I recall this Friday pretty clearly. I am a freshman in high school, and me and 2 of my friends are going to go to the movies. Passenger 57 is playing, and that is what we are going to go see. The problem is we have the time all wrong, and we are two hours early for the Wesley Snipes movie. But we told either my dad or my friend Glen’s mom to come pick us up in three hours. So we had to make a pivot and see something different. No one had a cellphone, and no pay phone close by. Hey, Lance Henriksen is in the Jennifer 8 flick. Why don’t we go see that? And we did, and we loved it. It was the perfect, dark, rainy, and noir enough for three young guys to dig. And since that viewing, this is a flick I pop on VHS and give a viewing every so often, so as not to forget this hidden gem. But enough about my ramblings, and now let’s talk about this must-see flick. Also, to recap, I have seen a ton of films and love that you even made it this far in my review, so thank you. I worked in video stores on two coasts, and this was a good recommendation I would hit people with if they were just looking for something to enjoy. Here we go. Wait… you have not seen this?
Here is the setup. John Berlin, played by Andy Garcia, is an LAPD detective who is coming apart. Always a LA cop, kind of a theme for me. His marriage has collapsed, his drinking is out of control, his career is about over, let’s say. His old partner and brother-in-law, Freddy Ross, played by Lance Henriksen, invites him up to Eureka, a small town in rural Northern California, to join the local force and get his head right. I would like to say I have been to Eureka, and when I first saw this film in NJ in 1992, that I did not have on my bingo card. Anyway, back to the film. He can get a Fresh start there. Clean air. Quiet town. Hopefully nothing to crazy.How about the First night on the job, he is standing in a garbage dump in the pouring rain, pulling a severed human hand out of a trash bag. Great fresh start, Freddy. Hahahahahah. Anyway, from the condition of the fingers, Berlin determines that the hand belonged to a young blind woman. He connects it to a cold case of an unidentified murdered girl, the department had been calling Jennifer, their seventh unsolved victim in four years, all of them blind women found dead or missing within a three-hundred-mile radius. The hand belongs to Jennifer 8. And now Berlin is obsessed. I won’t mention another thing because every plot twist makes this better and better as the film goes on.
Now, the cast. Andy Garcia is John Berlin, and this is one of his best performances and one of the most overlooked of that entire era. And I know I really loved him in Black Rain, but honestly, this is his best film. Garcia had just come off The Godfather Part III and Internal Affairs in 1990, and before that, he was in The Untouchables. Up to this point, he is a character actor in a leading man’s face, and this film is, I think, his transition into lead actor roles. This is my number one from him, but Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead is easily number two. The super ironic part is that, according to Bruce Robinson, the director, wrote the role for a much older, more physically worn down actor. Gene Hackman or Al Pacino were who he had in mind. And I get why a young actor brings a different vibe to the whole flick, but i think they went for it, and it succeeded. Garcia is so genuinely good in it that the argument now is just ‘what-if”. Uma Thurman is Helena, and she is a goddess. Completely believable as a blind woman in a way that requires real sustained physical discipline. It is super impressive. This is Uma Thurman between Henry and June in 1990 and before Pulp Fiction in 1994, but this is her most impressive role. I know why Tarantino was like, she can be in everything I make. Between this and Mad Dog and Glory, Quentin was like anything she wants to read for is hers as long as I make films. But back to her in this flick. The chemistry between her and Garcia looks real, which, given that she is fourteen years younger than him and they are playing a romance, is probably not bad, having two very good-looking people in the roles, and also extremely talented actors as well. Probably both. Again, imagine this is Gene Hackman or Pacino, I don’t think it works. Then there is Lance Henriksen as Freddy Ross, and this is one of those performances where an actor takes a role that could have been anyone, but he knows what he can bring to a part and how to kill it. You know Lance Henriksen as Bishop in Aliens, as Frank Black in Millennium, as the villain in Hard Target, and in roughly two hundred and fifty other films and television appearances because Lance Henriksen has not been idle a single day in forty years and appears to be constitutionally incapable of phoning it in regardless of budget, genre, or whether a reasonable person would even show up for it. I think I have my autographed copy of his biography at my parents’ house. Need to find that and read it again. Kathy Baker plays Margie, Freddy’s wife and Berlin’s sister, and this is another role that a lesser actor would not elevate. Baker is an actress who won three Emmys for Picket Fences and was extraordinary in Edward Scissorhands. She is also in Mad Dog and Glory, but I also loved her in Mr. Frost. Bob Gunton is in there as Goodridge, and even in the few minutes is solid. Bob Gunton is the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption, which came out two years after this, so not bad. Graham Beckel plays the territorial local detective who resents Berlin from the start and is just the right amount of believably wrong about everything. I just learned he is the late Bob Beckel’s younger brother. He was a political commentator whom I always liked hearing from. Graham is a nice actor in LA Confidential as well, a small but important part.
And then there is John Malkovich as Agent St. Anne, an FBI investigator who shows up well past the halfway point of the film and proceeds to be one of the most enjoyably malevolent screen presences of the entire decade. He is not in the movie long. He does not need to be. I mentioned to Larry and Mark that I eventually need to write another book talking about actors that are in a film for less than 10 minutes, but deliver such a performance that they should have an award just for this type of thing. I have no name for it, but I will come up with one. Malkovich had done Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, played Lenny in Of Mice and Men, then did this flick, and then In the Line of Fire, which he is amazing in. Let’s just say in this film, he is absolutely killing it. Every scene he has with Garcia is electric. The interrogation scene between them is the kind of thing you pause and rewind, as I said, an award was deserved. He is in maybe twenty minutes of a two-hour film, and he is the thing most people would tell me was their favorite part when they would bring the movie back to Hollywood Video or West Coast Video. But that is the John Malkovich experience. He arrives, he turns your film to eleven, he leaves. You are grateful and in awe. Sorry, that was a lot. He is killer in this.
Now the crew, and this is the part I really want to talk about. The director is Bruce Robinson. If you know that name, I am impressed. Bruce Robinson is best known as the writer and director of Withnail and I, the 1987 British cult classic that is a must-see flick. Easily his greatest contribution to film. It funded itself partly through George Harrison and HandMade Films, the same company that backed Life of Brian, which tells you everything about what kind of movie it is. It launched Richard E. Grant’s entire career, a man who, before Withnail, had essentially nothing, and, after Withnail, he has been in everything. Hudson Hawk, Warlock, hell, he is Classic Loki in Loki, the TV show. Okay, not about him, back to Bruce. Robinson also wrote the screenplay for The Killing Fields in 1984, which won seven BAFTAs and got Robinson an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Before he was a writer and director, he was an actor. He played Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet in 1968 and had a role in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H in 1975. After the shit show that the production studio did to him during the editing of this film, he kind of disappeared from movies. He wrote Return to Paradise in 1998 and In Dreams in 1999, but kind of disappeared. He eventually came back to write and direct The Rum Diary in 2011, the Hunter S. Thompson adaptation with Johnny Depp, but the production studios destroyed whatever vision he had with this film, and it crushed a really solid director. I find that super crazy, considering how much I enjoy this film and learned that the director hated it. As my daughters say, don’t yuck my yum. And this info will not for me. The cinematographer is Conrad Hall, who is one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of American cinema. He shot Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, for which he won his first Oscar. He shot Tequila Sunrise and Class Action and then came here to Eureka, California, to stand in the rain and make a Paramount thriller look like a European art film. He won his second Oscar for American Beauty in 1999. He won his third for Road to Perdition in 2002, which was released two weeks before he passed away. The work he does in Jennifer 8 is extraordinary, cold, specific, and atmospheric, and it was largely ignored because the film itself is not talked about enough, but man, I dug it and got what he was going for. The score is by Christopher Young, who did Hellraiser, Drag Me to Hell, Copycat, and a dozen other genre films, and is from Red Bank, NJ. Hope he is in his high school’s wall of fame. Honestly, a great crew on this super underrated film.
And now on to my favorite parts. The quotes:
“Find yourself a farmer’s daughter with nice big fucking tits and shake that bye-bye..” – Freddy
“How does anyone, dead as this, lose a knife?” – Freddy
“Policeman’s bodies age at different rates… I got a belly in its 50’s, my balls are in their 60’s, and my feet are in their 80’s.” – Freddy
“John… I’m running out of questions… and you’re running out of lies.” – Agent St. Anne.
Look, this flick doesn’t have the greatest rotten tomato score, but I am telling you it is a solid flick. Malkovich is awesome, Lance is Lance, and great. Uma is smoking and pretending she is blind. There is nudity, but not her. And Andy Garcia is super solid in this. In doing some research about this, I didn’t realize that Bram Stoker’s Dracula opened two weeks before this, so I can imagine that it stole most of the eyes for this. And I was hoping to see Passenger 57, instead of this when it came out, but happy for me and my friends’ timing, it put us in this theater. Amazon Prime for the normal four bucks, but Malkovich is worth ten, so I will expect some change.
Fun Facts:
- When I started going down the rabbit hole on this film after watching it, I found something that made me genuinely angry. Andy Garcia gave an interview to Movieline where he said that twenty minutes of the film were cut before release. Twenty minutes. He described the removed scenes in enough detail that you could feel exactly what was lost. There was an all-night alcohol binge for his character that Robinson had written specifically to show how far gone Andy’s character actually is, and there were substantial sections of the interrogation sequence between Garcia and Malkovich that apparently went much deeper and much darker than what made the final cut. What!!!! Where is this footage? No director’s cut has ever been released. There is no known plan to release one. Somebody at Paramount has a vault somewhere with twenty minutes of Andy Garcia and John Malkovich doing things that never made it to screen, and apparently has decided the world does not need to see that. That is a crime, and I will not be getting over it.
- That last one hurt my heart so much, I have no more. Need to start writing some senators.