D: John Dahl. P: David W. Warfield, Sigurjon
Sighvatsson, Steve Golin. W: John Dahl, David W. Warfield. Ph: Jacques Steyn.
Music: William Olvis. St: Val Kilmer (Jack Andrews), Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (Fay
Forrester), Michael Madsen (Vince Miller), Jonathan Gries (Alan Swayzie),
Michael Greene (Lt Hendrix)
“I think you’re a greedy,
two-faced bitch… but if you’re straight with me, maybe we can help each other”
The late Eighties-early Nineties saw the
sprouting, in rugged desert soil, of a distinctive strain of semi-rural neo-noir.
Dahl’s feature debut was in the thick of it. He would soon add the superior Red Rock West to a roster that included
Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot, After Dark, My Sweet, Delusion, U Turn and the brutally incisive One False Move.
Dahl announced himself as a skilful and
restrained manipulator of mood and time-honoured material. The starkness of the
Nevada outback is dotted with familiar noir signposts – low-lit offices and
shabby motel rooms, neon signage, motes in shafts of light, barred shadows
bisecting the frame – that point towards a self-awareness on Dahl’s part that,
thankfully, never becomes arch.
The pitch is similarly prototypical – femme
fatale induces down-at-heel private eye to aid her against a violent boyfriend,
leading him by the hormones on a detour slicked with blood and littered with
stolen bills. The hook is that the alluring Fay Forrester wants Jack Andrews to
fake her death; when he obliges, she uses her new identity to evade him as well
as Vince, her psychotic beau, with whom she ripped off the mob, then left in
the lurch. But Jack is persistent, and Fay leaves a money trail from the gaming
tables that puts Vince, cops and gangsters on her trail. So she pleads with
Jack: “Kill me again…”
Dahl’s dialogue is sharp and his style unfussy.
Only once does he indulge in noir-esque expressionism, when Jack and Fay –
fugitives by this point – make love during a storm. A broadly cynical tone is
maintained throughout. The script – co-written by a friend of Dahl’s from film
school – contrives multiple betrayals and false professions of affection,
contributing to an atmosphere polluted by mistrust.
This is textbook noir, of course, and the
director stays safely within its margins. (He has cited Double Indemnity as a major influence on his career.) The colour
scheme is sun-faded, sombre; Dahl instructed his DoP to study the paintings of
Edward Hopper for cues. The music consists of low, ominous strings. Jack is
positioned as the classic noir patsy; Fay is said to trigger his “nice guy
complex”. She selects him simply because he is the first private investigator
under ‘A’ in the phonebook – unlike Angel
Heart, in which PI Harry Angel assumed he’d been chosen by Louis Cyphre for
the same reason, only to discover a more sinister purpose, here it is pure noir
happenstance that leads Fay to Jack, and force of circumstance as much as lust
that binds their fates thereafter.
The casting of the Kilmers, who married the
year before, is a mixed blessing. Val has his moments but, at 30, is too green
for a role that, as written, reeks of world-weariness. He has the patina of
neophyte movie star, lacking the rumples or down-at-heel demeanour of a man in
hock to loan sharks, with only small change in the bank. He is better at
conveying Jack’s emotional stasis since the death of his wife – in one discreet
scene he visits her grave, where his name is engraved next to hers on the
marker, date of death TBA. Overall, however, there is scant sense of
desperation or disenchantment about a character whose predicament worsens by
the minute. A little more self-awareness wouldn’t have gone amiss – Kilmer
demonstrated this quality admirably in Tombstone
and Heat, for example, a little
further down the road.
Joanne is more persuasive, essaying a fatale
from the trashier side of the tracks – avaricious, deceitful and impulsive, but
not immune to mortal fears. Even in expensive attire she looks tacky, like the
second-rate casinos she frequents. The “murder” scene is steeped in barely
subdued eroticism – Fay giggling coquettishly as she squirms on a motel bed
covered in the contents of a blood bag, goading a discomfited Jack into making
it seem as real as possible. It resembles nothing so much as a sex game; are we
to infer that she doesn’t mind those beatings from Vince as much as she says
she does? It is a supposition that would make greater sense of a major plot
contortion towards the end.
Completing the central triumvirate, Madsen is
psychopathic thuggery incarnate, both explosively destructive and casually
sadistic. Like Mr Blond, Vince enjoys inflicting pain – the scene in which he
tortures Jack’s best friend is lit from below so that his face looms
intimidatingly from the screen. It plays like a rehearsal for his lobe-slicing
party piece in Reservoir Dogs.
Dahl would crown his noir career with The Last Seduction, one of the sultriest
thrillers of the early Nineties. His affection for this type of film informs
every frame, every tortuous twist with which Kill Me Again hurtles to a far-fetched conclusion. It’s there also
in the haunting vistas of roads to nowhere – a dominant motif in the school of
desert noir. Kevin Grant
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