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Tough Guys Don't Dance
Release Date: 1987
Ebert Rating: **½
BY ROGER EBERT / Sep 18, 1987
Norman
Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Dance" has the form of a thriller and an
impressive content of sex and violence, but beneath that is a strange
nostalgia that seems to have nothing to do with anything else. The nostalgia
is for Provincetown, seen in a cold winter season with the weathered gray houses
against a pink and purple sky, the gulls' cries lonely in the twilight. This
place is so deeply seen that the people in the movie sometimes seem like
ghosts, occupying it for a time.
That is the deepest level. Above it is the practical plot level of severed
heads, missing persons, alcoholic blackouts and dirty business to be done.
The film's hero is Tim Madden (Ryan O'Neal), a writer in a slow season, whose
past begins to catch up with him. He has spent a good many years drinking too
much, smoking too much pot, sleeping with the wrong women and not sleeping
with the right ones. Now he has made some people mad at him, and one day he
discovers a severed head in the place where he hides his stash.
I will not reveal the owner of the head for two reasons: first, because it
would be unfair to reveal the plot, and second, because although I have read
the novel and seen the movie and even visited the location while the filming
was under way, I cannot remember whose head it was. There is a press release
I easily could consult for the name, but that would be cheating. It says
something about this film that the women characters, played by such memorable
actresses as Isabella Rossellini, blond newcomer Debra Sandlund and
intriguing Frances Fisher, play people not nearly as memorable as themselves.
Something comes back to me now. The Sandlund character, Patty Lareine, is a
hillbilly once married to a preacher. The O'Neal character and his girlfriend
met them through a singles ad and engaged in a weekend of sexual abandon.
That led in a complicated way to the more recent events after Patty Lareine
left the preacher to marry the hero's rich friend from prep school, Wardley
Meeks III, who now appears on the scene after a crisis of identify.
This is as confusing as "The Big Sleep." The characters come and
go, in the past and the present, and their severed heads appear and
disappear. It is almost as if Mailer does not much care to take inventory.
The film's center of gravity is in Madden's befuddled and paranoid head and
much depends on a night he cannot remember, a night when he gained a tattoo
and perhaps committed a murder.
He drinks and makes cautious inquiries and tries to determine from people's
actions what they think he did. The local police chief calls him in, for
reasons not entirely clear. The inventory of heads in his stash changes from
one, to two, to none. He can hardly bear to look to see whose heads they are.
He cannot understand who knows the location of his stash and the identities
of women from his past and, even more so, who would want to kill them. Then
there is the question of the strange couple from California, who turned up in
the local inn shopping for real estate, drank with him and turned up missing,
their car abandoned, after the night he cannot remember.
In the middle of this morass, the film's best character appears: Dougy Madden
(Lawrence Tierney), father of the O'Neal character, a tough old bartender and
fighter who always seemed to the son more authentic and courageous than he
could ever possibly be. Now Dougy is dying of cancer, but he still is man
enough to put the bodies - there are more of them by this point - into a boat
and row them out to sea and sink them beyond the reach of gulls and police.
The relationship between the father and son is the best thing in the movie.
I wonder if Mailer even cared about the details of his thriller. Few people
who see the film only once will be able to accurately describe just what
happens in it at a plot level. I suspect he used his thriller, with its lurid
sex and blood-soaked bodies, as a lure to convince his backers to let him
direct the movie and that his attention was really on the father-son
relationship and on Provincetown itself, which becomes as important as what
happens in it. The photography, under the "supervision" of John
Bailey, is stunning and evocative of a time and place, and O'Neal occupies it
like a man on a last, sad visit.
What is strange is that "Tough Guys Don't Dance" leaves me with
such vivid memories of its times and places, its feelings and weathers, and
yet leaves me so completely indifferent to its plot. Watching the film, I
laughed a good deal; many of the situations play like comedy. Remembering it,
it seems elegiac, but in a way that has nothing to do with the deaths in the
plot. Something else seems to die and be mourned, something to do with Dougy
and the cold flats of the sand at twilight.
Cast &
Credits
Tim Madden:
Ryan O'Neal
Madeleine: Isabella Rossellini
Patty Lareine: Debra Sandlund
Regency: Wings Hauser
Wardley Meeks III: John Bedford Lloyd
Dougy Madden: Lawrence Tierney
Jessica Pond: Frances Fisher
Big Stoop: Penn Jillette
Cannon presents a film written and directed by Norman Mailer and produced by
Tom Luddy. Photographed by John Bailey. Music by Angelo Badalamenti. Edited
by Debra McDermott. Based on Mailer's novel. Running time: 109 minutes.
Classified R.
© Copyright
2005 rogerebert.com
Original
page: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19870918/REVIEWS/709180306/1023
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