Popular Culture Film Series

Popular Culture Film Series (organized by Greg Lyons)

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OSCAR AND LUCINDA (1997)

“Oscar and Lucinda follows the unpredictable turns of two people from opposite ends of the world who come together in a story of faith, love, fate and chance. Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes) is a flame haired minister who thinks like an angel and gambles like the devil. Lucinda Leplastrier (Cate Blanchett) is an Australian heiress who owns a glass factory and whose independent spirit is at odds with the conservative society in which she lives. Together they embark on the greatest risk of their lives.” Fox Searchlight.

On the Making of Oscar and Lucinda

Director Gillian Armstrong (b. 1950, Melbourne, Australia) studied film at the Swinburne Art School and supported herself as a waitress while completing Australia’s national film school’s course in directing.  She became the first Australian woman in 50 years to direct a feature film with her award-winning debut, My Brilliant Career (1979), featuring a star-making turn by Judy Davis in the lead.  Armstrong has made her mark with films about unusual women addressing challenging situations, including Mrs. Soffel (1984), High Tide (1987), The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), and Little Women (1994).  In the U.S. to receive the prestigious Women in Film’s Dorothy Arzner Directing Award, in 1996, Armstrong disclosed that “true equality” in a male-dominated industry will only come when “people drop the label ‘woman’ before ‘director’”:  directors have “different styles because we’re all different human beings, not because we’re women or men” (Hardesty).

“I love working with writers,” Armstrong testifies, “and have a great appreciation for what they do” (Hardesty).  Oscar and Lucinda is an adaptation of the 1988 Booker Prize winning novel by fellow Australian Peter Carey, who collaborated on the screenplay.  For years, Armstrong “pined” to make Carey’s offbeat romance into a film.  Irresistible to Armstrong were the novel’s rich, complex characters at the “comic and black edge” of fate and death, and its “wonderful themes” and visual imagery “of water and glass and obsession and gambling” (Fox Searchlight).  To bring her distinctive visions to the screen, Armstrong storyboards all her films and repeatedly assembles talented film teams, such as Oscar and Lucinda’s cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson (Little Women) and costume designer Janet Patterson (Last Days of Chez Nous).  The lush scenery and visual imagery of Oscar and Lucinda are stunning--unforgettable is resonant vision of the delicate glass church floating peacefully downriver.  But to capture such shots on location amid floods, thunderstorms, torturous heat and humidity; “mad” devotion and dedicated teamwork (“like an army operation”) were needed (Phan).  Indeed, the gritty realities of life continually intrude themselves in this odd and compelling film.  Oscar and Lucinda is no typical pretty-period film.  “It’s not nice,” Armstrong says, “It’s black and ironic and tragic at times”(Phan).  But then, so is life.

Casting Lead Actors Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett:  Finding the right actor to play Oscar Hopkins was a challenge.  The “odd, frail and naïve,” English minister had to project “the inner strength and charm” to make Lucinda and moviegoers “ultimately fall in love with him” (Phan).  In the early 1990s, Armstrong first tested Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines; b. 1962, Suffolk, England) for the part, and “I thought he was wonderful” (qtd in Phan).  An unknown English stage actor at the time, Fiennes quickly developed a passion for the part, identifying with Oscar’s “continual consternation of trying to work out what’s right and wrong in life” (qtd. in Phan).  While Armstrong’s project was delayed for years, Fiennes worked his way to critical and popular acclaim in Schindler’s List (1993) and Quiz Show (1994), as well as in a brilliant turn as Hamlet on London and Broadway stage.  To her agent’s dismay, Armstrong returned to Australia after wrapping Little Women in 1994, “to do [Oscar and Lucinda] . . . with no money and considered too tragic to ever succeed” (Phan).  Fresh from the success of The English Patient (1996), Fiennes remained committed to playing Oscar though his choice was risky and he accepted a huge pay cut.  Armstrong explains,  “His agents were saying, ‘You’re a handsome leading man, you can’t go playing this oddbod” (Levy).  Fiennes threw himself single-mindedly into the role, down to details such as becoming an expert card shuffler.  Of his technique, Fiennes says: “A character becomes something that’s turning around inside your head all the time and it becomes part of you” (Levy).

Armstrong’s next challenge was casting the feisty, bloomer-clad Australian heiress, Lucinda Leplastrier, whose scandalous late night gambling in Sidney card rooms shocks her conservative society.  Cate Blanchett (b. 1969, Melbourne, Australia) was already a fan of Carey’s novel, which she read when she was 18 (Membory).  A 1992 graduate of Australia’s prestigious national Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett decided to pursue acting as a career “when I realised how actors have the power to move people”-and move them she did in award-winning performances on the Australian stage between 1992 and 1995 (Membory).  She won the part of Lucinda amid stiff competition, although her only previous film work had been a supporting role in Paradise Road (1997), with Glenn Close and Frances McDormand.  Armstrong also felt that Blanchett’s Australian background added authenticity to the story of the independent Australian woman meeting, then falling in love with Fiennes’s Oscar Hopkins, the oddball English clergyman (Phan).  Although Blanchett despises gambling, she readily identified with Lucinda’s key “problem…that she was born before her time” (Membory).  Blanchett insists that her acting, not her looks, be the center of interviews:  “I am responsible for a character’s interior life and how that expresses itself physically,” but she finds it depressing that reviews always comment on women’s looks, rather than their acting ability” (Membory).  Blanchett has since secured her reputation as fine actress in Elizabeth (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and An Ideal Husband (1999).  Now in demand, Blanchett will play the title character in Armstrong’s forthcoming Charlotte Gray (2001), and the role of Galadriel in the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Works Cited

Fox Searchlight.  “Directors: Gillian Armstrong: The Interview.”  Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2000. <http://www.foxsearchlight.com/directors/gillianarmstrong_dir.html>

Hardesty, Mary.  “The Brilliant Career of Gillian Armstrong” [Interview].  DGA [Directors’ Guild of America] Magazine 20-4 (1996): n.pag.  <http://www.dga.org/magazine/v20-4/armstrong.html>

Levy, Shawn.  “Movie Interview: Ralph Fiennes.” Oregon Live LLC 6 Feb. 1998.  [Portland] Oregonian, 1997-1998.  <http://www.oregonlive.com/ent/movies/feb98/MV980206_ralph.html> 

Membory, York.  “Cate’s a Girl to Bet On.”  Hot Tickets: Film Review.  This Is London: Associated Newspapers Ltd., 18 Mar. 1998.  <http://thisislondon/dynamic/hottx/film/film.html>

Phan, Aimee.  “Oscar and Lucinda Portrays No Ordinary Love Story.”  Daily Bruin Online, 21 Jan. 1998: n. pag.  ASUCLA (Associated Students of Univ. of Calif.-Los Angeles).  <http://www-paradigm.asucla.ucla.edu/db/issues/98/01/21/ae.oscar.html>

Nov 17              The Limey, dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1999, with Terrence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren, & Peter Fonda

THE USUAL SUSPECTS  (Dir. Bryan Singer, 1995)
Rated R (violence, strong language)

“The Usual Suspects is a maze that moviegoers will be happy to get lost in, a criminal roller coaster with twists so unsettling no choice exists but to hold on and go along for the ride” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times 16 Aug. 1995).  Kevin Spacey earned the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his mesmerizing turn as “Verbal” Kint, a palsied con artist with a twisted foot and a weakness for talking.   We meet him in the hot seat, eye-witness and one of only two survivors of a spectacular shipboard explosion in San Pedro harbor that left a body count of 27 allegedly involving a  $91 million cocaine deal.   Compulsively garrulous and promised immunity, Verbal narrates a brilliantly tangled tale for special agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), an interrogator with an ax to grind.  And so Verbal takes us back six months before, when five hardened criminals—the “usual suspects”--were rounded up on “trumped up” charges of truck hijacking in New York, and emerged from detention planning revenge.  A fine ensemble cast joins Verbal in the line up: surly, smart-mouthed Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollak); cocky, simmering Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin); his manic, jive-slurring partner Fred Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), and a brooding ex-crooked-cop-trying-to-go-straight, Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne).  But nothing is “usual” about these “suspects” or the twisted road they will travel, ominously orchestrated by a mysterious arch-villain Keyser  Soze.  The fast-paced, elegantly layered plot is a mine-bending thriller, studded with high-wire tension, delicious dialogue, and whiplash surprises—culminating in a startling ending that will send you back to re-view this film again and again.  Writer Christopher McQuarrie took home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. 

Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie--friends since high school in New Jersey--collaborated on one previous film Public Access, which shared the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Festival.  This team reinvigorates the genre of film noir in The Usual Suspects, which Newsweek critic Jack Knoll acclaims “the best, most stylish crime movie since Stephen Frears’s 1990 The Grifters.”  Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers calls it “the freshest, funniest and scariest crime thriller to come along since Pulp Fiction.”  While Quentin Tarantino parodies film noir in his gangster film Reservoir Dogs (1991), Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspects captures the “seductive mood and narrative fascination” of classic noir, through the brutal “fusillades of language” scripted by McQuarrie, the “succulent photography” (Kroll) and “formal wide-screen beauty” of Newton Thomas Sigel, and the “whiplash editing” and “richly evocative” musical score of John Ottman (Travers). 

For many viewers, however, one of the most compelling aspects of the film is the “brilliant acting of an irresistible ensemble (Kroll).

 “The cast carries the emotional ball.
The Usual Suspects is acted to sweet perfection” (Travers).

The five “usual suspects” are “parodies of fictional gangster, tough guy, and hit man,”
a “roundtable of dirt bags” who have made this film “a cult classic” (Fried).

Five [anything-but] “usual suspects” are initially thrown together in a line-up and a cell on a trumped up hijacking charge:

Ø      Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollack), “gritty explosives expert from Queens” (Fried)

Ø      Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), “tough guy with an itchy trigger finger” (Fried)

“Newcomer [Benecio] Del Toro is a star in the making, using slurred speech and spastic body movements to nail the jitters beneath Fenster’s studly bravado.  Whatever this guy’s doing, you can’t take your eyes off him; he’s electrifying” (Travers).

Ø      Fred Fenster (Benicio Del Torro), McManus’ partner, “the Latino hustler with the Brando accent” (Fried). 

Ø      Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), “the rakish anti-hero,” “an ex-cop, gone bad, gone good, and apparently gone bad again” (Fried).  Gabriel Byrne, “brooding and brutal, turns [Dean] Keaton into an enigma as hypnotic as Keyser Soze” (Travers).

“Just for the record, Suspects is [Kevin] Spacey’s show.  It’s Verbal’s torrent of words and the flickers of fear and cunning dancing in his stoolie eyes
that keep us riveted as the plot goes its Byzantine way” (Travers).

Ø       Roger “Verbal”  Kint (Kevin Spacey) with “game leg and hand,” a “shifty confidence man who tells rather than shows in order to get himself in and out of jams” is “not heroic at all” (Fried).   “Just for the record, Suspects is [Kevin] Spacey’s show.  It’s Verbal’s torrent of words and the flickers of fear and cunning dancing in his stoolie eyes that keep us riveted as the plot goes its Byzantine way.  Spacey’s balls-out brilliant performance is Oscar bait all the way, a match for his priceless turn earlier this year [1995] as a pit-bull Hollywood producer in Swimming with Sharks.  The Usual Suspects is just the movie for an actor who’s full of surprises and an audience fully up to the challenge” (Travers).

Rolling Stone’s “10 Best Movies of 1995” rated Usual Suspects
number 6 as the year’s “freshest and wittiest thriller,
with performances by Kevin Spacey and Benicio Del Torro
that must be seen to be believed” (“Usual Suspects”).

THE USUAL SUSPECTS  (2): Classic + Post-Modern Film Noir

 “For many true movie fiends, [film] noir is the key American movie type, and the most fun when it’s done right.  The Usual Suspects is done right,” an “intelligent movie, with no special effects, no infantile charades of violence” (Kroll). 

One important formula for crime film is the heist or “caper,” which Jack Cawelti maintains has become “one of the dominant forms of popular culture” in the last two decades (cited in Orr).  As critic Stanley Orr explains, the heist caper typically features a criminal mastermind “faced with the Sisyphan task of coordinating a complicated criminal operation.”  Audiences are drawn to this criminal protagonist—even when the operation fails, as is frequently the case in film noir—because s/he enacts a universal drama of “the human consciousness struggling to impose order upon an irrational world” (Orr).  But Usual Suspects departs from the classic heist formula and its focus on the criminal-hero’s existential dilemma.  Instead, it joins other post-modern noir films like Reservoir Dogs (1991) and Killing Zoe (1995), in centering “the process of fiction-making itself” (Orr).

 “…the most convoluted film noir plot since William Faulkner
confounded audiences 50 years ago with The Big Sleep” (Travers)

At the center of critical comment and controversy is The Usual Suspects’ “convoluted” story line.  Christopher McQuarrie earned the 1995 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his “taut, wickedly twisted” (Travers) and “meticulously crafted” script, which creates “a self-reflexive spin on the neo-noir thriller” (Fried).  As Cineaste critic John Fried points out, “unlike recent film noir remakes and dark thrillers which focus on the casual coolness of gangsters, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects focuses more on the conventions of the genre, forcing the audience, like the detectives in the film, to consider how we put together a story and piece together clues.” 

 “You have to pay close attention to this film, to listen hard to its cross-fires of dialogue,” to follow the “convoluted” story line (Kroll).  But these requirements constitute the film’s main appeal for many viewers.  “[P]utting the pieces together is a kick” (Travers).  The film’s primary narrator is Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey)—a “whiny two-bit thief,” self-described “cripple” and “gimp” (Brown), and sole survivor who seems anything but the criminal mastermind of the film’s central heist caper.  A reluctant witness who “talks too much” (McQuarrie), Verbal Kint tells his story in flashbacks, under the bullying interrogation of U. S. customs agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) in the cluttered office of Rabin, another federal agent.  Conspicuous in our visual introduction to the setting of Rabin’s office is his cluttered bulletin-board: screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie describes it as  “a breathtaking disaster of papers, wanted posters, rap-sheets, memos and post-its,” the confusing debris of decades that suggests no system of crime detection and probably baffles Rabin himself (23).  Tracking shots of the bulletin board, extreme close-ups of a lighter or a coffee cup may or may not be cryptic clues needed to solve the puzzle or simply insignificant details used to create a realistic setting.  Only in retrospect do viewers fully appreciate deceptive art of the camera, quietly pointing out the raw materials from which Verbal Kint brilliantly improvises his stunningly twisted tale.

Agent Kujan’s conviction that Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) is the ring-leader who got away, proposes an alternative version of events that challenges Verbal’s insistence that Keaton is dead.  Thus, at least two possible narratives initially emerge from the conflicted interrogation and complicate the puzzle.  “[T]he audience is challenged as to whose [story] they can trust, while the answer for those who look is evidently before their eyes.  Such narrative minefields are the stuff of the grimmest film noir, which is chock full of fallible story-tellers with tales as twisted as their hearts” (Francke). 

At breaking point, Verbal insists that the real master-mind is Keyser Soze, a shape-shifting monster of a criminal, who has pulled the devil’s greatest trick: “convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.”  Keyser Soze, an exotic “composite of Genghis Khan and Fu Manchu” (Orr), is “the grand poobah of gangsters,” a “mythical bad guy” who “becomes the elusive protagonist of the film” and “sends the pulses of even the hardest criminal racing at the mention of his name” (Fried).  If this exotic arch-villain strains credibility, Verbal’s account seems verified by the independent testimony of dying witness Arkosh Kovash.  Still, Usual Suspects offers us “little beyond what Verbal chooses to tell us” (Orr).  Unlike classic film noir, Usual Suspects offers viewers no “privileged glimpse into any ‘objective’ reality” (Orr)—i.e. no authoritative representation of what “really” happened independent of Verbal’s tainted version of events. Verbal’s mesmerizing tale ultimately persuades and, thus, deceives Kujan and (I think most) first-time viewers.  We are caught up in the cunning web of wicked Verbal magic—until the “surprise” ending, that is.   Kujan’s revelation that the “truth” of what “really” happened lies elsewhere, comes too late—and it comes in a closing cinematic thunderclap, a flurry of images artfully juxtaposed to suggest an entirely new pattern of connections and, thus, a radically different solution to the “convoluted” plot puzzle.  The final rapid-fire image montage representing Kujan’s reconstructed point-of-view also present images of retreating Verbal Kint dropping his feigned disabilities and smiling enigmatically as he effects an elegant escape—images which, at the least, confirm that Verbal is not what he has seemed to be.

The “surprise” ending of Usual Suspects thus invites viewers to begin again. “A whammy of a surprise ending makes you want to see the film again to see if Singer pulled a few fast ones to make the pieces fit” (Travers).  “See it once, see it ten times, you may still be left in the dark, but it’s the kind of disorientation that leaves you feeling deliriously giddy” (Francke).  “[Usual] Suspects rewards multiple viewings because the slippery characters and shifting points of view add up to a film of hypnotic and haunting resonance” (Travers).

Works Cited

Brown, Georgia.  “Great Pretenders.”  Village Voice 22 August 1995: 45.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9509170738.

Francke, Lizzie.  “The Post Tarantino Heist Movie.”  New Statesman & Society 25 August 1995: 29.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9510021204.

Fried, John.  “The Usual Suspects.”  Cineaste 22.2 (June 1996): 53-54.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No.  9608080718.

Knoll, Jack.  “Crooks, Creeps and Cons.”  Newsweek 28 August 1995: 58.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9508257585.

McQuarrie, Christopher.  “The Usual Suspects” (script).  Culver City, CA: Blue Parrott, Inc., 1994.

Orr, Stanley.  “Postmodernism, Noir, and The Usual Suspects.”  Literature Film Quarterly 27.1 (1999): 65+ (9 pp.)  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 1829522.

Travers, Peter.  “A Summer Sleeper.”  Rolling Stone 7 September 1995: 75-76.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9509051934.

“Usual Suspects.”  Rolling Stone 28 December 1995: 134-137.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9512295132.

Thank you for attending the Fall 2001 Detective & Crime Movie Series!
Organized by Greg Lyons, with the support of
COCC Humanities Dept. & Westside Video

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