On Film
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen UNEXPECTED LUMET By Raphael Shargel With Night Falls on Manhattan, Sidney Lumet begins his fifth decade as a director of feature films. His body of work includes Twelve Angry Men,...
...On the advice of defense lawyer Sam Vigoda (Richard Dreyfuss), "the last of the '60s radicals," Sean becomes involved in an Internal Affairs investigation that goes after many of the cops who arrested Washington, including his father's partner (James Gandolfini) and his father Liam himself (Holm...
...When questioned about his background, Sean sagely declares, "I know the streets...
...During the course of the film, Sean is forced to acknowledge that Washington, a criminal even his own lawyer describes as "scum," is the only one who told the truth at his trial...
...Its climax does not feature adversaries confronting one another with guns, but a single figure confronting a paper shredder, brooding over whether or not to destroy evidence...
...People owe me...
...Films that deal with political corruption tend to conclude in one of two ways...
...Many critics and audiences have been disappointed with Lumet's latest, calling it perfunctory and absurd, a rehash of cop-movie themes handled more effectively in his other films...
...Like Serpico, it follows a young and idealistic character from his first day on the j ob to a moment of intense personal crisis...
...Like Twelve Angry Men, it takes care to describe the torturous childhood and adolescence of a defendant at trial...
...You want clean hands...
...This is a movie designed to deflate expectations...
...Night Falls on Manhattan eloquently dramatizes the difficulties of true altruism...
...As if the film's plot were not contrived enough, Lumet, freely adapting his screenplay from Robert Daley's novel Tainted Evidence, peppers his script with dialogue that sounds more like a 1930s Warner Brothers movie than a realistic contemporary crime drama...
...Sean's romance with an agent from Washington's defense team mirrors the relationship between Paul Newman and Charlotte Rampling in The Verdict...
...And while Night Falls on Manhattan builds dramatically after the conviction, it grows increasingly intimate as it progresses, moving from big public spaces like courtrooms and hospitals into corridors, offices and homes, continually reducing its number of significant characters...
...Sean sincerely wishes to do good, but he lives in a world where every decent decision is made for selfish reasons...
...Thirty-threeyear-old Sean Casey (Garcia) is elected District Attorney of New York County after only eight months of service as an A.D.A...
...If Night Falls on Manhattan had met the expectations of its audiences, if it had been either a by-the-numbers police corruption story or a much closer remake of Serpico or Prince of the City, it wouldhave found more favor than it has...
...Yet Lumet rejects the climaxes that the conventions of the genre demand...
...He admits to falsifying a search warrant in order to collar Washington, but he is not otherwise corrupt...
...But by appearing to embrace convention and then diffusing its satisfactions, the film presses its audience to take note of and judge its content...
...Morgenstern asks Sean...
...Night Falls on Manhattan contrasts Andy Garcia's smoldering reserve with Ian Holm's quirky dynamism...
...Vigoda is a vengeful crusader because he failed to prevent his 15-year-old daughter from overdosing on drugs...
...Morgenstern and his chief assistant...
...Morgenstern, obsessed with power and popularity, continually crows, "I got friends...
...Washington, unlike the kid in Twelve Angry Men, does not win anyone's sympathy when he tells of his past...
...In Making Movies, Lumet's revealing book about his craft, he talks about how his films blend different acting styles...
...Night Falls on Manhattan does repeat elements of earlier Lumet films that deal with corruption and the law...
...Morgenstern puts Sean on the Washington case because he wants to cheat Harrison out of his reputation...
...Raphael Shargel, a new contributor to The New Leader, is an instructor in film studies at the University of Virginia...
...And while the conclusions of Serpico and Prince of the City are despairing and simplistic, in Night Falls on Manhattan not every New York cop is implicated in scandal, though the price of integrity proves to be almost impossibly high...
...The only big action sequence, a shootout that would more typically appear at the climax, occurs 10 minutes into the film...
...Liam, shaken by the corruption of the force, cries, "there's so much going on, I just don't understand it any more...
...Become a priest...
...Unlike Rampling's character in The Verdict, Peggy does not take advantage of any opportunity to betray her lover...
...the two romance each other in a few unconvincing and expository scenes...
...While the father in Q&A is tainted, Liam does not turn out to be a cop on the take...
...It's not hard to see where these accusations are coming from...
...After the trial, Sean takes up with Peggy Lindstrom (Lena Olin), a lawyer for the defense...
...Washington's trial, verdict and sentence are passed and done with before the film is half over...
...By contrast, in Night Falls on Manhattan Lumet has created an uneven work that nevertheless portrays the unresolvable complexities of the criminaljustice system better than any American film in recent memory...
...The plot is a standard...
...The movie also gives Ron Liebman one of his best roles—that of a hot-blooded district attorney who flings Yiddishisms about as if they were weapons...
...His body of work includes Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, The Wiz, Prince of the City, and The Verdict...
...Either the whole system is indicted as irredeemable or a virtuous savior swoops in on the proceedings, ridding the system of its evils...
...Known for their urban settings, Lumet's movies frequently deal with ethnic and racial conflict, and are marked by the director's ability to exact dynamic and moving performances from his actors...
...By setting his film off kilter, Lumet demands that his audience contend with the disturbing ideas it raises...
...Sean learns, under Morgenstern's and Vigoda's tutelage, that he cannot be part of the system without making concessions to its darker side, covering up his and its shortcomings, owing favors that will have to be returned at any price...
...His confrontation with the potential corruption of his father mimics Timothy Hutton's predicament at the end of Q&A...
...Lumet has directed more well-known movies than either Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, while his obscurer efforts, such as Daniel and Running on Empty, are two of the most underrated films of the 1980s...
...He succeeds because he has won a single important conviction, against Jordan Washington (Sheik MahmudBey), "the worst drug dealer in Harlem," and because he benefits from the rivalry between incumbent D.A...
...And when the Internal Affairs crackdown leads to a detective's self-destruction, the scene of his suicide is a virtual remake of a climactic scene in Prince of the City...
...Lumet appears to have staged his film backwards...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
