Fallen Innocents
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen FALLEN INNOCENTS By Raphael Shargel David Mamet's favorite game is the high stakes con. In his best movies, a team of conspirators fleeces a privileged and gullible individual. But...
...To me, its success seems a sign of the collective despair of American audiences...
...WHEREAS The Spanish Prisoner challenges us to pursue its diabolic logic, City of Angels is deliberately, insultingly mindless...
...For all its talk about angels and eternity, the film celebrates Seth's desire to possess Maggie's body...
...Seth expresses a strong desire not only to experience physical love but also to know the taste of fruit...
...Wide-eyed and flirtatious, she nevertheless acts as a moral barometer, continually reminding Ross that those driven by a desire for money and power will gladly band together to destroy anyone standing in their way...
...Both depict heroes framed for conspiracies involving a grisly knife murder and then denied the opportunity to prove the true villain's guilt...
...Not a work of hard-nosed realism, City of Angels is about Maggie's falling in love with one of those winged messengers of God...
...His protagonists risk everything they hold dear— their financial resources, their integrity, their honor, even their sanity—and, in most cases, are forced to relinquish them...
...Seth (Nicholas Cage) is the lucky angel who becomes smitten with Maggie on the day she prematurely waltzes away from a patient who is about to die...
...The film enthralls us precisely because, try as we might, we cannot guess its outcome...
...The meticulous calculation that goes into each of his shots is often distractingly evident...
...The antithesis of The Spanish Prisoner, this excruciatingly slow film appeals chiefly to the emotions...
...His angels were mere recorders, unseen figures who stood helplessly by as they overheard the desperate thoughts of a populace living in West Berlin, on the edge of the free world...
...But while Thornhill found new love and acceptance after his trials were over, Ross does not seem capable of recovering what he discarded...
...Still, we are told that Maggie has never lost a patient...
...Visiting one patient just before operating, she stares blankly at him like a terrified deer...
...After much consideration, Seth decides to give up his immortal state and become a sentient human being, even though the film draws direct parallels between his choice and original sin...
...The Spanish Prisoner owes a lot to Hitchcock, particularly to North by Northwest...
...The metamorphosis from angel to human is referred to as "the fall...
...She daydreams during surgery, and while sewing up her victims appears more interested in the funky jazz she has playing than in her needlework...
...And yet this obvious solution never occurs to him...
...My description may sound sinister, but the movie doesn't play it that way...
...Ross is aware of certain matters that are never made clear to us...
...She commands a great deal of respect, works with a loyal team, and holds an awfully cushy job...
...the decisions he makes are precisely those we would hit upon were we in his situation...
...Hitchcock's paranoid movies always concluded by revealing that certain apparently sinister forces were in fact harmless...
...Becoming involved in a Mamet piece means taking delight in the downfall of the vulnerable...
...The Spanish Prisoner never abandons its suspicion of all social organizations...
...But the movie has so much going for it that it can be forgiven for showing its seams...
...She can afford to take long weekend vacations on impulse, performs only a procedure or two a week, and never seems to be on call...
...It does, however, teach one essential lesson: If you ever need heart surgery, pray that Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan) won't be your doctor...
...The film's downbeat climax only enhances this myth...
...If confidence building is clearly not Maggie's strong suit, she doesn't seem to fare much better in the operating room...
...He makes Maggie aware that Seth can become human and encourages him to take the plunge...
...His heroes suffer considerably, yet Mamet constructs his plots so that the audience will thrill to the scheming of the antagonists...
...He spends most of his days flying invisibly about the city, eavesdropping on the thoughts of the living, and gathering with his fellows on the beach at sunrise and sunset to enjoy the music of the spheres...
...Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Steve Martin, and longtime Mamet crony Ricky Jay are excellent as figures who have different deep motives for befriending Ross...
...Ross, by contrast, has no ties: He is a single man with few friends and only a vague sense of allegiance to his company...
...Like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Ross is made to suspect his boss, his friends and his coworkers, to reevaluate and betray the codes that have guided his life...
...In The Spanish Prisoner David Mamet dramatizes the depths the corporate world will sink to in order to take our money...
...This naturally gives him a distinct edge: He has no doubts that Maggie is as infatuated with him as he is with her...
...Although Seth mopes and moans about his new love, there is no reason why his attraction to a human should cause anxiety...
...Any time a Mamet character mentions allegiance to "my group," it's time to run for the hills...
...But while most examples of this generally lighthearted genre focus on the machinations of the sharpers, Mamet's much darker works put the sucker at the center...
...Nor is there a hint of irony in the heavy-handed style of screenwriter Dana Stevens and director Brad Silberling...
...For the most part, Silberling appears to be striving for the artistry and passion of a Calvin Klein perfume commercial...
...Where Wenders and legendary cinematographer Henri Alekan lyrically contrasted angelic and human perspectives by moving from color to black-and-white, Silberling favors protracted, ludicrous closeups of his actors' longing faces and an excessive use of helicopter shots, which are supposed to give us the perspective of the angels who fly over the city...
...His problem is that angels have no sense of touch...
...He claims that his brainchild will control the global market, but never tells us what part of the market he is referring to or how The Process will accomplish this feat...
...There is also, of course, an element of masochism to our enjoyment, as there is in viewing a magic act or listening to a long joke...
...After becoming visible for Maggie and speaking knowingly to her, he then haunts her thoughts and learns how deeply she is taken with him...
...Since he shares his duties with dozens of other angels who hover about L. ?., he has even more free time than Maggie...
...All we know is that the formula stands to bring an enormous windfall to his company...
...City of Angels' cheap delusion is a perfect example of what he is talking about...
...When she catches another with a tub of ice cream in his bed, she becomes petulant...
...There are instances when we feel completely in tune with Joe Ross (Campbell Scott...
...Overly confident, she abandons her charges before making sure they are out of danger...
...City of Angels reduces these lyrical monologues to a series of one-liners that occupy only a scene or two...
...Its glowing cinematography and weepy soundtrack (done, respectively, by John Seale and Gabriel Yared, both of whom won Oscars for their work in The English Patient) attempt to entrance us with beautiful news about the power of love...
...It's as if his performers had found themselves in a film by Alfred Hitchcock...
...Seth has appeared in order to escort the soul of the dead man to his final resting place...
...Rice has the worst bedside manner of any physician in Los Angeles...
...In fact, Mamet is one of the few contemporary directors who errs on the side of restraint...
...When Seth appears before Maggie, he cannot feel her hand or understand what she means when she speaks of human sensations...
...The visual style of the film is appropriately economical, as if it too were reacting against the omnivorous people it depicts...
...His Satanic advice is that personal salvation can be achieved by making the spirit into flesh...
...We learn much more quickly than Ross that creating The Process means dealing with heartless, mercenary people...
...Unlike the angels in the original version, too, Seth not only knows God intimately but is able to reveal himself to anyone he wishes...
...He is open, straightforward, and unsuspicious—so much so that his secretary Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon) repeatedly refers to him as a Boy Scout...
...But we are not always on such steady ground...
...He is selling nothing other than a reversal of the Christian ideal...
...Nominally a remake of Wim Wenders' superb Wings of Desire, the film only borrows a few pieces of Wenders' premise...
...Watching The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by Mamet, we are not able to predict the next step of its tricky plot, even though in retrospect each new development seems inevitable...
...The traps they set are admirably subtle, entrancingly sneaky...
...He has only to wait for Maggie's death to be with her spirit forever...
...He has invented something called The Process, a long mathematical formula he has written out in a large red notebook...
...Mamet instead constantly changes our relationship to his main character...
...His films are a sadistic pleasure...
...Both mingle corporate life with the world of espionage, telling the story of a man whose greatest weakness and greatest strength lie in his innocence...
...And Mamet's terse, twisty script is his finest since Homicide, fleshing out the sinister, manipulative motivations that lie beneath gracious gestures and banal actions that only appear to be benign...
...Conventionally, movies about confidence tricks disorient us by tossing out red herrings...
...There is even a serpent figure: Nathaniel Messinger (Dennis Franz) is an angel who fell many years ago and now spends his nights devouring sweet fatty foods and enjoying sex with his wife...
...At such moments, Mamet lets us know Ross is being toyed with, and invites us to cringe at the bad judgment behind his impulsive choices...
...We accept that Ross is a creative genius, yet there are a number of occasions when we feel superior to him...
...Having given up all hope of achieving any genuine transcendence, many of us are apparently content to fantasize that if we could sleep just once with a Nicholas Cage or a Meg Ryan, our troubles would go away...
...But it spends so much of its exposition rejecting any semblance of credibility that we quickly become inured to its endless absurdities and contradictions...
...City of Angels was the number one box office attraction in the two weeks after it opened...
...It was made by a storyteller with extraordinary and deserved confidence in his ability to surprise...
...Mamet accentuates the chilliness by coaching his actors to deliver their lines in a deadpan manner...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
