by Hadley Hury
n Grosse
Pointe Blank, John Cusack gets a juicy opportunity to prove what many
of the young actor's fans have suspected all along -- that he is too cool
for school. And director George Armitage frames Cusack's low-key hipness
so effectively -- in this black comedy about a hit man who returns to his
hometown for his 10th high-school reunion (in the upscale Detroit suburb
of the title) -- that the actor's work will likely earn him new admirers.
Cusack has not been easily cast into lead-role material. His performances
to date have been a compelling but unusual collage of yearning innocence
(Say Anything) and disillusioned irony (The Grifters).
This new project, which the actor co-produced and co-wrote, showcases two
new dimensions of his screen persona, grown-up good looks (Cusack is now
33) and a knack for sly comedy, which should help solidify his leading-man
status. In fact, looked at side by side as auditions, Cusack's heartbreakingly
lost young con in The Grifters and the 
smoothly
droll yet soul-searching Martin Blank of this latest film should suggest
to directors that Cusack's range as an actor extends not only from drama
to comedy but includes the even rarer capacity for embracing both in one
film. In Grosse Pointe Blank, he is more watchable than ever. It's
exhilarating to feel Cusack succeed so robustly in winning our sympathies
in what might seem an impossibly conflicted role in an outrageous, if not
altogether schizoid, script -- after all, he's playing an assassin trying
to go straight who returns home, picks up where he left off with the love
of his life (Minnie Driver), and accompanies her to their class reunion,
where his identity crisis is underscored as he chats up old acquaintances,
is forced to defend his life by wasting a rival hit man in a deserted hallway,
wraps the body in a peppy school-spirit banner, drags it down a flight of
steps right by the festivities in the gym, and hoists it into the basement
furnace.
Cusack co-scripted Grosse Pointe with D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink from the original story by Tom Jankiewicz -- they and director Armitage (who directed 1990's brilliant sleeper Miami Blues, with Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh) deserve a lot of credit for another key aspect of the film's surprising charm. They keep the violence at a comic distance -- no small feat given our collective psyche today, when even a joke about guns makes us flinch, and we are so visually and emotionally sated with the sight of murder and mayhem that one would think our capacity had long ago been bankrupted for finding any humor in the subject. Not to say that the film's humor isn't dark, ironic, edgy, even unsettling; it is -- but hilariously so. It's a testament to the fine line walked here -- both in content and tone -- that this outrageous black comedy is neither tasteless nor threatening. (A vague bit of exposition is thrown in along the way that suggests Martin got into the biz to begin with in "a CIA-related operation," which helps get us further off the hook of moral compunction and allows us just to enjoy the ride.)
Armitage does an equally fine job with the first two-thirds of the film's character-driven comedy and the big action-orchestrated finale; and he, Cusack, and their crew are given expert support for their fragile but very funny construction. Alan Arkin is Dr. Oatman, the psychiatrist whose help Martin seeks as he determines to leave his profession behind and rediscover himself. Unfortunately, Dr. Oatman is terrified of his client and prefers to deal with him by phone, offering such jewels of low-affect intervention as: "Don't kill someone for a few days...see what it feels like," and "Say to yourself, `I am centered in me and this is me breathing' -- say that to yourself for about 30 minutes..." before slamming down the phone. Arkin is so sly you wish he had more scenes. Ditto: Cusack's always-interesting sister, Joan (Men Don't Leave) as his eccentric assistant; Jeremy Piven (of TV's Ellen) in one of the larger roles among the reunioning grads of Grosse Pointe High; and most of the large supporting cast. Only Dan Aykroyd strikes a false note with his typically bombastic, cartoon performance; it has its moments but is generally not in a league with Grosse Pointe Blank's refreshing, off-kilter subtlety.
MOVIE BUFFS WHO LIKE TO INCLUDE THE bad as well as the beautiful among their treasures should run -- not walk -- to see Anaconda. This superlatively tawdry, low-rent piece of dreck qualifies as a near-classic of high-camp moviemaking. Cultists -- especially of the monster/horror genre -- are sure to congregate for decades to come, huddled over bowls of popcorn, howling in delight. Anaconda may even attain the level of movie trash-worship that includes recitation of lines of dialogue by the faithful. My own best bet (and the options are many) for the one that everyone will really gear up for and yell, in unison, the loudest? When the sluggishly paced movie is more than half over and the nasty snake of the title has already made its fat animatronic presence known on several occasions -- destroying property and even killing one of the characters -- another character actually says, with portentously dramatic realization: "There's something out there....isn't there?"
The true greatness of camp trash like this is measured by just how low a particular formula can be reduced without its die-hard audience (a) leaving the theatre, (b) falling asleep, or (c) beginning to talk out loud about having seen gore (if a horror movie) or a creature (if a monster movie) produced in exactly the same manner, and better, before. Well, there have been no prior efforts featuring big snakes that spring out through the glories of computer enhancement and wrap around people and squeeze them till their eyeballs pop out, so Anaconda should manage -- despite its formulaic bottom-feeding -- to hold onto its natural constituency.
The rich potential is apparent almost immediately -- it hovers like a fetid odor over the Amazon jungle setting: Eric Stoltz, slacker-actor darling of the indie-picture crowd (and recently quoted as saying he'd rather not work than do projects that have no intellectual or aesthetic reality) is introduced as a sort of Andy Hardy-meets-Ramar-of-the-Jungle academic "who studies tribes." Our anticipation of the territory ahead burgeons as we realize that not only are we not being trusted with the term anthropologist, we are witnessing the early, unmistakable signals of a lead actor trying not to be in the movie. (He succeeds for at least awhile when his character is consigned to his bed after an emergency tracheotomy -- but the fact remains painfully obvious that he never does decide whether to own up to his larger-than-usual paycheck by playing it straight or to keep us in the know that he knows he's up to his pasty-white, freckled booty in some deep commercial doo-doo.) If the movie does big box-office, Stoltz can laugh all the way to the bank, but he will only save face as an actor by regularly hosting his own home-screenings of Anaconda, at which, scene by pinned-and-wriggling scene, and for a full two hours, he must laugh first and loudest.
The prof is leading a film crew somewhere "Deep in the Amazon" (a title informs us, as if we might mistake the establishing shots for Pascagoula, Mississippi), to capture footage of an elusive tribe. Along for the ride is a collection of folks who deepen our camp-trash adventure. We get an extra generic layer here -- the rip-off disaster-movie formula, in which most of the characters are not merely bad actors but also such derivative stereotypes that any audience member could pass out name-tags to them within the first five minutes, with accurate notes and numbers regarding their responses to the developing situation and the order of their being killed off.
The serpent of the title is a giant version of the semi-aquatic constrictor which actually can grow to 40 feet. This one is a lot heftier than that and is produced by full-scale animatronic models and computer animation. The star doesn't appear nearly often enough to keep things hopping, and when he does he's a rather unconvincing monster. That's not to say that he's any less convincing than his human actor colleagues and, in fact, he's a bit ahead of the game, since he is spared a speaking part in this screenplay that makes Twister sound like Chekhov.
Naturally, the expedition is hijacked by a character played by -- yes! -- a former movie star whose career has waned (Jon Voight, playing on a par with the swan-song performances 30 years ago of Joan Crawford in Berserk! and Tallulah Bankhead opposite Stephanie Powers in Die! Die, My Darling!), as a seedy riverman who says he is a former priest who became a snake poacher but whose motivations seem mysteriously evil, or at least, clouded -- like the supposedly Paraguayan accent of Voight, who wears a perpetually and irritatingly goofy sneer and says things like: "Dees snake will hol you tight like a lubber..." Jennifer Lopez , as the documentary director is, well, not quite credible. But how can you be when you are trying to exchange lines of dialogue with Ice Cube, whose character's job-title of cameraman would indicate he's there to roll film but who spends most of his time rolling his eyes like some Steppin' Fetchit figure from the '40s and to whom Lopez is required to utter such defining bits of feminist character development as , "You know I never mix business with pleasure" ? There is an airhead couple who seem to know absolutely nothing about tribes, or rivers, or science, or botany, or documentaries, or anything else that might bear on the project at hand, and who seem, perhaps, to have mistaken this dire river excursion for the day-trip shoppers' ferry to Catalina -- he's a beachboy blonde with pukka beads and she sports a headband and culottes. They wear headphones into the jungle at night, smoke some grass, and have their sportive coitus interrupted by a wild boar who chases them back to the boat where they shake their heads and say, "Wow, it was incredible." Blondie, being the shallowest person onboard (now there's a contest), is, de rigeur, the character who turns suddenly into an agent of immoral collusion, siding with Voight's treachery, and, therefore, becomes an early candidate for snake hugs.
And so forth.
This scuzzy nightmare vision of Jaws-meets-Gilligan's Island is directed with a defiantly proud lethargy by Luis Llosa (The Specialist). There are a couple of scenes in the movie where the characters sit around at night in the hot, thick, darkness -- drinking hard, and looking confused and fearful. Could these scenes be little windows of cinema verite to the actual location shoot for Anaconda? It's certainly possible; the same technological advances that bring us the big snake also made it possible for the film's cast and crew -- even in The Darkest Amazon -- to watch their daily rushes.