RETRO ACTIVE: Romeo is Bleeding (1993)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today?s new releases. In honor of Oren Moverman's corrupt-cop drama Rampart, this week it's Peter Medak's extreme neo-noir Romeo is Bleeding. Film noir frequently feels on the precipice of going too far?its passions, its brutality, and its doom and gloom are often pitched with such frenzied intensity that one half-fears it will tip over into parody.
Romeo is Bleeding was censured for doing just that upon its 1993 release, as director
Peter Medak and writer
Hilary Henkin's jet-black crime saga was dismissed for indulging in so many tropes and clich�s that it played like something of a spoof?a denunciation that remains, 18 years later, to be only partially true. Unquestionably, this neo-noir about a corrupt cop's downward spiral is awash in formulaic elements, from extreme hardboiled voiceover to a nasty femme fatale (contrasted with not one, but
two, visions of loving femininity), and enough tawdry elements ensnaring its knuckleheaded protagonist to make it a veritable catalog of conventions. Yet there's neither intentional nor unintentional caricature to Medak's underrated gem. Capturing a sense of terrifying futility in both shadowy spaces and brightly lit landscapes, and using a cornucopia of constricting and low-angled compositions, the film sidesteps making fun of its chosen cinematic milieu or itself. Driven by unabashed sincerity, it's a work that honestly sells its stock noir notion about the foolhardiness of attempting to either stay true to one's flawed self, or to escape one's preordained niche in search of greater things.
The bleakness of that damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario oozes from the sweaty pores of crooked sergeant Jack Grimaldi (
Gary Oldman), who likes to dance in his row house backyard in the moonlight with angelic wife Natalie (
Annabella Sciorra), and whose work is all violence and sex for which he has a not-so-secret taste. Jack wants more, or rather,
he wants it all?hungrily, madly, recklessly?and so he makes money on the side by informing the mob of testifying witnesses' locations. That nets him $65,000 a gig, though as Medak conveys through shots of Jack's face framed by the mailbox walls that hold his cash payments, he's trapped by such gluttony. Stashing his supplementary income in a hole in his backyard?as Jack intones in the film's incessant, over-the-top third-person narration, "Pretty soon, all he could think about was feeding the hole"?Jack is prisoner to his avaricious urges, and soon a victim to them as well, after he's commissioned by the mob to pinpoint Russian black widow Mona Demarkov (
Lena Olin). Introduced as a tangle of snarling hair led around in handcuffs by cops, and wearing a suit jacket that barely covers her negligee and thigh-high stockings, Mona is from first sight a wild beast, one of the "animals" that, according to Jack's mob informant (
Michael Wincott), will soon fill the streets after the forthcoming "fall of Rome."
During their first meeting, Mona wastes no time embarrassing Jack by mounting him (to his crazy-eyed delight) right before his colleagues enter the room, and shortly thereafter disappears, putting Jack in deep trouble with bigwig mobster Don Falcone (
Roy Scheider), who demands that Jack kill Mona himself or find his loved ones in fatal peril. Believing himself to be in control of his destiny and yet played like a pawn from all sides, Jack proves to be at the mercy of Mona, who wants him to help her stage her own death/escape for a cool $325,000, and who's defined by always-revealed garters, dark red lips, and insanely eroticized cackling at moments of climax and cruelty. She's as femme fatale-ish as any in the genre, epitomized by the film's signature image of her wrapping her legs around Jack's neck as he drives a car (his face spied from below by the steering wheel). Olin is a whirlwind of ruthless malice, to the point that she'd destabilize the action were it not for Medak and Henkin's treatment, which finds a consistent way to meld Jack and Mona's overripe, borderline-comical lust and craving with Jack's competing, equally genuine sense of romantic yearning for an internal and external reality less conflicted and debased than his current one.
As Jack's blonde-bimbo mistress,
Juliette Lewis brings surprising empathy to a stock role, and the peripheral cast is peppered with pros, including
Dennis Farina,
James Cromwell and
Ron Perlman. Still,
Romeo is Bleeding is all about Oldman, who?front and maniacally center at virtually all times?is nothing short of an alternately jittery, placid, frantic, charming, lunatic force of nature. One can often feel the wiry Oldman acting, in the way he lights a smoke or holds it between his front teeth, or the way he dances with himself and the women in his life (all reflections of the various dream-guises Jack tries on). Yet at the same time that his performance revels in mannerisms, the actor's raw, clammy, pathetic ravenousness is palpable, and magnetic. His turn bookended by scenes set in a lonely desert diner where, as a man with another name, he waits like a ghost for a visitor who doesn't materialize, Oldman has a primal ferocity (finally let loose in a climactic denied bid for self-annihilation) that's borderline apocalyptic. Whether his Jack is going glassy-eyed with carnal desire, fleeing through the grungy graffiti-sprayed NYC night with his face and neck coated in blood, or simply, tearfully gazing at quixotic mirages, he beautifully and unforgettably captures that archetypal noir schism between dreamy romantic hopefulness and tragic greed and need.
Posted by ahillis at November 27, 2011 9:22 AM
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