The Fengshui Cat: November 2010

My first piece for "The Parallax Review," a site that reviews mostly slipped-through-the-cracks cable fare. As a test of my writing ability, they asked me to pick out any movie that was playing on cable that week and write up an 800 word review. So, by dumb luck, I randomly chose a film that one of their reviewers had already been assigned. Long story short, it wasn't published on the site but you should be able to see new reviews of mine appear there starting this Friday (12/3).

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Angel Heart (1987)

Starring Mickey Rourke, Robert Dinero, Lisa Bonet

Directed by Alan Parker

Written by Alan Parker

Produced by Alan Marshall, Elliot Kastner

Rated R

113 minutes

4 stars

It’s 1955 and we’re in seedy, rainy downtown New York.

Angel Heart is neo-noir with a supernatural twist, starring Mickey Rourke as your classic, sleazy gumshoe with a Brooklyn accent. He spends most of the film in a rumpled suit and a pair of Wayfarer Clubmasters, exuding pure nostalgia wherever he goes. If you’re a fan, you’re in for a treat. This is vintage Rourke.

Here he plays Harry Angel, a private eye hired by Robert Dinero to look for somebody named Johnny Favorite. He’s wisecracking but subdued, a little frayed around the edges, with a certain boyish charm. He’s no stranger to death, pausing at a crime scene only to light a match off a corpse’s shoe, but more than once fights to ensure his survival with great fanfare. Alan Parker speckles him with just enough quirks to keep him interesting, while offering few solid clues about his character. Those he does provide are dropped with the subtlety of a hammer. He plunks keys on an old piano, keeps flashing back to a 1943 New Years’ party, and politely refuses eggs (he has a “thing about chickens”).

His stake in the film’s plot of voodoo and ritualistic murders is at first purely financial; he goes where the biggest wallet is. Throughout the first 25 minutes, I found myself wondering how Parker was going to uproot his easy existence in New York and move the action to New Orleans; I was a little disappointed that all it took was a paycheck with a magic number.

Rourke’s performance is bolstered by that of Cosby Show alum Lisa Bonet, playing a role that was sure to turn a few heads back in 1987. Bonet is sexy and mysterious, a modern femme fatale in the Big Easy. Only Dinero is flat. Cryptic, Mephistophelian, and slightly bizarre, he delivers his lines with a knowing smile. Whenever you see him, you’re trying to figure him out, but his interests remain purposefully vague.

The film boasts a bewildering, Big Sleep-type noir plot, and, like The Big Sleep, it throws a lot of disembodied names in your face the first 25 minutes. The script is peppered with just enough red herrings to not completely overwhelm. At one point we come across a bizarrely narcissistic Harlem pastor whose congregation carries him through the streets on a gold throne in what I initially guessed was a full-swing New Orleans funeral procession. Aside from that and the occasional voodoo-shrine-in-a-closet-gag, you’re not given too many indications where the film is going to lead.

Throughout the second act Rourke spends most of his time asking around about Johnny Favorite, and counting the stiffs piling up in his wake. The pacing might be slow for some. The film moves laboriously right up to the twist ending in the final five minutes, which, if you’ve been paying attention to the supernatural subtext, should be no harder to guess than that of The Sixth Sense. Fortunately, it’s much more satisfying, aided in part by the sheer creepiness factor of it. I’ll just say this: demonic children with glowing yellow eyes, used sparingly, can unsettle the shit out of you.

The film owes much of its moodiness to the synthesized, sometimes jazz-complemented soundtrack by Trevor Jones. Rourke creeps around shadowy, rain-soaked locales to Tangerine Dream-inspired ambience cues. If you’re creeped out by black magic, blood rituals and, well, blood-drenched sex scenes, stay away unless you’re masochistic. Everywhere Rourke goes, people keep turning up dead, and the murders are brutal to say the least. Michael Seresin’s cinematography, dark and possibly ahead of its time, offers little to the imagination.

The verdict? It’s Chinatown meets Live and Let Die. Gloomy, largely atmospheric, sometimes psychological, and a few times downright unsettling. If you’re an 80’s Rourke fan, a noir buff, or just anyone who’s into two hours of occult bloodletting with a twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan piss his pants, Angel Heart might just be the movie you’ve been waiting for.