Beat: (2000. dir: Gary Walkow) Back in my beatnik-fascination years, I always thought a movie about either Joan Vollmer or Lucien Carr would be way more interesting than another tired trek down the Kerouac/Cassady path. And there it was, right in front of me: this one is about how Vollmer (Courtney Love) committed suicide-by-husband over Carr (Norman Reedus), set forward here as the possible great love of her life but too cowardly to pick up the gauntlet. Yeah, I don't buy it either, but it's great to see these two intriguing characters reclaim their well-deserved places in the foreground after all these years of padding out the indices of Burroughs/Kerouac/Ginsberg tomes.
It's not a good movie. There's something oppressive about it, and it never pulls together as a narrative. Everything is too pretty, there's too much sentimental music gluing it together, and it moves at an extreme reefer-amble rather than the benzedrine-gallop at which their hearts would have been pounding. It's been a long time since I read about Joan, but my sense is that they're playing fast and loose with the history here. She would long have been a junkie herself by this time, and certainly she was no glamour-puss with perfect maquillage, long-limbed and blowzy like Courtney Love. I have nothing against Love (OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I do: once when she was bartending at Blue Gallery she spent the whole night having a temper tantrum on the phone and I had to nurse a single beer through the entire second set. But I have nothing against her as an actress); still, she's not Vollmer. Yes, she brings intelligence to it, and there's a good, easy rapport between her and her husband (Keifer Sutherland). Regardless, this is the kind of dialogue they're having to wrassle with:
Ginsberg: Joanie, what are you doing?
Vollmer: What does it look like? I'm staring into the abyss.
Ginsberg: Don't you know that if you gaze too long into the abyss, it'll gaze back at you?
Vollmer: It already has.
See what I mean? These freaky poet-types bond on quoting Whitman, etc, and the whole plot, such as it is, tries to construct a conflict we'll care about out of post-adolescent drama-queen sex hysteria, which doesn't play well. It's almost impossible to make scintillating dialogue if all anyone's thinking about is why so-and-so-won't-sleep-with-me. I'm not saying people don't spend much of their lives in that kind of quiet desperation, and I'm not saying the beatniks didn't; I'm saying it's hard to make it into a coruscating piece of cinema.
Ron Livingston (Office Space, Drinking Buddies) is fantastic as Allen Ginsberg, and Keifer Sutherland finds a few master-strokes within his (admittedly over-emoting) Burroughs, no easy task. There's a sense of doomed venture about all beatnik movies, since we all harbor such exacting ideas about who they were, how they moved and spoke and acted. Reedus is well cast as the superficial but brightly-burning superstar Lucien Carr, the kid who gathered the disparate members into one room then committed the murder that sent them forth onto their various paths. He communicates Carr's weakness particularly well, and, yes, I admit, he indulges his Boyish Charm here, but, in his defense, Carr certainly would have used his own, constantly and to good effect.
The ending, although historically dubious, is a beautiful moment for Reedus, and should not be missed by the true fan.
Rating: two stars
Reedus Factor: four stars
Deuces Wild: (2002. dir: Scott Calvert) It's not a good movie. It's a nostalgia trip yearning for a place and time that never existed, and, even in fantasy, is not in the least appealing. Pompadour-haired, wife-beater-wearing gangs battle it out in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Their mothers are all crazy, some with grief and loss, others just crazy; their girls have that and nothing else to look forward to once the ring goes on the finger. The good guys hang out at the soda shop, do charity work at the Catholic Church for penance, are nice to little kids and dress up to go to weddings with their girls; the bad guys hang out at a pool-hall, sell dope to the weak and use little kids in their evil machinations. Then they all beat the crap out of each other, all but destroying their neighborhood in the process.
There's (surprise!) a Romeo & Juliet subplot, and Reedus is the baddest of the bad, the dealer who supplied the hot-shot that killed the younger, dreamier brother of our hero (Stephen Dorff). He's getting out of jail, Reedus, and bent on having his revenge on the guy he's sure snitched him out (again, Dorff). (It wasn't.) Gang-members are played by the likes of James Franco, Johnny Knoxville and Balthasar Getty, but only Reedus is really interesting, although not as much as he would be if he'd played it five years later. He's too young; his malevolence is merely two-dimensional. There is already, however, that fascination in the way he moves, that disquiet interplay of looseness and tension, the complicity between stillness and violence. In the end, because it's that kind of predictable story, he gets the crap beat out of him by Stephen Dorff, which doesn't really seem likely, does it?
Rating: one and a half stars
Reedus factor: three stars
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