Movie: Romeo Is Bleeding (Peter Medak, 1993)
In the video clip for Always, a dude (Bon Jovi himself) cheats on his girlfriend with her roommate, which sets up a ridiculously gaudy melodrama filled with inexplicable behavior and overemoting actors. In typical 90's fashion, the clip is obsessed with video imagery. Bon Jovi and his girl flirt by filming each other erotically and both women first discover Jon's exploits in bed through a video screen. Upset to see him with the roommate, the other woman runs away in distress and somehow ends up at the house of an expressionist. The guy paints her in a way that slightly distorts her face and body, making her so distraught that she calls up Bon Jovi. Upon seeing the painting, in a fit of rage he destroys the entire apartment.
Bon Jovi made a career out of living out the fantasy of a carefree sex-symbol rock star, doing pretty much nothing else but romanticising and glorifying how awesome it was to be a carefree sex symbol rock star. In the 80's and 90's there was probably nobody who did that kind of thing better and more sincerely. and I've always enjoed his music and his whole act. That does make those final scenes in Always more than a little funny. You get the feeling that the slightly off-kilter painting is just about the most grisly thing Bon Jovi can possible imagine or accept in his art. That could explain why he would remove Always from the soundtrack of Romeo Is Bleeding, after specifically writing it for the film. This is a film in which a one-armed (we see her cut off her injured arm!) Lena Olin, dressed in a revealing leather outfit, holds a corrupt cop under gun point, forcing him to dig a grave for the mafia don she is about to kill. It's also a film in which Roy Scheider has the time of his life playing the mafia don in question. He gets to be menacingly threatening while pontificating about the perils of pacifism and British World War 2 poets. The whole film is kinda stupid, but I will always have a soft spot for mischievous, grisly pulp that lets good actors throw their charisma around and chew the scenery with juicy dialogue.
The best actor in the film is neither Scheider nor Olin, but Gary Oldman. He plays the corrupt cop Jack Grimaldi as a guy who knows the difference between right and wrong, and would do the right thing if he just could resist sex and money a little bit. In the vicinity of either, Oldman responds with a great combination of weary resignation and unbridled desire. Equally wonderful is the spring in his step whenever he senses excitement coming his way, portraying it both as the behaviour of a young ambtious man with endless irrational confidence and a way of masking his insecurities and uncertanity around the people he needs to outsmart. Unfortunately, the amount of people he needs to outsmart keeps growing and with every action he takes he keeps ending up in a bigger and bigger hole. That's also the kind of thing I have a soft spot for, and, no matter how much of a mess the rest of it is, I think the film's (and Oldman's) consideration of Jack's inexperience is genuinely good and insightful. He has discovered that he can make a lot of money playing both sides, but doesn't yet know all the tricks of the trade. So he is playing it by ear, hoping that he doesn't drown, until he realises way too late he is out of his depth, and has no way out. That's more interesting than seeing him fall just because of greed and immorality.
All of this makes it much easier to tolerate the horrible "too cool for school" narration (that switches from third person to first person in the middle of the film, setting a very obvious point up as a major reveal), the overbearing jazz score, the film's inability to decide whether it wants to be pulp fiction or a moody noir, and the horribly written relationship between Jack and his mistress Sheri. She is played by Juliette Lewis and I still haven't figured out whether most directors have no idea what to do with her or whether I just find her a completely unappealing actress. What does seem obvious here is that making her play a bewigged Marylin Monroe-channeling cocktail waitress brings out even more her incessant, bordering on whiny, neediness that seems to be at least a little bit there in all her roles.
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