Screen:
Baumann, Paul
SCREEN TAKE YOUR GALOSHES 'SEA OF LOVE' & 'BLACK RAIN' As the sexually voracious Helen in Sea of Love, Ellen Barkin goes at men like Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor goes after opposing...
...It only starts to get silly when Barkin is called upon to molest a couple of voluptuous but otherwise innocent-looking vegetables at a Manhattan market...
...The business of rounding up suspects is belabored, and the flushing out of the murderer is about as subtle as a surprise celebrity appearance on a variety show...
...In Sea of Love, a scene in which a cheap hood in a shiny jacket and a pompadour confronts Pacino in a fancy shoe store could have come right out of the revelatory world of The Wanderers...
...There is a good deal of gruesome sword and knife play, with everything from heads to pinkies being chopped off...
...As the feverish Helen, Barkin (Diner, The Big Easy), who has a face Picasso might have put together and a body only God in his infinite generosity could have created, talks and acts like an irritable bus driver...
...Keller's delight and confusion over Helen, his fear that she might in fact be the murderer, move across Pacino's hard, dark face like clouds mottling the ocean's surface...
...Such innocence must be snuffed out...
...He knows how New Yorkers talk...
...Andy Garcia plays Charlie Vincent, Conklin's doomed partner...
...These are more visceral than earned reactions, however...
...But in Black Rain Scott does founder...
...His raunchy first novel, The Wanderers, about a group of toughs growing up in the Bronx, is by turns realistic and mythological...
...Keller is tracking down a killer who uses the personal column of a singles magazine to set up victims...
...Don't talk to her unless you have exact change...
...Stay out of this rainstorm if you can...
...The ethnocentric and inscrutable Japanese are always bowing and scraping before betraying an essentially fiendish nature...
...If Sea of Love can't quite keep all its parts moving in unison, Ridley Scott's Black Rain leaves its even more lurid material scattered far and wide...
...Scott, who stages atrocities in a steel factory, a subterranean parking garage, and at a terraced farm house, is also inventive with sound...
...Loner, casual dresser, and daredevil, Conklin is tinged by corruption but fearless when facing greater evils...
...Humiliation, sometimes even death, follows...
...One is tempted to think of his as the very face of New York City itself...
...With his immensely sad, somehow broken features and his dark, heavy-lidded eyes, he seems to have dragged himself back uncertainly from some ineffable catastrophe...
...Price, with the help of director Harold Becker {The Onion Field), gives Pacino plenty to work with...
...The moribund storyline even has the Japanese mouthing lines like, "We won the peace," and "You shoved your values down our throats...
...It's like taking a trip to another planet...
...Douglas seems as out of place as the movie's protagonist...
...His peer group is every social worker's nightmare...
...His cops are earthy and shrewd...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...Within the Japanese mob, Sato's mentors have no more luck than New York's finest in bringing the ambitious hood with the punk hairdo to heel...
...Cops, like priests, are always being lied to, and Pacino carries that wearying knowledge with a bedraggled dignity...
...There is some passing interest in seeing the futuristic landscape brilliantly envisioned for Los Angeles in Blade Runner echoed eerily in the real world of modern Japan...
...Barkin is good as the predatory Helen...
...Japanese star Ken Takakura waxes obsequious and pious as an Osaka detective, and Kate Capshaw (The Temple of Doom) appears in sequined gowns with impressive plunging necklines and backs...
...Sato, who smiles with warped pleasure at his own pain, is incorrigible...
...Pacino, who once ruled the world as the youthful Don Corleone in The Godfather, may now have the most interesting face in movies...
...This is too broad an indictment...
...Black Rain is a peculiar story, with an almost World War II combat theme...
...There seems to be no honor even among the most decorously mannered of thieves...
...Vincent, who cavorts with his Japanese hosts and tries to humor his grim buddy, is marked for death from the moment he appears on a crowded New York street...
...You shudder at the collision, and wonder how anyone survives the mauling...
...Richard Gephardt's presidential campaign...
...Michael Douglas is the overdone egg, a foul-mouthed hero who, after escorting a prisoner from New York to Osaka, Japan, gets caught up in a horrific war between two local mobsters...
...This is pretty lame domestic padding...
...Sea of Love, written by New Yorker Richard Price (The Color of Money), pulses with the city's easy cynicism and heartfelt paranoia, and is propped up with New York's own kind of sentimentality...
...Douglas plays detective Nick Conklin, a garden variety American hero...
...The rhythmic clamor of the steel mill, the echoes in the garage, and the whirling of windmills in the fields surrounding the farm house create a sometimes overwhelming sense of suspense and dread...
...Snarling and puffing out his chest in earnest, he comes off more as a pensive adolescent than a seasoned big city cop...
...This is steamy stuff, with a bewildered but grateful-looking Al Pacino left gasping for air and pawing the walls...
...Douglas is no match for Yusaku Matsuda, who plays the monstrous Sato, the psychopathic young Japanese gangster behind all the grisly mutilations...
...There's near genius in the movie's early scene where Keller and his partner argue over Keller's wife's desertion as they inspect and handle the naked body of a murder victim...
...In frustration, the Japanese Godfather can only blame the corrupting influence of American values for his wayward protege's behavior...
...It's a dazzling visual flood-even the double-decker street buses have grilles that light up like slot machines...
...Screenwriter Price always has been good with street punks and certain of New York's grittier hothouse qualities...
...You'd have thought those cliches had been exhausted in Rep...
...He makes the prettiest pictures tell the most inconsequential stories...
...John Goodman (Rosanne Barr's TV husband), who brings a genial vulgarity to his role as one of Keller's partners, helps breathe life into a sometimes over-stylized story...
...On plot, where Sea of Love needs to be masterful, it's a bit shaky...
...Sea of Love, with its throbbing saxophone music, Manhattan night skyline, dingy apartments and hallways, is a genre picture, a double jigger of film noir washed down with the usual murder and sexual problem-solving...
...The erotic is never far from the comic in the aphrodisiacal wonderland of the movies...
...Helen has a face that spells doom for a number of unsuspecting ladies' men, but the story also gives her a small child and an impossibly hard-edged mother...
...Pacino is better as Frank Keller, a veteran New York City detective who goes home to an empty apartment and a diminishing liquor supply...
...Although set in Japan, Black Rain is another hardboiled New York detective story...
...Barkin plays it in an honest and direct way, but she isn't given much to do beyond the gymnastics...
...The crush of people in this urban thriller is claustrophobic, the neon landscape hallucinatory, the tattooed and leather-clad thugs exotic but seemingly a natural extension of a wholly man-made world...
...Long before the fatal confrontation, it is clear only one of two people could have done the dirty work...
...The bars/bordellos gleam with a stainless steel and monochromatic menace...
...Everyone is on the make, everyone bends the rules...
...Director Scott, creator of the luminous Blade Runner, is usually criticized for a devotion to style over substance...
...With his evasive manners and prickly temperament, Pacino gives Keller an emphatic presence...
...Sea of Love is sentimental enough to imply that New York's dangers are the price you must pay for passion...
...SCREEN TAKE YOUR GALOSHES 'SEA OF LOVE' & 'BLACK RAIN' As the sexually voracious Helen in Sea of Love, Ellen Barkin goes at men like Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor goes after opposing quarterbacks...
...Life in the big, impossible beehive drives people to desperate remedies-to strangers...
...But as an individualist, Conklin has the upper hand...
...He is filling in for Tom O'Brien, who is on vacation.n, who is on vacation...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
