On Screen
MORRONE, JOHN
On Screen PATRICIAN AMBITIONS BY JOHN MORRONE IN the prologue to The January Man, two fashionable young women, dressed to the nines for New Year's Eve, step sleekly into their cars and are...
...Since Shanley shows little interest in the killer (who at the end is apprehended and dismissed with amazing dispatch), we don't either...
...Though on the outskirts of the story, the most revealing character is Christine...
...Christine (Susan Sarandon), a gal with patrician ambitions, ditched Nick for his power-mongering brother and still has the paperwork that could prove Frank actually took the bribe...
...we start watching the ethnic bits pile up...
...You may be tempted to dismiss the film as AII in the Family dressed up like Serpico...
...On Screen PATRICIAN AMBITIONS BY JOHN MORRONE IN the prologue to The January Man, two fashionable young women, dressed to the nines for New Year's Eve, step sleekly into their cars and are driven away...
...The film telegraphs what a dumb move this was (Nick baldly asks her, "How can you sleep with him after you've been with me...
...Flynn once made him the scapegoat in a bribery scandal concocted to protect Frank...
...Nick isn't exactly thrilled...
...What, however, is he trying to say about this bunch of working-class blokes who have sold out by climbing the political ladder, or have flaked out by becoming the vivacious socialite or the underappreciated genius...
...British director Pat O'Connor, whose 1984 sleeper Cal revealed him as a sensitive observer of ethnic tensions, would seem an apt choice for The January Man, yet he is virtually eclipsed by John Patrick Shanley's script...
...His intention, apparently, was to enrich the stale police-procedural plot while setting the characters' personal conflicts in motion, but the result is a dissipation rather than a heightening of suspense...
...The identity of the victim goes largely undiscussed throughout the film, other than that she is the best friend of the survivor, who turns out to be the daughter of an IrishAmerican mayor of New York named Eamon Flynn...
...As Shanley has it, if you haven't entered public service for personal advancement, you concentrate on private pursuits...
...Miss December,' as I'll call her, was the 11th in a series of unsolved "blue-ribbon" strangling murders begun almost a year before...
...Now the brothers are barely on speaking terms, and their working together is further made unpalatable because of a woman they have shared...
...To avoid the possibility of a 12th corpse in January, the Mayor, Frank and a retrothinking, pasta-gutted precinct captain, Alcoa (Danny Aiello), are forced to bite a very hard biscotto: to hire back to the force the Commissioner's gifted brother Nick (Kevin Kline), a "Beatnik" ex-cop marking time in the Fire Department who just might crack the case...
...How Christine will resolve the frustration induced by her greed, and what she will do with the bribery evidence, are practically the only sparks of suspense in The January Man...
...When not grubby from fire fighting, Nick practices a particularly indigestible style of cuisine and talks art and economic injustice with his neighbor, played redeemingly well by Alan Rickman as the crankiest of nonconformists...
...Of course, both questions are tangential to the plot, but if this is a thriller, so is Abie's Irish Rose...
...Rarely have I seen the duplicity of civil servants so linked with their middle-class ethnicity...
...Mayor Flynn and his up-from-theranks commissioner of police, Frank Starkey (Harvey Keitel), are facing political heat because the murder of Bernadette's friend has hit too close and is too much before the public...
...Even Kevin Kline, in the lead, seems to play down to his role, performing athletically when breaking down a door but giving dispirited readings to coy lines uttered in moments of crisis...
...One purrs contentedly to the chauffeur, "Gracie Mansion, please.' The other heads home, to a posh but more modest address, and is promptly murdered upon arrival...
...Dressed WASPily in a severe black sheath dress, a plain string of pearls and far too much hairspray—the least flattering persona Sarandon has ever been asked to portray—she looks simply terrible knowing she's wed the wrong man, the wrong class, the wrong way of life...
...Since Mayor Flynn is played by Rod Steiger doing his best to look and sound like Carroll O' Connor, and since Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays Bernadette, the daughter, with the off-center urban look of an '80s Anna Maria Alberghetti (the result of a mixed Irish-Italian marriage, perhaps...
...and, frankly, we're inclined to agree...
...But trapping a serial killer sits most uneasily upon the volatile social fabric he has created here...
...Shanley, a playwright, became last year's most visible new screenwriting talent for his disarming treatments of Italian and Irish neighborhood neuroses in Moonstruck and Five Corners...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 2
