Ray Liotta

Identity

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Identity (2003)

Dir. James Mangold

Written by: Michael Cooney

Starring: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, John Hawkes

 

Identity has been quietly resting on my shelf for a decade, unwatched. It’s a disc that got mixed into my collection from a previous roommate at some point, and I have never had the urge to watch it. I saw Identity in the theater, with this same eventual roommate, no less, and I can remember both of us being wholly unimpressed with the movie, and with its prominent plot twist. In the years following up the success of The Sixth Sense and M. Night Shyamalan’s subsequent couple of movies, it seemed like the game-changing plot twist was the flavor of the month for Hollywood studio thrillers, and I think that some fatigue from the overwhelmingness of the trend led to my total dismissal of Identity. I largely forgot about the movie until discovering it in a box of DVDs when I moved into the house that I’ve been living in for the last six years, and in the time between then and my decision to start this project, I only thought of Identity, cursorily, as a real-life version of “The Three,” Donald Kaufman’s asinine screenplay from Adaptation. in which all three principal characters are revealed to be the same person. Since starting this project, however, Identity has loomed large in the back of my mind as a movie that I was both anticipating and dreading screening and writing about. I fully anticipated Identity to be, at best, a generic and predictable thriller not worthy of the collected talent that it assembles, and, at worst, a derivative and implausible B-movie driven by a third act plot twist it doesn’t earn. Maybe it was the low bar that I had going in, but I was pleasantly surprised by Identity, and I found most of my remembrances of it from 15 years ago to be incorrect.

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Identity begins by introducing Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an inmate set to be executed for several brutal murders. Rivers’s legal team and psychologist, Dr. Malick (Alfred Molina), file a midnight appeal for a stay of execution, arguing a legal defense of insanity citing new evidence that has come to light in the form of a diary. The midnight hearing is assembled during a tremendous storm, and begins without Malick, who is being transported from prison. At the same time, a group of ten strangers become stranded at a roadside motel, forced to bed down for the night due to the storm. They include a former cop, Ed (Cusack), who is now working as a limousine driver, a Nevada state trooper, Rhodes (Liotta), who is transporting a convicted murderer, a prostitute on her way to a new life in Florida, Paris (Peet), and the hotel’s manager, Larry (Hawkes). The group have come together in spectacularly coincidental fashion, which is shown in a flashback, involving a family getting a flat tire from striking a loose high heel that flew out of one of Paris’s suitcases. The mother, Alice (Leila Kenzle), is struck by Ed’s limousine when he is distracted by his passenger, the actress Caroline Suzanne (Rebecca de Mornay). Ed brings the injured woman to the motel in search of a working phone, and while he is trying to get help for her, the rest of the group assembles at the motel. As they realize they are stranded for the night and begin to bed down, a killer starts to pick them off one by one, leaving motel keys with the bodies, counting down from 10 to 1. The group begins a paranoid hunt for the killer, and the bodies continue to pile up in rapid fashion, while at the same time the survivors begin to discover more inexplicable coincidences, such as the fact that they all share a birthday. Meanwhile, as the competency hearing continues, and Rivers arrives, the extent of his multiple personality disorder is revealed, and it becomes apparent that the events at the motel are the representation of the psychic trauma of Rivers’s multiple identities being dragged to the surface and vying for primacy in his mind. Dr. Malick makes contact with the Ed personality and urges him to save Rivers’s life by eliminating the personality that drove him to commit the murders, and the action returns to the motel for the film’s climax.

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While Identity certainly owes a massive artistic debt to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, even going so far as to obliquely reference one of the novel’s many film adaptations, it still managed to feel relatively fresh to me. While the film’s revelation that all of the characters at the motel only exist inside of Rivers’s mind is a little bit predictable, Identity still managed to largely keep me interested and on my toes. The movie brings in the twist a little too early, but it leads up to it with a series of McGuffins and red herrings that I actually found to be pretty satisfying. It’s a movie that strives towards prestige, and though it doesn’t quite achieve the level of a top thriller, it’s a workmanlike effort that I found to be much more enjoyable than I ever would have imagined. Mangold turns the desert motel into a disorienting funhouse maze, utilizing canted angles, tight shot framings around corners and down narrow hallways between the buildings, and the persistent rain and gloom, to disrupt the audience’s sense of visual continuity of space. While the mystery isn’t particularly compelling after it’s revealed that the characters are all psychic projections, up to that point, the film’s visual style and a few well-timed surprise killings had me heavily invested in discovering the killer’s identity. I had the knowledge that Ed, Rhodes, Paris, and the others are all just manifestations of Rivers’s psyche tucked away in the back of my mind, but the taut editing and brisk storytelling of the first segment at the motel all but made me forget that the reveal was coming.

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The film’s cast, which is surprisingly stacked for a movie of this sort, also does a lot of heavy lifting in making Identity a more successful film than it otherwise might have been. I don’t think that either Cusack or Liotta, who are the leads of this deep ensemble, are particularly inspired in their performances. Both of them are as solid as they typically are, but neither really brings much new to the table, either. The supporting cast, however, comes on strongly, with Peet doing a nice job of maximizing her role as the film’s third lead. She’s steely and resilient, managing to give some depth to a character that is probably a bit underwritten. We don’t get many specific details about Paris’s back story, but Peet’s performance gives hints towards the type of life that she’s running from. John Hawkes, who I had completely forgotten was in the movie, is the real gem in the supporting cast, though. While his character seems at first to be relegated to a comic relief role, his story is fleshed out and given a surprisingly dark makeover halfway through the film, and the shift in how the audience perceives his character from that point is a testament to Hawks’s versatility as an actor. He goes from being agitated and put-upon to eluding a quiet menace after it’s revealed that he isn’t actually the hotel manager, but that he found the manager dead one day and assumed his responsibilities while hiding his body in the freezer. All the while, though, he imbues Larry with the sympathy-evoking beaten dog qualities that are so common in Hawkes’s characters. The strong assemblage of veteran character actors that round out the cast, and the A-list stars in the film, help lift it above genre material and convincingly sell a movie that might otherwise have collapsed under the weight of a less-than-novel structure and narrative contrivance.

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I was actually really satisfied that I found myself to be a bigger fan of Identity that I had expected. I’ve written before that I don’t particularly enjoy writing about movies that I don’t like and that I find it difficult to produce quality writing about films that I don’t think are of a very high quality. I was totally psyched up to write about how much I hated Identity, but, luckily, I was able to avoid that and instead write about what a pleasant surprise it was that this movie wasn’t total trash. Of course the movie has its faults. It really is fairly predictable, with its major twist being telegraphed from the beginning, but it packs in enough genuine surprises along the way that it makes up for the larger lack of mystery surrounding its central narrative. I don’t see myself returning to Identity anytime soon, and I wouldn’t really recommend that anyone go out of their way to see it, because it really is a pretty paint-by-numbers example of a thriller, but it’s a decent enough diversion. It’s the sort of movie that if I caught it on basic cable in another decade I would probably have forgotten about all over again, but I guess that could make the rediscovery that much more satisfying. There’s not anything being offered here that hasn’t been done before, and probably done better, as well, but the cast is solid and the atmospherics are actually quite well done. Identity isn’t the sort of twist movie that requires a lot of active thinking or reflection on the part of its audience, but it’s an entertaining enough ride if you want to turn your brain off for a while.

Goodfellas

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Goodfellas (1990)

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Written by: Martin Scorsese & Nicholas Pileggi (from Pileggi’s book)

Starring: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco

 

I have been procrastinating and struggling with the idea of writing about Goodfellas for several weeks now. I’ve written before that I’m not much of a fan of writing about movies that I don’t like, but, sometimes, it’s just as difficult to write about a movie that you really love, one that’s universally accepted as a masterpiece, and that has been lauded to death already. I don’t know what more I could add to the conversation surrounding Goodfellas, a movie that is often brought up as a contender in the debate over the best films of its ilk, if not the best films of all time. There’s really no debating for me; Goodfellas is quite near the top of my personal favorites, and I think that it’s almost a perfect movie. It’s a combination of cinema as high art and as mainstream entertainment, an accessible masterpiece that absolutely builds consensus among almost any movie fans. When I was watching Goodfellas for something like the hundredth time to prepare for this post, I sent a friend of mine a message that simply said, “I could watch Goodfellas every day and be happy,” and that sentiment is absolutely true. It provides everything that I need in a movie, and though it probably isn’t my absolute favorite movie of all time, it would likely be my desert island movie pick.

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Based on the true story of his involvement with the mafia, Goodfellas follows Henry Hill (Liotta) from his first forays into organized crime as a boy growing up in New York City, to his rise to the pinnacle of the criminal underworld. Along the way, Scorsese introduces a memorable cast of characters and details the inner workings of a well-oiled criminal empire. More than any other movie, including the most classic and lauded of all gangster films, Goodfellas acts as a thorough and immersive tutorial in the operations of the mafia. I’m largely dispensing with a plot synopsis for the movie not only because it’s a movie that anyone reading this post should already be familiar with, but also because its narrative has become the ür-text for the gangster film since its release nearly thirty years ago. The story of Goodfellas will be familiar to anyone who is familiar with the archetypal trope of the individual struggling to define and achieve the American dream, but it’s the telling that makes the movie so memorable. So many lesser movies have quoted and lifted from Goodfellas that it almost seems to have birthed the genre anew, and though it obviously owes a debt to the other giants of gangster cinema, it stands out as an original and vital push forward for the genre.

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Clearly, Martin Scorsese was already established as a master by the time that he made Goodfellas, but this is a film that no doubt vaulted him into another stratosphere as a visual and narrative artist. The movie takes its audience on a 140-minute thrill ride, visually and aurally matching the opulence and the chaos that would come to define Hill’s life as he ascended through the ranks of an organized crime family. The film features the familiarly expressive camera work that would come to define Scorsese’s cinema, and the whiplash editing of longtime Scorsese collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, with both the cinematography and the montage combining to underscore the film’s haphazard narrative. Scorsese has also chosen to tell this tale episodically, condensing thirty years of action into a handful of vignettes that chart Hill’s rise and the increasing unraveling of himself and those around him. These directorial choices give the film a sense of urgency and immediacy, while the ever-present voice over narration lends it its credence and position of authority. While The Godfather is told as a grand epic of Shakespearean proportions, Goodfellas feels thoroughly modern, charting a similar story of criminal enterprise and demise, but doing so in a more engaging and more vital way. It’s a movie that eschews rumination in favor of dragging the audience along by the throat, forcing the audience to see and absorb, and, in essence, experience, the things that Hill is experiencing. When the movie does slow down a bit to let the viewer catch her breath, it’s typically in the form of a freeze-frame, highly constructed to hammer home some point or moment of great narrative import. Goodfellas is full of these and other cinematic visual tricks, a tour de force of image paired with narrative meaning, with Scorsese pulling out all the stops and incorporating every bit of cinematic flair he had developed to that point in his career.

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Scorsese also assembles one of the best casts of any of his films, with Goodfellas combining a who’s-who of established actors, many of whom Scorsese had never worked with in the past, and a panacea of up-and-coming actors, who would go on to people the next generation of mafia media. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci both turn in typically electric performances, with De Niro officially beginning a phase in his career where he started to play the elder statesman, and Pesci being rewarded with an Oscar for his unhinged performance as the ruthless gangster Tommy. Relative newcomer Liotta acquits himself well to a meaty and difficult role, aptly charting Hill’s physical and mental degradation throughout the course of the film. He is by turns charming and suave, and then haggard and harried, a life lived on the fringes of society having obviously taken its toll on his character. Hill is the closest thing the movie has to an audience surrogate, because even though he’s on the inside, he acts as a tour guide through this dark world and his engaging performance encourages the kind of identification that leads to the stomach-turning excitement of the film’s final act as everything starts to crumble around him and his family.

Lorraine Bracco deserves special mention for turning in a varied and stellar performance as Hill’s wife, Karen. Karen is an outsider when Hill first meets and approaches her, but Bracco never plays her as helpless or naïve, instead choosing to make her character uneasy, but ultimately tacitly approving of the madness unfolding around her. Karen is obviously taken in by the lavish lifestyle that Henry introduces her to, with the possibilities of life as a mobster’s wife literally unfolding in front of her eyes in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, as the camera charts an unbroken course through the Copacabana, showing Karen and the audience the kinds of pleasures that abound for those willing to bend a rule. Though she’s a wide-eyed observer, Karen is always aware of the work that her husband does to afford them their lifestyle, and soon enough her own character trajectory starts to mirror that of her husband. By film’s end, Karen is just as strung out and paranoid as Henry, and Bracco sinks her teeth into these later scenes, showing the once prim and proper Karen starting to come apart at the seams. Hers is a powerful performance in a film that largely relegates its female characters to the sidelines.

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My own history with Goodfellas probably goes back a little over 20 years. I’m not exactly sure when the first time I saw the movie was, but I can remember borrowing it on VHS from the library, probably sometime shortly after I had borrowed The Godfather for the first time. Because of the close proximity of my first experience to both movies, and I’m sure not unusually, these two classic gangster movies have always been inextricably linked for me. I really liked both movies at the time, and I still do, but when I was a kid, The Godfather reigned supreme in my opinion. That attitude shifted at some point in my teens and early twenties, when I started to recognize the importance and the style of the more modern, and, by that point, more influential Goodfellas. To me, it’s just a more engaging movie. Even though I have its lines of dialogue memorized and I can anticipate every great and memorable set piece, Goodfellas never fails to grab my attention and keep me locked in for the entirety of its runtime. Though I go to see every new Scorsese release in the theaters, Goodfellas is the only one of his classics that I ever go back to rewatch with any regularity. I need to be in a particular mood to want to sit through Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, but Goodfellas is always a welcome escape for me. There are better movies, though not many, in my opinion, but this is one that earns its place as my desert island movie because it so perfectly triggers every pleasure center that a movie can activate in my brain. Its narrative structure and pacing, the stellar performances of its cast, the attitude that the film has, its great soundtrack, all add up to one of the most satisfying movie experiences that I can treat myself to.

Blow

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Blow (2001)

Dir. Ted Demme

Written by: David McKenna, Nick Cassavetes (from the book by Bruce Porter)

Starring: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Jordi Molla, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta

 

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a glut of movies about the illicit drug trade hitting American theaters. From harrowing looks at heroin addiction like Requiem For A Dream, to thoughtful examinations of the intricacies and failures of the “war on drugs” like Traffic, to gritty police procedurals such as Narc, the subject matter of these films was as varied as their overall quality. It would seem, however, that Hollywood was addicted to drugs, and that audiences were looking for a fix as well. Looking at my shelf, I certainly tended toward enjoying these types of movies it seems. I owned all three of the aforementioned films, plus other druggy classics from the 90s like Trainspotting and New Jack City. Blow slotted in nicely alongside some of these other films, it wasn’t as gritty or real as something like Traffic, but it made for a slick, entertaining movie about the life of one of the biggest cocaine traffickers in history. I remember enjoying the film a lot as a teen, but watching it for this post for the first time in a decade, Blow mostly felt hollow and definitely doesn’t stand up with the rest of the movies mentioned here.

Blow is a biopic about the life of George Jung (Depp), America’s biggest cocaine trafficker in the 1970s and 1980s. Jung was a part of the infamous Medellin cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, and he is almost single-handedly responsible for the cocaine craze of the 1980s. It was once estimated that some 85% of the cocaine imported in that decade was brought across the border by Jung. The film opens with Jung’s childhood in Massachusetts, where his hard-working but poor father, Fred (Liotta), teaches him the lesson that money is not important, despite the materialistic instincts of his mother. It would seem that the lesson didn’t stick, because as soon as Jung is able, he and his friend Tuna (Ethan Suplee) move to California to pursue bigger and better things, and end up becoming local celebrities selling high-grade marijuana. Jung’s ambition lands him in prison when he is busted with over 600 pounds of marijuana, and it is here that he meets Diego (Molla) who offers to introduce him to his Columbian friends after they get out of prison. Diego makes the introduction to Escobar, and the rest, as they say, is history. Jung becomes a bigger trafficker than ever, making millions in the cocaine trade, until the birth of his daughter causes him to have an epiphany and a change of heart, and he promises his wife Mertha (Cruz) that he will get out of the life. However, Jung is unable to fly straight, and his continued dalliances with cocaine end up robbing him of his life and his family, and putting him in prison for a 60-year sentence. Jung was released from prison in 2014, but the film ends with him still locked up, having never reconciled with his daughter.

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As crime films go, Blow follows a fairly standard arc. The protagonist comes up from nothing, is introduced to the criminal underworld, finds that he has a particular knack for criminality, and, ultimately, flies too close to the Sun and must pay the consequences. It borrows heavily from established classics of the genre, in particular Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The casting of Liotta as Jung’s father only serves as a constant reminder of that other, better film. It isn’t that Blow is a bad film, necessarily. Most films would pale in comparison to Goodfellas, as it’s universally recognized as one of the best crime movies ever made. It’s just that Blow lacks the depth of some of the better films in the genre. It is perfectly fine entertainment, but its over-reliance on voice over narration and montage makes the audience feel like we’re never really getting close to the real George Jung. Too often the film opts to tell, rather than show, causing it to feel light and insubstantial, like a cheap knock off. Rarely does the film deviate from the standard path set for it by the generic conventions of storytelling, and even its more inspired sequences feel predictable because it is a story that’s been told so many times before. I think a big problem might just be that George Jung is not an inherently interesting subject for a biopic. There’s no attempt to portray him as morally conflicted, or even a suggestion that the toll that his product can take on lives has ever even occurred to him. In the film, Jung seems purely interested in acquiring money and possessions, and he’s motivated by little else. He’s a largely influential and notorious figure, but he doesn’t seem to have any particular personality traits or quirks that make him a noteworthy subject.

Johnny Depp tries to breathe some life into Jung, and he does a nice job in the film of making Jung somewhat relatable and interesting. This film was released just a couple of years before the first Pirates of the Caribbean film would propel Depp into absolute mega-stardom and divert the direction of his acting career, and it’s one of the last movies where he isn’t playing “Johnny Depp playing Character X.” I’m not a huge fan of Depp as an actor, particularly not his post-Pirates work, but he does good work as Jung. The part doesn’t require him to do much dramatic heavy lifting, as it doesn’t really delve much into Jung’s psychology or emotion, but he feels genuine towards the end of the film when he is attempting to resolve the broken relationship with his daughter. By this point, Jung has lost everything, and Depp plays him with a kind of calm acceptance, rather than desperation. The film’s final scene is supposed to be the emotional climax, when it’s revealed that an aging Jung, sentenced to 60 years in prison, has never received a visit from his daughter. It’s a shame that the script didn’t provide enough opportunity for Depp to fully flesh out the character or his relationships, because this emotional payoff falls flat entirely.

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The rest of the cast performs admirably, for the most part. I like Ethan Suplee in just about everything he’s done, but he is largely used as wallpaper in the film, dropping out of the story entirely by the middle. Paul Reubens is great as a flamboyantly gay hairdresser who introduces Jung to the world of marijuana sales. The role was a big comeback for Reubens after his popularity had declined in the 1990s following his arrest for indecent exposure. He brings the same manic energy to the role of Derek Foreal that he brought to his signature role as Pee Wee, although for a much different audience. The biggest disappointment in the movie is probably Cruz, as Jung’s wife. She isn’t really on screen much, as her character isn’t introduced until over halfway through the film. She plays a bigger role towards the end of the film, but her performance is largely forgettable. She rebounds for a scene late in the film where reconciles with her former husband, but her role is otherwise too light.

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The film doubles down on its lead actor and protagonist, to the detriment of its overall success. It chooses to highlight style over substance, with multiple showy montages set to classic rock staples. These sequences are fun, and they’re probably the best parts of the movie, but, like I mentioned before, they feel preordained and derivative. Watching Jung and Diego do blow and try to find places in their apartment to stash boxes upon boxes of money while “Blinded by the Light” by ELO plays in the background is fun, but it isn’t particularly inspired, nor is “That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynyrd underlining Jung’s descent into full-blown cocaine addiction. Scorsese is probably the best when it comes to taking iconic classic rock songs and pairing them with memorable filmic images. He’s been doing it his whole career. It’s obvious that Ted Demme is borrowing heavily from that style, but in being so literal with his song choices, he misses a lot of the point of the exercise.

Ultimately, Blow is a fine movie. It is entertaining, it’s well shot, and generally well-acted, to boot. It’s just tough to want to watch Blow when there are so many other films from the same time period that deal with similar subject matter in a more interesting or more in-depth manner. Blow was only modestly successful at the box office, and it currently has an approval rating of just over 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels about right. It’s certainly not a bad movie, but it isn’t very good either, or very memorable. Honestly, I think that the experience of watching Blow is pretty similar to the experience of using its namesake drug. It’s fun while you’re doing it, but whenever the effects wears off, you’re really not left with a whole lot.