Steven Soderbergh takes a plain revenge plot, cuts it out of order and lets Terence Stamp’s face do the rest. It is short, sharp and far sadder than the genre requires, though the script under the style is thin.
Terence Stamp plays Wilson, a Cockney career criminal just out of prison, who flies to Los Angeles because his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) is dead. The police call it a car crash. Wilson does not believe them, and the trail leads him to Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a record producer with a house in the hills and a girlfriend, Adhara (Amelia Heinle), about Jenny’s age. That is the whole plot, and Steven Soderbergh and his writer Lem Dobbs know it. What they have made from it is 89 minutes of revenge thriller that keeps turning into something sadder, and we recommend it without much hesitation.
The first thing you notice is the cutting. Sarah Flack does not let a scene run in order: a sentence starts in a car and finishes in a kitchen, a conversation on a beach is handed out in pieces across the whole film, and a shot of Wilson on the plane, staring at nothing, comes back again and again. This is the method of Point Blank (1967) and Soderbergh is not hiding the debt. In lesser hands it is a trick. Here it plays as an old man’s memory, going back to the same few pictures because they are the only ones he has.
Some of those pictures are borrowed. When Wilson remembers Jenny as a child, Soderbergh uses footage of Stamp himself from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), a young thief with a young man’s face. There is no make-up and no recasting, just the same actor thirty-two years apart, and it caught us off guard; we were more moved than we expected a revenge film to manage. Soderbergh does not underline it. He cuts from the boy to the old man and moves on.
Stamp does the rest. Wilson speaks in rhyming slang that nobody in California can follow, and Luis Guzmán, as Eduardo, a friend of Jenny’s who becomes his reluctant driver, keeps asking him to say it again in English. The film’s best scene is in the first twenty minutes: Wilson walks into a warehouse asking about his daughter, is beaten and thrown into the yard, gets up, walks back in, and we stay outside with the camera while the gunshots come through the wall. We laughed, and then felt the cold under it. The line he leaves with is the one on the poster.
Fonda plays Valentine as a man who got rich off the sixties and kept the tan. He is vain, soft and frightened, and Barry Newman’s Avery, the fixer who does his sums, is the one person in the house who understands what is coming. Edward Lachman shoots the two worlds differently: Valentine’s glass house in hard white daylight, and Wilson’s Los Angeles at night in motels, warehouses and car parks. Gary Frutkoff furnishes Valentine’s rooms with money and not much else. Cliff Martinez’s score is a low electronic hum that never tells us what to feel, and Louise Frogley keeps Wilson in the same dark jacket throughout.
The flaws are in the writing. Dobbs gives Valentine a crime that stays a sketch, and a middle stretch involving a party and a federal agent that the film seems as bored by as we were. Lesley Ann Warren’s Elaine, a voice coach who knew Jenny, brings a warmth the script does not know what to do with, and Heinle’s Adhara is a good idea for a character who is mostly looked at. Now and then Flack’s cutting stops being memory and becomes a mannerism, the same shot returning for a fourth time when the third had done the work. A few critics have called Stamp wooden. We think the stillness is the performance, though there are moments where the editing does his acting for him.
This came a year after Out of Sight (1998) and a year before Erin Brockovich and Traffic (both 2000), and it is the smallest and strangest of the four. It is also the one that feels most like a film Soderbergh made for himself. Watch it at home, where the broken sentences settle and the faces are close enough to read. It runs 89 minutes and carries an 18.
