drqshadow-reviews

Fishing for auto policy renewals, a roving salesman steps through a doorway and falls into the web of a flirty young bombshell. Though his instincts throw immediate red flags, he starts thinking with the wrong head and gets roped into a murder conspiracy that promises to rid her of a pesky husband and reward them both with a hefty life insurance payout. Once he's in on the scheme, our man is *all* in, more enamored with the idea of orchestrating everything just-right than he ever was with the girl. His status in the agency, and chummy relationship with the claims manager, offers him a unique insight into the demands of maximizing their settlement without raising suspicion, but these jobs almost never go off without a hitch and, as we'll soon learn, one dangling thread can sometimes be enough to unwind the whole careful fabric.

One of the cornerstones of film noir, Double Indemnity embraces every last one of the genre's expected nuances. Dark, stern, gritty and tragic, it's well stocked with dirty liaisons, crisp shadows, witty repartee, dim alleys and billowing clouds of cigarette smoke. The atmosphere is thick and rich, dripping with moody atmosphere, and the cast fits a similar mold. Leading man Fred MacMurray, then known primarily as a comedic actor, is convincing and charismatic in the new light, well equipped to deliver a large number of sharp, rapid lines of dialogue. A slightly past-his-prime Edward G. Robinson is equally game as the instinctive coworker who hasn't quite realized who's doing the wool-pulling in their professional friendship. The only hiccup lies in the narrow relationship between MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, who don't have room to develop anything more than a carnal attraction before wading into deep waters. He's brash and bossy, she's cut from the same cloth, and those similarities mean they spend more time repelling one another than canoodling on the couch. That might add to the sense of looming inevitability that hangs over the whole scandal, but it also makes their purported romance feel hollow from the beginning. Fortunate, then, that they spend most of the picture apart, avoiding contact to improve their chances of getting away with the money.

This is a complicated story, but one that flows smoother than silk. That's doubly impressive when one considers the limitations enforced by the Hays Code, which nixed this adaptation on two separate occasions before acquiescing with a truckload of caveats. Managing a finished product that bows to those restrictions, while still maintaining its hard-boiled credibility and telling a brisk, potent, colorful fable, well, that's downright miraculous. Kudos to Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (author of The Big Sleep), whose screenplay hurdled those hoops while adding enough extra context to draw the praise of original author James M. Cain. Speaking after the fact, Cain openly wished he'd dreamed up a few of the film's freshest ideas himself.

I sat down with this one expecting an embarrassingly dated, pretentious peephole into the flightiest years of the 1990s. And while, okay, that's not always very far from the truth, I was also surprised to find something a little more substantial: wit, truth and ennui. An emphatically even-handed rendition of four wide-eyed kids at the onset of their post-college years, Reality Bites depicts each character as flawed, uncertain and lost. Adrift without a safety net for the first time in their lives, the cast alternates between selfish and idealistic, making big mistakes in their personal, professional and romantic lives but also, sometimes, realizing it and growing from the experience. Often confidently wrong, these twenty-somethings are catty and dramatic, prone to rash decisions and emotional blow-ups but also big enough to eventually admit their shortcomings and offer the olive branch. I don't like any of them, really, but I can relate. I probably wouldn't have thought too highly of myself at the same age, either.

There's a lot of heavy-handed romantic turmoil here, given the tempestuous love triangle between the beautiful people in the eye of the storm. Fickle Winona Ryder, at the height of her pixie cuteness, must pick between the irritable, poetic genius she's secretly admired for years (a grungy Ethan Hawke) and the supportive, dim-witted new guy (Ben Stiller, in a suit and bad Morrissey hairstyle) who doesn't embody her rebellious counter-culture ethos but offers emotional and financial stability. That material can be wearying, especially as Ryder flimsily dodges several uncomfortable make-a-choice moments, but her indecision is understandable given the guys' tendency to sabotage themselves and her character seems to hem and haw over everything anyway. Decision paralysis is real, particularly for someone who thinks they're in so far over their head, and Ryder's character is living proof. I don't think she makes the right choice in the end, but at least she does make a choice.

An anthem of sorts for jaded, cynical Generation Xers as they entered the workforce, Reality Bites was appropriately painted with the same brush as Cameron Crowe's preceding film, Singles. This iteration might be missing the hip, fashionable Seattle soundtrack that buffed its predecessor, but it's loaded with the same frustrated, angsty attitudes about life, love and the empty promise of adulthood. The humor is keen and sharp, the squishy romantic bits mildly excessive but not unbelievable, and the core message is loud and true: no matter how much they may have convinced you (or themselves) otherwise, nobody really knows what they're doing at this point in their life.