YOU KILL ME: Existential Meditation? Dry Black Humor? -- Yes, But Also Unconventional Romantic Comedy!
Written: Jun 22 '07 (Updated Jun 23 '07)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: BEN KINGSLEY (his best performance in years), Tea Leoni, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Pullman. Dialogue.
Cons: Takes all the skill of cast, director, editor and composer to suspend our disbelief.
The Bottom Line: YOU KILL ME is an entertaining blend of dry humor, character study, ethnic contrasts, and unconventional comedy. Ben Kingsley shows us how good he can be when he underplays.
|
|
|
| macresarf1's Full Review: You Kill Me |
When you have long suffered from emotional, mental, and therefore, physical pain, you may become depressed, and need incentives . . . to do almost anything. If you are Frank Falenczyk, a Polish-American hit-man from Buffalo, New York, the incentives come from the Vodka of his people's homeland -- or as they like to say, around the Great Lakes, "anything that has a label on the bottle."
The setup for the joke part of Director John Dahl's YOU KILL ME is this: WHERE DO YOU SEND A PROFESSIONALLY MURDEROUS DRUNK TO SOBER UP?
---------------
We meet, Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), looking a bit like Jean Reno in THE PROFESSIONAL [black knit-cap, all-black outfit, but no dark glasses], shoveling snow off the porch steps and walk in front of his conventional two storey house. Every few feet or so, he takes a swig from a quart of clear liquid, and wearily throws the bottle into a drift ahead of him, as a new goal to aim for. By the time, he reaches the sidewalk, a snow plow has pulled up. Out gets Frank's young nephew, Stef Czyprnyki (Marcus Thomas).
The Family needs a job done.
The ascendant Irish Mafia boss, Ed O'Leary (Dennis Farina), is going to New York that evening to make a deal with "the Chinese" to cut out the Polish Family, leaving the Irish and "the Blacks" to fight over whatever is left of City graft. Frank's mission is to take O'Leary out at the Amtrak Station.
Unfortunately, Stef doesn't drink beer in the morning, and he is going snowboarding with his cousin --
No company to warm his empty soul, 8 p.m. finds Frank into at least his second bottle of clear liquid, as he falls asleep in his car, his silencer-equipt pistol on the seat beside him, while O'Leary and his men go off to New York on the train. Frank remembers nothing until next morning, when Stef and other relatives drag him out of the car and back to the Krzeminski Snow Plow and Equipment Garage, the family headquarters.
Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall), the patriarch, is furious. Frank has a recent history of missing hits, hitting the wrong guy, doing messy jobs. And the O'Leary hit was crucial to the survival of The Family.
"You don't work for us anymore," Uncle Roman bites off, "and we can't afford to let you work for anyone else."
Denied one more chance, Frank throws up in front of Roman.
Aargh! Something has to be done.
After all, sighs Roman: "You are family."
Where DO you send a drunken hit-man to sober up?
The Krzeminski Empire is of small and shrinking resources.
The only place the Family has a contact -- and so the punch line to Director Dahl's joke -- is . . . San Francisco.
----------------
SAN FRANCISCO!
"What? They don't have beer there?" Frank logically protests.
[In fact, the last time I looked, San Francisco has more bars per capita than any major city in America.]
But considering the alternative, Frank goes West, rather than going South.
---------------
In San Francisco, his handler, a real estateman named Dave (Bill Pullman), a mean-spirited, hypocritical drunk himself, has gotten Frank a one bedroom apartment on "Lower Nob Hill" [sometimes known to City wags as "The Upper Tenderloin"]. Dave also has found him a job as an assistant undertaker to "Doris" (Alison Sealy-Smith). Black, a veteran in the field, and very competent, Doris soon has Frank applying rouge to corpses, muscling unwieldy body parts into place, and doing what needs to be done. Frank hits it off with the gallows-humored, dry Doris, and fits right in to the funeral parlor.
Death is his field, after all.
Dave's other assignment is harder to carry out.
Frank has to attend weekly meetings of a 12-Step Group, at St. Bridget's, a Catholic church at 38th and Geary. Like most unrepentant alcoholics, he finds the meetings initially a chore, alternately absurd, anger-making or quite intimidating. There are all the rituals -- the parking restrictions, the coffee and donuts, the gentle pleas for small donations. And the main serial ritual: "My name is _____ "
Frank is not about to touch that one, as he sits, still wearing his black knit-cap, arms folded, defiantly snaking his head about at this victim of booze or that one going up to confess the most petty, pathetic and basically inconsequential sins.
Worse, the only person who befriends him at the meeting is Tom (Luke Wilson), who confesses, he's a gay Golden Gate Bridge toll-taker.
When Frank responds, with a slight cock of his head, "I'm not," you can almost sense his trigger finger and other parts of his body contracting.
Sharing coffee at a cafe, a couple of weeks later, Frank in his slightly halting Polish-American dialect deadpans, "Is this the part when we kiss?"
But in time, Frank and Tom become friends and allies.
-------------
Meanwhile back at the funeral parlor, Frank meets an elegant cosmetics junior executive, Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni). She has brought a pair of red bowling shoes to the preparation room for her recently deceased step-father because her mother wants him buried in them.
Frank points out, "He has enormous feet. I may have to break his toes." Laurel takes that little secret of the funeral trade [bodies swell when they die] as matter-of-factly as he offers it. Frank has an instant thing for Laurel.
He makes a pass at her after the funeral, phones her, and presently takes her out on a date.
Why this stolid ruin of an older man and a seemingly attractive younger woman should soon have gone to bed together is the "unconventional romantic comedy" part of YOU KILL ME.
[It may have to do with the facts, never dwelled upon, that Frank carried out his first contract when he was sixteen, and that there was a good deal of helpless anger between Laurel and her departed step-father, the reason for which, she may have acted-out with older men, leaving her unmarried at near 40.]
A time comes when Frank gives Laurel instruction in what he knows best, and she sits in the audience at St. Bridget's when he rises to say:
"Hi, my name is Frank. I'm an alcoholic. I . . . kill people . . . for a living -- This is anonymous, right?"
-------------
If you can get by that moment, I won't describe Frank's inevitable fall from the wagon, or how he strips down to his underwear (where does he keep that automatic?) to persuade a City supervisor not to raze a landmark home the greedy Dave is interested in, or what happens when the Family is really hit back in Buffalo.
As I say, YOU KILL ME emerges, at bottom, as a romantic comedy.
--------------
Against Marcelo Zarvos's ethnic accordion and string score, the screenwriting team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA) have filled YOU KILL ME's brisk 92 minutes with atmospheric scenes and ironically funny lines, nicely match-cut by Editor Scott Chestnutt. But none of that would work if it were not for the old pro cast.
Ben Kingsley -- an actor whose early work I've always felt over-rated, and middle work over-acted -- beautifully underplays, for quiet laughs and some pathos, a character similar but reversely different from the stiff-backed, anal-retentive killer he portrayed in SEXY BEAST (2000). Every word, every move, every attitude and expression conveys the indomitable professionalism and despair of this old killer. Until, without an ounce of sentimentality, he begins to open up to the 12-Step philosophy, viewers may not see in him what Laurel does. But by then, he has fulfilled his contract on us.
Baker Hall, Farina, Pullman, superb character actors, all create familiar figures who are nevertheless fresh. Tea Leoni, another one of my "stars of tomorrow" who never quite made it, has a good physical bearing, and a mordant way with a comic line, which creates a character from the most underwritten of the major roles. The younger actors all give differentiated performances, providing action to the plot.
--------------
And so, as an existential meditation on the nature of death, dying and redemption; as a dry black comedy in the tradition of PRIZZI'S HONOR; and as an unconventional (wince-free) romantic comedy about an older man and a younger woman, YOU KILL ME delivers a solid evening of entertainment.
--------------
Perhaps, for the final joke about YOU KILL ME, you might look at the IMDb message board, arguments concerning how much of the film was shot in Buffalo or San Francisco. In so many words:
"It was all photographed in Buffalo, 'The Snow Capital of America.'"
"No it wasn't! Most of it was done out West!"
According to Director John Dahl (RED ROCK WEST, FATAL SEDUCTION), obviously back in form, and enjoying it, the picture was shot on a tight budget in 26 days -- 25 in Winnipeg, Manitoba -- and ONE DAY in San Francisco.
You could have fooled me (born by the Great Lakes and a Frisco dweller). I would have sworn parts were shot in the Lake Erie-side house where I was born; and outside my front door, maybe in my apartment, or at "The Elephant and Castle" pub, by the Embarcadero Theaters, down by San Francisco Bay!
---------------
PRIZZI'S HONOR: John Huston, an Irish-American "Uncle Roman," gave his film, the last one on which he was entirely in charge, to his daughter, Angelica, who won an Oscar with it. Huston, a master of this down-beat, jazzily comic crime genre, found the joke more personal and funny than some of his audience. Jack Nicholson played the hit-man.
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-21E8-3C99DCE-397FAF2A-prod6
-----
SEXY BEAST: In a way, this English gangster film, set in Spain and London, was YOU KILL ME played dead serious, in reverse, without the uplift of 12-Step and compassion, or a sense of humor.
http://www.epinions.com/content_27422527108
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Funny Movie
Viewing Method: Press Screening
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
macresarf1
|
 - Top 100 |
|
Location: San Francisco, Ca.
Reviews written: 563
Trusted by: 378 members
About Me:
12/1/09: Afghanistan, again: Between the Republican Devils and the Deep Blue Dog Obama.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.