The Great Movies III

Now Uncle Bud goes into overdrive. He briefs them on his kidnap plan as if it were one of those clever strategies in a heist movie, and not simply a matter of sending Collie to pick up a rich kid in a schoolyard. Collie wonders if maybe there's a way to get the money without the kidnapping: like, maybe, Uncle Bud could foil the kidnapping and collect a reward. The problem, says Uncle Bud, is that the plan doesn't look right unless the hero produces the kidnapper. That would be Collie. At the same time Bud rejects the plan, Collie senses that he sees an angle in it. Get rid of Collie, and the money is only split two ways.

It may seem I've revealed too much of the plot, but After Dark, My Sweet is not about the plot but about the personal and moral decisions that Collie and Fay make in light of how the plot unfolds. The closing twenty minutes of this movie contain masterful storytelling, with important decisions arriving silently, by implication. The last sixty seconds are brilliantly complex, as Collie steps a few feet away into the desert to think things through, and does, and improvises a chain of events that is inevitable, heroic, sad, and flawless.

The movie was directed by James Foley, born 1953, a USC film-school graduate, and one of the most underappreciated filmmakers of his generation. His At Close Range (1986) contained career-defining performances by Sean Penn and Christopher Walken; his Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) was the powerful adaptation of David Mamet's play about real-estate salesmen, with its electric performances by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, and Alec Baldwin; his Confidence (2003) had that unforgettable Dustin Hoffman performance as a hyperactive strip-club operator.

After Dark, My Sweet is the movie that eluded audiences; it grossed less than $3 million, has been almost forgotten, and remains one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.

Faye lives in a suburban home that looks half-furnished, as if she is moving in, or out. The water in the pool is thick with leaves. We see a lot of drinking in the house, but no eating. How did Uncle Bud drift into her life? We gather he drifts as a mode of living. How does she feel about his kidnapping scheme? Before Collie came along, it gave them something to vaguely plan. She thinks Bud is a fool, but her life is too unfocused for resistance. When she and Collie finally have sex, the sequence is punctuated by fades into darkness, as if they are seeking oblivion as much as pleasure.

Collie is the central character, the one who retains the ability to decide what he will and should do. Jason Patric's performance is perfectly tuned to give us a man who finds that, with some effort, he can function in the world, but that he has lost the confidence to prevail. He supplies a narration from the Thompson novel that allows us a glimpse inside his mind. That's useful, because although he repeatedly tells people that he hates to be thought of as stupid, the narration proves that he thinks more than he reveals. The subplot involving Doc Goldman is a tragedy within a tragedy, above all for the doctor, a pathetic little man with a yearning for the impossible and a bad sense of timing.

Jason Patric, in movies like this and Rush (1991), Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), Narc (2002), and The Alamo (2004), shows a tough complexity that subverts his good looks or turns them to dark dramatic advantage. True, he was also in Speed 2 (1997), but as the only critic who liked that movie, I cannot complain.

Rachel Ward, remembered for The Thorn Birds on TV, creates a wounded and drifting Faye, a woman without hope or purpose, her beautiful face rising bravely to a world of those too exhausted or damaged to be moved by it. The precise evolution of her feelings during the final scene is crucial, but I was also touched by her tenderness in earlier scenes; she plays a kind woman who has been deposited into an ugly situation by the inertia and hopelessness of alcoholism. As for Bruce Dern, there is a calculation in the way the movie denies him a life outside the immediate plot. Yes, we get a glimpse of an associate or two at long range, but here is a man who functions for Collie and Faye only in terms of his need to use them. Uncle Bud, who is nobody's uncle and probably not named Bud, projects the patient intelligence of a man who can convince you of one thing and himself of another.

That ambivalence is the essence of Thompson's novel and Foley's film: it begins with exhaustion and despair, stirs itself into half-hearted evil, and then in a final desperate sequence finds barely enough heroism to bring itself to a stop again. I have seen After Dark, My Sweet four times, and it only deepens with the retelling.