Cinema
Where The Money Is (15, selected cinemas)
Old timer
Mark Steyn
Paul Newman dusts himself off for you guessed it — another heist caper. Whether or not he manages to steal the money, you know he'll steal the show though, in this instance, that's petty larce- ny, as I believe Ring Lardner said of Larry Adler in the 1930 Broadway show Smiles.
Where The Money Is has the slightest of plots, but that doesn't matter because, with Newman, the audience walks into the the- atre bringing the backstory with them. Newman's development as an actor resem- bles one of those children's nursery songs where with each verse you leave off one more word. The actor's pretty much pared himself down to the minimum now — min- imal movement, minimal dialogue, minimal vocal inflection — secure in the knowledge that the customers will fill in the blanks. But this time round he's pushing it to the limits. For the first part of the film, he just sits there, saying nothing, head lolling, paralysed by a stroke. Even the famous sparkling blue eyes decline to sparkle, instead staring back grey and lustreless.
This is Henry, the latest in a long line of likeable Newman rogues. He's an old crook, serving a long sentence, till the stroke hit. Now he's been moved from jail to a secure convalescence home. We, the audience, know it's an act: Paul Newman isn't going to take a role that requires him to do nothing but sit in a chair and drool for 90 minutes. Linda Fiorentino, his nurse Carol, only suspects it's an act: she notices odd little things, nothing you can quite put your finger on. So she determines to find some way of putting Henry off his stroke. Alone with him in his room, she does one of her Fiorentino specials, though for the first time in nurse's uniform: a couple of pelvic thrusts, thighs wrapping nearer and nearer, and finally a full-scale lap dance, hovering a fortieth of an inch over Henry's crotch. But, when she fails to get a rise out of him, she begins to wonder if she's not imagining it.
As it happens, she's right: in the state penitentiary, Henry taught himself advanced yoga, which apparently enables you to fake stroke symptoms, as well as feign disinterest when Linda Fiorentino's seamed stockings are caressing your zipper. That's some advanced yoga.
So Carol opts for a less hormonal approach, taking Henry on weekend out- ings with her hubby Wayne (Dermot Mul- roney), and eventually succeeding, in very dramatic fashion, in rousing Henry from his alleged stroke. Soon Carol and Henry are dancing at the local tavern, as Wayne looks on, struggling to figure out why he should be jealous 'cause his wife's dancing with some 75-year old codger.
Well, because the codger's Paul New- man, that's why. The voice is a little more gravelly, but the grin is cool and assured and the eyes flash like a guy who knows how to find an in. It's always fun to see Newman going through his paces, but the clever trick is pairing him with Fiorentino, who gave a killer performance in The Last Seduction that no advanced yoga can resist, survived the Joe Eszterhas kinky sex farra- go Jade, and has struggled to find good roles since. But she's a neat match for Newman — sleek but hungry, and with that low, modulated voice that gives his growl a good run for its money. It's not an explicit- ly sexual relationship, but it has a sexual charge to it: she sees him as her ticket out of loser town, if only she can talk him into one last, glamorous heist with her and Wayne as the legs of the operation. Trou- ble is, she may make a passable Bonnie, but Wayne's no Clyde, except in the sense in which Sinatra and the Rat Pack used the term. Henry senses this. 'We were king and queen of the prom,' explains Carol, 'so it sort of made sense to get married.' When did it stop making sense?' he asks.
All along Henry spots Wayne as the weak link in the chain. Sending the younger man to collect some of the necessities of the raid, he cautions Wayne: 'Be cool to these guys, right? Look them in the eye — but not like you're gonna remember their faces.' But cool is not really in Wayne's repertory, as Henry and Carol are to learn.
For reasons not entirely clear, the film has a British director, Marek Kanievska. Cool isn't really in his vocabulary, either, though Kanievska, a David Lynch wannabe, might dispute that. The picture has a rather desperate fondness for bizarre camera angles and colour schemes that seem to have nothing to do with either story or character. But Kanievska knows how to get good performances out of his principals, and that's the best way to approach this movie: meaningless title, silly plot, but cracking acting.
'I don't think putting in a cat-flap was such a good idea after all.'
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