retro movie review: The Limey

It's easy to forget how monumentally influential Pulp Fiction was to the movies, especially movies made and released in the late 1990s. People still try to copy Quentin Tarantino, but back in the late 90s, "imitating Tarantino" and "making a movie" were almost synonymous concepts; even otherwise original and talented filmmakers found themselves applying the Tarantino mold to their own movie-dough, and the reason was two-fold: because audiences couldn't get enough of Tarantino's tricks -- whether they were performed by Tarantino himself or any other filmmaker -- and also because critics sometimes took an embarrassingly long time to understand that there is a polar-opposite difference between copying Tarantino's original ideas and actually being sincerely original.

Take, for instance, Steven Soderbergh and The Limey. Soderbergh is a talented filmmaker. He has made some really good, really original movies. But with The Limey, Soderbergh is fixated on Tarantino's idea of telling a story without a chronologically linear narrative (yes, I know Tarantino wasn't the first one to do it, but the whole point is he's the one who made it popular) and the problem is, it worked for Pulp Fiction, but the results are much more mixed with The Limey.

The movie stars Terence Stamp as Wilson, a career criminal in England who has just been let out of prison after a long stretch. He has recently learned that his daughter Jenny, who had moved to L.A. just about as soon as she was old enough to do so, has died in a car accident.

Wilson doesn't believe there was anything accidental about it. He has absolutely no reason to reach this conclusion, mind you, save for an instinctual feeling of which he is 100% certain. So he heads off to Los Angeles, to find out who was responsible for his daughter's death.

The chronology of Pulp Fiction may have been nonlinear, but it was at least coherent. In The Limey, it's difficult to follow what's going on. In the first scene, Wilson is on a plane on his way to America. Images of him on the plane are "narrated" by an audio-only flashback of him learning of his daughter's death. Simultaneously, we are treated to flashforwards of Wilson meeting one of his daughter's friends (Luis Guzman). Soderbergh is showing us three different points in time at once here, and the result is a confusing mess.

Wilson's investigation gradually gets him closer and closer to the possible villain of the piece, Terry Valentine, a rich and powerful record producer who was dating Jenny and who is played by Peter Fonda. This movie would have worked just fine if they had made Valentine an all-out villain, but I like how they instead chose to make the character sympathetic. Yes, it's both suspicious and tasteless that he is already in another relationship with another younger woman so soon after Jenny's death, but this isn't the movie archetype of a Hollywood mogul who just likes to bed pretty women; Valentine clearly cares for his girlfriend, and the two of them like to talk more than engage in carnal matters. Also, it's difficult to ignore the psychological implications that this new girlfriend bears such a strong resemblance to the girlfriend who has recently died.

But what of Wilson?  Wilson is busy with his investigation, an investigation which sometimes involves fisticuffs and/or gunplay. In a more standard Hollywood movie, there would be a lot more of those scenes. Here, those scenes are few and far between, and much more of Wilson's story involves him interviewing potential witnesses, such as the friends Jenny made in acting class.

Let me tell you something, some of these "pure talk" non-action scenes are remarkably well performed by Stamp and  remarkably well written by Lem Dobbs. Stamp himself is the best thing about this movie, and there are scenes where we do nothing but stare at Stamp's face as Wilson ponders the implications of the latest clue. It sounds boring, but Stamp is so good, we are entertained.

But there are other scenes where the writer gets distracted by far less interesting supporting characters, whose lives wander off in far less interesting supporting storylines. There's Valentine's crooked but loyal right-hand man Jim Avery, for example, and the hitman Avery hires, played by Nicky Katt. Valentine himself also gets a lot of screen time with his new girlfriend, and although I earlier stated that I liked the three-dimensional aspect of their relationship, there's only so much mundane chit-chat I'd like to listen to in any given film. Yes, that's another way Tarantino radically altered cinematic storytelling, not just in terms of storyline chronology, but also in terms of dialogue. Dialogue was suddenly no longer considered purely functional, and we could hear what characters thought about random, meaningless topics. But what filmmakers tend to forget is, if you can't write this type of material as good as Tarantino does, all you've got are characters rambling about uninteresting topics.

Frankly, the script meanders aimlessly whenever Wilson isn't on screen, in sharp contrast to Wilson's own "out for revenge" storyline. We know that there will eventually be a showdown between Valentine and Wilson, and it's interesting to note that we don't mind the movie taking its time getting there whenever Wilson is actually on screen, whereas whenever the movie wanders off to show what the other people are doing, we want to cry out "just get on with it!"

Critics loved this movie. They seemed to love it for two reasons: the "bravery" of showing the scenes out of order -- an idea which I have already described as neither original nor successful, from a narrative standpoint -- and for Stamp's performance. Yes, Stamp is excellent in this movie. If only the filmmakers had focused more on him and less on the boring supporting players, we might really have had something.