perfect for the material, as no one perhaps understood this world better than Scorsese: and that’s the seductive good and the terrifying bad. Back to that shot of Karen and Henry arriving at the club. The whole sequence – the deference with which Henry is treated, his cool comfort with power, the exclusiveness and special treatment of the whole thing – that smacks of the sort of ultimate party we can only dream of. For most of the first half of the film, Scorsese totally understands why this life is so appealing and exciting. Sure there is violence. There’s danger. But there’s also comradeship. There’s doing anything you want all the time (so long as you stick within the clubs rules). There’s being treated by a God by those around you. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? Is there any wonder Henry saw this as he was growing up and, more than anything, wanted a part of it? In voice-over Karen makes it clear, all this violence and power and being asked to hide guns by your boyfriend is sexy. Who cares about the implications, give me a slice of that pie.

Without understanding this glamour, the film could never show the dark depths of the underbelly of gangsterism. Strangely, perhaps because this is a blue-collar film (the highest gangster we see, Paulie, is still only a few steps away from the street), it’s easier for viewers to give these guys a pass for their behaviour (in a way no one did with Scorsese’s spiritual sequel, his white-collar crime movie The Wolf of Wall Street). Don’t be fooled. Scorsese hints at it with the opening prologue, with Henry, Jimmy and Tommy pulling over a car to brutally finish off (with a spade, knife and gun) a body of a yet-to-be-revealed victim in the back of a car. These ain’t good guys, and for all Henry is shocked by the capacity of violence from the other two he does nothing to stop it.

Because violence is what powers this film, it can happen anytime, it can happen to anyone and your killers always come to you smiling as friends. The gangster code preaches all the time about never betraying your friends, never ratting. But these guys stab each other in the back all the time. There is no honour among thieves. Every hit comes seconds after friendly enquiries and laughs. When Jimmy masterminds a brilliant heist, so paranoid and distrusting is he of those he did the crime with that he has them all killed (a masterful cut montage). Later in the film, strung out on cocaine and terrified of the law Henry treats every meeting like it’s the entrée to him being killed. Even Karen isn’t safe – witness the brilliantly oblique scene late in the film when Jimmy offers her some coats ‘they’re just round the corner’ – is it a hit? Are the coats real? Who knows…

Loyalty is only extended at best to one or two figures. Jimmy (Robert DeNiro in imperious form, terrifyingly cold and also generously ceding the best moments to his co-stars) seems to have a never-ending patience for the psychopathic, instinctive violence of his best friend Tommy. Played with a petrifying Oscar-winning flourish by Joe Pesci, Tommy is like a murderous Rumpelstiltskin, a brutal killer and wired murderer who can explode at any moment. Witness the famous “Funny how?” scene – it plays superbly off Tommy’s unpredictability, his hair-trigger possibility to either laugh with you or shoot you. Much of the film’s problems for our ‘heroes’ – not less that body in the boot of the car – stems from Tommy’s capacity for thoughtless violence. 

Scorsese directs these scenes with such unbearable tension, that any romance of the early sequences of the young Henry Hill disappears. How could you even begin to imagine spending time in a room with these violent, soulless men who kill each other at the drop of a hat? Despite all this, never for one moment until the very end does Henry even consider leaving this world behind. Like so many of the characters in The Sopranos the addiction of this world of power is just way, way too much and if that means a short life then, hell, so be it. Even at the end on witness protection, Henry’s punishment is that he is forced to live a normal life like a no-body (or rather like the rest of us) while balancing the guilt of betraying the people he left behind. Loyalty is a complex thing, but always one-sided in the Gangster world.

As Hill Ray Liotta gives the finest performance of his career. Henry is part wide-eyed naïve dreamer unaware that his dream is a nightmare, and loving every minute of it. Liotta’s Hill is an addict to everything he touches – danger, violence, infidelity and most damagingly of all the mountains of cocaine he is consuming by the 1980s. Compared to the other gangsters, he’s a decent guy – but only in the sense he hesitates (slightly) in the face of murder. He’s selfish, greedy, strangely likeable oddly sympathetic but you feel he gets everything he deserves. Just as good is Lorraine Bracco as his wife Karen, too aroused and infatuated with the bonuses the crime life brings her to listen to her conscience. 

Scorsese’s film is a masterpiece that completely understands that the gangster life is, at the end of the day, a series of boys who never grew up who espouse concepts like duty, honour and faith but live lives of greed, petty murder, vengeance and savagery. Sure walking on the dark side can be fun, can be exciting and can bring you some immediate bonuses. But it also leaves your soul as cold as Jimmy’s or as blackly non-existent as Tommy, the sort of guy who can pour affection on his mother while shrugging off her worries about what that terrible smell is in the boot of his car. These guys are having fun for half the film, until they aren’t, but don’t get seduced by the fun of it. Scorsese knows only too well that they’re going where the film started: a red light washed grave in the middle of nowhere.