Get Shorty Elmore Leonard fans will enjoy a near-perfect movie version of Get Shorty
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva LOOK AT HIM John Travolta in 'Get Shorty' Hew of us can enact our dreams in our jobs. That lawyer so diligently adding codicils to your will may harbor fantasies of...
...Palmer tracks the hoodlum to his lair, breaks his nose with one fast punch, and takes back his property...
...Oddly, this effect is easier to bring off in a novel than a movie...
...The cunning of Elmore Leonard's book lies in the way it shows us that all the characters, not just Chili, are constantly running movies in the screening rooms of their minds, and that stratagems, manners, even morals, are determined by what each Hollywood "player" has learned from filmgoing...
...There is nothing in his personality or physique that he hasn't tailored for the character...
...He "reads" them, they can't "read" him, so he wins...
...But Chili gets Hollywood fever and conducts very fast raids on a series of alien turfs until he gets into precisely the position he covets: the power to make movies...
...Look at me," commands Chili repeatedly...
...Elmore made this plausible in the book...
...Circumstances place our hero in his enemy's power and Barboni sends him to the West Coast to collect money from a supposedly dead man...
...It's not DeVito's height but his lack of glamour that makes him a burlesque of the role...
...Besides, he's got an entire arsenal to draw upon: charm, humor, flattery, sexuality, reasonableness, and-most auspiciously- threat...
...I mean that quite literally...
...The make-or-break question is, just how good is John Travolta as Chili Palmer...
...This new movie is just a good minor work, but it may attain a certain classic status because of its hero...
...You see, the jacket makes Chili look like Al Pacino in Serpico...
...If a film director were to continually insert the movie scenes by which the characters measure reality, he would risk turning Get Shorty into an anthology of old movie clips instead of a good, brisk crime comedy...
...One just doesn't mess with a movie lover's fantasy life...
...Many scenes have the feel of comedy sketches but are never allowed to become so farcical that they burst the framework of the story...
...On the other hand, Sonnenfeld and Frank have done many things well...
...Wouldn't the roughneck flung by our hero down a flight of steps in a chic restaurant attract a flutter of concerned waiters...
...Sonnenfeld doesn't even try...
...By contrast, Chili seems detached from the realities of his job, almost ethereal...
...The very way he holds his cigarette delivers an aspect of the man...
...Even in great performances, there may exist a slight lack of congruence between actor and role...
...Can this daydreamer really be a gangster...
...So, while the book was basically about the meta-reality experienced by movie-minded people, the movie is more conventional: a comedy about how well-equipped a smart gangster is to swim in the shark-infested waters of Hollywood...
...Indifferent to his business partner's small talk, he fantasizes about buying the condemned film theater across the street and turning it into a classic movie revival house...
...A gangster becomes a moviemaker precisely because he is so good at being a gangster...
...And when people see the loan-shark look on his face, a look that tells them they must comply with his logic for want of any solution of their own, they usually crumble...
...He bluffs the bluffers with a confidence they can only envy...
...Why would he want to hurt people whose trust and aid he might someday need...
...He's perfect...
...This performance is as great as any in American film (certainly greater than anything Travolta has done), but Brando unconsciously lets us know that he is too large for the role even as he illuminates it...
...The star is supposed to be in the DeNiro-Pacino mold: unhandsome but magnetic, not a matinee idol but definitely a star...
...Rene Russo is well cast as a shrewd actress but has been allowed by the director to give a too tightly corseted, grim performance...
...Get Shorty is a comedy-an in-souciantly violent comedy-about a job switch that fulfills a man's fantasies, and the comedy arises from the fact that the skills of his quondam trade propel the hero successfully into the profession of his dreams...
...When we first met Chili Palmer, an intelligent and rather pleasant young loan shark, he is staring out a restaurant window in Miami...
...And for all the movie's energy and pace, my disbelief wasn't always suspended...
...And he hasn't done well by a couple of his actors...
...At times, Frank and Sonnenfeld have coarsened the material by straining for laughs and thrills that Leonard, a laid-back storyteller if there ever was one, never intended the material to evoke...
...Get Shorty has given us Chili Palmer...
...That lawyer so diligently adding codicils to your will may harbor fantasies of piloting a B-52...
...The pace and shape of each scene are calculated to wring every drop of irony and gallows humor out of the material...
...8 1/2 is probably greater than La Strada, but it's the latter that gave us Gelsomina and Zampano...
...But, let's face it, all this is prologue...
...Barboni is a brutal pig of a man, and his nature makes him perfect for his work...
...And, most importantly, Travolta knows how to flick on and off the menace in Palmer's eyes, to replace instantaneously the threat of harm with the promise of friendship, or vice versa...
...And, if DeVito and Russo have been mishandled, the rest of the cast is excellent...
...Moving within a milieu in which daydreaming, roleplaying, and con games are rife, Chili's certainty of purpose is his clout...
...Chili rarely uses force...
...He seems more interested in movies than collecting debts...
...Danny DeVito is miscast as a superstar sought by Palmer to make a project financeable...
...The other day, I caught A Streetcar Named Desire again on TV and noticed a certain daintiness in Brando's demeanor (during his quieter moments) that didn't seem to belong to Stanley Kowalski...
...But Travolta, a much narrower actor than Brando, is completely at one with Palmer...
...Director Barry Sonnenfeld and scriptwriter Scott Frank have chosen a much simpler course: They have the characters constantly refer to movies they've seen, but the real focus is on the strategies and power plays of Chili and his friends and enemies, and we can see for ourselves that the ploys are movie-influenced...
...Ray Barboni, having lost his own coat, casually lifts Chili's black leather jacket from the restaurant's cloak room...
...By the time one of the Escobar drug lords arrives on the scene, there have been one murder and two beatings too many...
...Some great movies don't give us great characters while some merely good films do...
...It's not easy or practical to switch careers in midlife, so the fantasies must remain just that: the occupations of our unseen selves...
...Delroy Lindo is on the verge of being typecast but, here playing yet another gangster, still manages to be fearsome in surprising ways...
...Gene Hackman and Dennis Farina work successfully toward opposite goals: Hackman, as a hapless producer, makes his usually massive presence seem clutsy, pathetic, dopey, while Farina puffs himself up believably to project Barboni's repulsive thuggish-ness...
...This encounter-so economically violent that it makes you gasp and laugh at the same time-both establishes the movie's tone and launches its point...
...When a more prominent gangster, Barboni, saunters up to their table, Chili's partner is properly obsequious but Palmer at first doesn't even look at him...
...Then we see him in action...
...It is this flexible steeliness that makes the gangster memorable...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
