“The Morning After” (1986)
There couldn’t have been a more appropriate title for this 1986 Jane Fonda mystery-thriller (maybe “Paycheck Gig”), as the general handling of every story and idea is just as messy as an absinthe-induced hangover. Alcoholic ex-actress Alex Sternbergen (Fonda) wakes up next to a dead body without a clue of how she got there or what happened the previous night. She finds comfort in an ex-cop (Jeff Bridges) who decides to help her out of kindness/horniness, and together they lay low and play detective while somehow finding time to have romantic dinners and long conversations detailing Alex’s backstory. A character being wanted for murder couldn’t be higher stakes; yet somehow these stakes are promptly ignored as the plot waits patiently so two characters can further their relationship arc. We’d figure that maybe there was a deleted scene that explained of some sort of brain defect that the protagonists had, rendering them to randomly be unable to perceive the trouble they were in, except that every single character detail wasn’t divulged twice over in the dialogue. Now it’d be one thing if only the wannabe-pulpy plot didn’t work, but even the love story is shoddy, somehow containing zero chemistry between the usually lovely Fonda and a young & dashing Bridges. To top it all off, the entire thing is glazed with 80s music that would embarrass even the most delusional composer of the decade, and Fonda’s breakdown over her addiction to the bottle is “Mommie Dearest” bad (yet was deemed Oscar worthy…). If you’re still not convinced to forget about this one, even IMDB can’t offer up more than a shrug, somehow constituting this as worthwhile trivia. Keep away at all costs. [D]
“Running On Empty” (1988)
Likely impressed by his solid turns in “Stand by Me” and “The Mosquito Coast,” Sidney Lumet quickly cast youthful actor River Phoenix as the heart in his 1988 drama, alongside a post-“Taxi” Judd Hirsch and a pre-“Chicago Hope” Christine Lahti. The premise here is that Arthur (Hirsch) and Annie (Lahti) exploded a lab that was creating napalm for the Vietnam War in their activist heyday, blinding an innocent janitor in the process. Since then they’ve been on the run, relocating and changing identities whenever Arthur feels the heat. That kinda life certainly doesn’t leave much time for Michael (Phoenix) to do regular kid stuff, including putting his extraordinary talents on the piano to good use. Things get complicated in their new town when his skill is recognized by a music teacher which eventually leads to the boy falling in love and being ushered towards Julliard – much to the dismay of his family, who instead wish to keep living together and in secrecy. Lumet’s outright refusal to squeeze tear-jerking scenes out of the plot is refreshing considering the story’s ripe, innate sappiness. That said, the script by Naomi Foner (aka Mamma Gyllenhaal) is completely puzzle-less, written as if she was trying to arouse her screenwriting teacher by taking all the appropriate roads and hitting all the apropros notes. The actors feel very at home in their characters which lends to believable performances, but since everything is much too predictable so early on, even they can’t keep the film from dragging. [B-]
“Family Business” (1989)
However much you swallow the premise of this low-key crime caper depends on how willing you are to stomach the casting. We have to believe that Dustin Hoffman is the son of Sean Connery, despite being only seven years younger and recipient of some very, ah, different genes. Perhaps more difficult to accept is that Matthew Broderick, here as an enterprising young man who yearns to be involved in one of his grandfather’s criminal schemes, could sport a Jew-fro and thick-framed glasses and convincingly play a person grandfathered by the still-smooth Connery. Despite the flimsy age difference, there is fun to be had in watching Hoffman and Connery go head to head, their wildly different acting styles suggesting lifelong friends but still providing a compelling sort of chemistry. The heist itself is a bit of a fizzle, though, and the picture straddles the line between slack, listless drama and wet blanket comedy that suggests that the set became far more entertaining once someone said “cut.” [C]
“Q&A” (1990)
Lumet was one of the great New York directors, albeit never in as extravagant manner as, say, Woody Allen was. But he understood the heartbeat of the city in an eminently truthful way, and in “Q&A,” he delivers a crime picture that shows a vision of a multi-cultural New York melting pot that Spike Lee, a self-proclaimed fan of the elder director, would be proud of. The plot — a rookie cop (Timothy Hutton) investigating the shooting of a Puerto Rican kid by a legendary, brutish cop (a walrus-like Nick Nolte, in possibly the best work of his career) — might seem familiar, and it is. But Lumet, adapting the novel by New York supreme court judge Edwin Torres himself, gives it a rich underbelly, showing the racial ties that have always divided NYC, and never depicts a character in broad strokes, right down to Armand Assante’s drug lord, who’s given far more depth than most similar characters. It’s an incredibly rich, almost novelistic take on the crime genre — to the degree that, if you have a complaint about the film, it’s that it’s almost overstuffed. It’s one of Lumet’s most personal films, he even pulled a Coppola and cast his daughter Jenny Lumet as the love interest of Hutton’s character — like Sofia Coppola, she would go on to make films, rather than act, penning the script for Jonathan Demme’s excellent “Rachel Getting Married” [A-]
“Night Falls In Manhattan” (1996)
The third in Lumet’s trilogy of self-penned efforts about corruption in New York is, unfortunately the less of them by quite some way. The film has a pulpier take on the subject matter than either “Prince of the City” or “Q&A,” thanks to Richard Daley’s source material, and while the director approaches it with his usual sincerity, the contrivances of the plot, which involves an assistant DA (Andy Garcia) prosecuting a drug dealer who shot his cop father (Ian Holm), still shine through. More importantly, Garcia isn’t as strong a lead as his predecessors, miscast and sometimes overplaying the role a little. But still, the James Ellroy-style scope is admirable, and Lumet has as keen an eye and ear for the city, and the people in it, as he’s ever had. As ever, the supporting cast is full of the best character actors around, and as disappointing as Garcia, and Lena Olin as his lover, are, the fine performances of Holm, James Gandolfini and, in particular, Richard Dreyfuss, make up for it. It might not be top-rate Lumet, considering the high standards he set himself in this genre alone, but we’d still take this over a thousand corrupt cop movies from, say, David Ayer. [C+]
“Find Me Guilty” (2006)
Buried underneath what at the time was an avalanche of love for Lumet in the wake of the Thalberg Award at the Oscars, this low-key dramedy was regarded as an odd duck by distributors, who quietly had this in and out of theaters before anyone noticed. And while it’s decidedly off-product material from the director of several classics, “Find Me Guilty” manages to be oddly touching. A highly improbable true story, “Find Me Guilty” features Vin Diesel as mobster Jackie DiNorscio, placed on trial and pressured to sell out his associates. Instead, DiNorscio refuses to turn rat, becoming his own legal representative in a case that would stretch on for an unprecedented 21 months. Despite the absurdity of the case and the larger-than-life persona of life-of-the-party DiNorscio, Lumet shoots the material in a clipped, professional manner, allowing the actors to do the heavy lifting. And they step up to the task, with the mismatched pair of Diesel (who wears several extra pounds and a wig) and the diminutive Peter Dinklage (as a beleaguered defense attorney) generating a surprising amount of chemistry. “Find Me Guilty” feels episodic and disjointed, as if there was some sloppy last minute tinkering in the editing suite that went unfinished, but it has all the traits of Lumet’s earlier films, in its clear-eyed portrayal of criminal misconduct and warm human comedy. [B-]
“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” (2007)
It’s frankly staggering to think that Lumet was able to start his career with a stone-cold classic like “12 Angry Men” and to top it off, a full half-century later, with a film as terrific and alive as “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” Released when the helmer was 83, the film (shot digitally, with Lumet predicting that film would soon be rendered obsolete) feels like it could have come from a director a quarter of his age — except we can’t think of a twenty-something who could have assembled a cast of the calibre of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, Brian F. O Byrne, Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan, or extracted such tremendous performances from every one of them. Lumet invests his seedy, twisty little genre tale (from a script from playwright Kelly Masterson) about two brothers hard-up for cash who fatefully decide to rob their parents’ jewelery store with the heft of a Greek tragedy; as an investigation of the bad decisions that bad people make, it’s second to none. It proved too grubby for many, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s close to a miracle. [A]
And The Rest: As we said, we simply didn’t have the time or space to fit everything in, even without mentioning that some of his lesser known films are tricky to get hold of. So what did we miss? There’s the theatrical melodrama “Stage Struck,” Lumet’s poorly received sophomore feature, a remake of the Katharine Hepburn vehicle “Morning Glory,” which toplined Henry Fonda and a young Christopher Plummer. It was swiftly followed by “That Kind of Woman,” a wartime romance starring Sophia Loren, which saw something of an upswing — being nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.
“A View From the Bridge,” sometimes known as “Vu du Pont,” an adaptation of one of Arthur Miller’s very best plays, came between great versions of other top flight American playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, but never quite got the same cachet as those films. “The Group” in 1966, and “Bye Bye Braverman” in 1968 were both films that Lumet felt suffered from a lack of lightness of touch from him, although the latter, from what we remember, isn’t bad at all.
1969’s “The Appointment,” meanwhile, was a film that Lumet admitted he only took because he wanted to learn how to shoot in color, despite a terrible story — only taking it if he was able to use Antonioni‘s DoP Carlo Di Palma. He went back to the Tennessee Williams well, with less success than “The Fugitive Kind,” for “Last of the Mobile Hot Shots,” an adaptation of the writer’s “The Seven Descents of Myrtle” with a script by Gore Vidal, no less. He also co-directed the Martin Luther King documentary “King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis” in the same year.
“Child’s Play” was an adaptation of the Broadway thriller and was initially meant to team the director with Brando, who dropped out in a fit of ego over the size of co-star James Mason’s role. It’s generally seen as one of Lumet’s worst pictures and has never been released on either video or DVD in the U.S. “Lovin’ Molly” came in the same year as “Murder on the Orient Express,” an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel, intended to cash in on the success of “The Last Picture Show,” even to the extent of casting Beau Bridges, the brother of that film’s star, Jeff. As you might have guessed, it came nowhere close.
“The Wiz” is perhaps the best known film we haven’t written up — a big budget musical remake of “The Wizard of Oz” starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor. It’s best known for bringing Jackson together with Quincy Jones for the first time, but the film itself is mostly undone by a terrible script, by no less than Joel Schumacher. It was followed by another flop, the Ali MacGraw comedy “Just Tell Me What You Want” — Lumet always fared less well with comedy.
His final stage adaptation was the thriller “Deathtrap,” an enjoyably twisty thriller starring Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine. 1984’s “Garbo Talks!” was another awkward attempt at comedy, with a slightly curious cast led by Anne Bancroft, Ron Silver and Carrie Fisher.
And then came the 1990s, for the most part somewhat lean years for Lumet. Both Hasidic Jewish thriller “A Stranger Among Us,” with a horrendously miscast Melanie Griffith and the aforementioned “Guilty As Sin” were seemingly strictly paycheck gigs, and should be treated as such. Medical satire “Critical Care” is seen as being slightly better, with an impressive cast including James Spader, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Jeffrey Wright and Helen Mirren, but there’s a reason you’ve probably never heard of it — it’s on Netflix Instant, if you’re curious. He closed out the 1990s with the entirely redundant “Gloria,” a remake of the John Cassavetes/Gena Rowlands film, with Sharon Stone.
And then came the 21st century, which saw Lumet return to TV for the first time in decades. He co-created the legal drama “100 Centre Street,” a series on A&E that toplined Alan Arkin and Bobby Cannavale, and was generally well received, although it only lasted two seasons. He later teamed with “Oz” writer Tom Fontana for the HBO movie “Strip Search,” a post 9/11 drama starring Glenn Close, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ken Leung, showing that even as he entered his 80s, Lumet’s conscience would never abandon him.
Oliver Lyttelton, Jessica Kiang, Rodrigo Pere, Kevin Jagernauth, Mark Zhuravasky, Christopher Bell.
