BOILING POINT
BODIES, REST & MOTION
At least 30 or 40 years separate the sensibilities that underlie Boiling Point and Bodies, Rest & Motion, two current releases I suspect won’t be with us very long. The first, a quirky and at times oddly charming museum piece, is masquerading as a Wesley Snipes action thriller, but advertising–even wall-to-wall–isn’t everything. The writer-director, James B. Harris, who was born in 1928, produced the first three important Stanley Kubrick features–The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), and Lolita (1962)–and what’s most distinctive about this movie is its bittersweet aroma of 50s nostalgia and over-the-hill desperation, most of it wafting around a pathetically cheerful con artist called Red Diamond (Dennis Hopper) who’s simply trying to stay alive.
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Boiling Point essentially plays with and parodies the principle of symmetrically matching sound bites in order to create rhymes and continuities in its parallel plots. A federal agent working for the Treasury Department (Snipes) is granted only a week to catch a pair of ex-cons (Hopper and Viggo Mortensen) who are circulating counterfeit bills and who killed his partner; meanwhile one of the crooks (Hopper) is granted only a week in which to pay off an enormous debt to another gangster. Sometimes cutting between the two ex-cons, sometimes cutting between the parallel plots, Harris employs a number of bridges in the dialogue, so that a question asked in a first scene might be answered in a second, and often uses echoes of phrases, situations, or attitudes to match up successive scenes. Clearly interested in pointing up similarities in characters on both sides of the law, Harris is also interested in comparing and contrasting the separate age groups involved in both worlds, though apart from a hooker played by Lolita Davidovich and a junkie played by Lorraine Evanoff, it’s the older folks who arouse most of his interest and sympathy.
The only problem is that when all’s said and done there isn’t very much to know about these people. The same holds true for most of the people in Boiling Point. A lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers in both cases seems to fit snugly with a desire to keep these movies light on their feet; yet paradoxically the undertow of dissatisfaction and failure that seems to characterize all the lives we’re observing is just about the only thing that keeps the plot of either movie in motion. Bored with themselves and each other, these people are vaguely hoping to find a way out of their stagnation, but not at all sure how to do it. What mainly keeps them interesting and alive is their style, not their content–the case with both movies as well.
Some of what ensues reminds me in spots of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, with the same sort of postmodernist mixture of self-pity and irony about vanished roots, cultural and familial. At its most obtrusive the notion of cultural alienation takes the form of loud Indian chants heard periodically on the sound track, of Nick asking a Navaho filling-station attendant “what the wind means” and getting the answer he deserves (“It’s just the wind, and I’m just a Navaho”), and of Nick buying a cheap imitation Indian headband to wear on his way back to Enfield. Even more heavy-handed–and theatrical in a bad sense–is the handling of lost family roots, more self-pitying than ironic, after Nick reaches his destination.
As a writer-director-producer, James B. Harris is considerably more eccentric than he was as a producer for Kubrick–apart from his relatively impersonal The Bedford Incident (1965), on which he took no writing credit, an efficient, noncomic cold-war thriller that might be said to represent his version of Dr. Strangelove. Some Call It Loving (1973)–his weirdest and least commercially successful feature, though my personal favorite–is a solipsistic fairy tale about a somnambulistic jazz musician who purchases a genuine sleeping beauty at a carnival and finds himself unable to cope with her once she wakes up.
