harmony
by Douglas MesserliRoger Ebert’s on-line review of Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang describes the film genre as “Action, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Thriller,” which perhaps says it all about this frothy confection whipped up in a blender in order to be consumed by absolutely anyone and everyone. Ebert goes on to somewhat begrudgingly complain: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang contains a lot of comedy and invention, but doesn’t much benefit from its clever style. The characters and plot are so promising that maybe Black should have backed off and the told the story deadpan, instead of mugging so shamelessly for laughs. It could still be a comedy, but it would always be digging its elbow into ribs. I kept wanting to add my own subtitles: ‘I get it! I get!’” And, in large part, I find myself agreeing with him.
Yet, from its credits on, this film is so stylishly directed, wittily
conceived, and well-acted—particularly by the petty, East Coast thief, Harry
Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) and the seasoned gay detective, Gay Perry van Shrike
(Val Kilmer playing “Gay Paris,” get it?)—that it almost seems mean-spirited to
throw a dose of cynicism into this brew, particularly since Black himself has
laced his creation with a camp cynicism just so that nothing, not even the
character’s youthful history played out in a Norman Rockwell-like Indiana,
tastes too sweet. All right, the plot makes absolutely no sense, and is so
convoluted that even an attentive reader like me, armed with a Wikipedia cheat
sheet, can still not make it out. But then a film that it models itself on
Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake—which
Time Out Film Guide describes as a “loopy”
piece—predictably, perhaps, argues that the film might intentionally make much
sense. I’ve seen The Big Sleep dozens
of times, but still don’t completely understand its “story.” And just like that
brilliant film noir what matters here
is the chemistry between its characters and their clever dialogue.
It’s almost as if writer and
director Black were betting with that devil, Pauline Kael, that he could make a
movie based on the action formula that might still be highly entertaining. Even
if in his attempt to do so he goes, at times, far over the top, even over the
edge, I think, ultimately, he succeeds.
It’s also, purportedly, the first time a major film action character was
gay. Kilmer is not great actor, despite his own estimation of himself, but in
his puffy good looks he is near perfect as the hard-core, experienced gumshoe,
Perry, enlisted to give newcomer, would-be actor Harry a taste of the
underworld life. “Rule number 1….This business. Real life, boring.” If nothing
else, Perry knows who and what he is.
Harry, on the other hand, who, after attempting to rob a toy store has
stumbled into an audition, convincingly acting out what has just happened in “real”
life (the auditioners are convinced his is a brilliant method actor), is a naïve
as they come. At his first Hollywood party he attempts to protect a sleeping
woman, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), challenging the would-be “intruder”
to a fight, only to be severely beaten. Throughout the film, he is beaten again
several times, even by women, is shot, loses a finger, and is tortured with
electricity in his crotch. Convinced he is in love with Harmony—who, it turns
out, in this coincidence-packed movie, is his high school sweetheart (albeit
the only male in his class with whom she did not have sex)—yet even as an adult
who momentarily shares her bed, he does not “score,” although, what Harmony
says of another girl might equally apply to herself, “She’s been fucked more
times than she’s had a hot meal.”
Despite his seemingly heterosexual proclivities, Harry gets nowhere with
the women (is even voted out of a bar by the women within), he keeps coming
back and back to Gay Perry, despite Perry’s dismissal of him. And the only real
kiss he gets—in this “kiss kiss” tale—is when Perry, in order to evade the
police, embraces him for a long mouth to mouth munch. After he crawls into
Harmony’s bed, the scene ends with him arguing with her concerning her
admission that she had slept with his best high school friend—the only male,
other than himself, that he thought she had not had sex!
If Harmony and her dead sister, Jenna, along with the body of Veronica
Dexter, keep showing up in his life, it is because they are needy or dead, not
in love with Harry. As he himself hints, the women with whom he communes are
either perverted or deceased: “I mean, it’s literally like someone took America
by the East Coast and ‘shook’ it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.”
Certainly, his relationships with women are not ever harmonious.
In the end, it is only Perry who is truly honest with him, explaining
not only the ways the world but revealing the painful truth that Harry has been
lured to Hollywood as a ploy to get another actor. And it is Perry who perhaps
perceives how things stand:
Perry: Merry Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.
Harry: No problem. Don’t quit your gay job.
And later:
Harry: Hey, hey, hey! It’s Christmas, where’s my present,
Slick?
Perry: Your fucking present is you’re not in jail, fag-hag.
Harry’s telling of the story, as
the voice-over narrator of the piece, begins badly as he forgets to tell
important elements of the tale, including the somewhat meaningless intrusion of
an actor dressed as a robot entering Harmony’s apartment. So, it immediately
becomes clear, the story we witness may not be the whole story. Certainly by film’s
end, when Perry survives his apparent murder (an event which Black mocks by
having all the previously killed actors of the piece, including President
Lincoln, enter Harry’s hospital room, only to be hurried off by the nurse), we
recognize that his notion of Harmony being “the one who got away” is a kind of
hallucination, particularly when we discern that Jenna is not Harmony’s sister,
but her daughter through incest—which brings us closer to Chinatown, perhaps, than Woman
in the Lake or The Big Sleep.
It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that Harry admits, at film’s
closing, that he now works for Perry, with Perry, to close down the film,
putting his hand over Harry’s mouth as if to shut down any possible new
confessions. Perry, always the realist, even apologizes “to all you good people
in the Midwest, sorry we said fuck so much.” But then that is truly what this
film is all about, and it is nearly impossible to imagine Harry going on
without his rhyming-named friend. Harmony has finally been achieved.*
Los Angeles, July 9, 2013
*I might also mention that this film
fits perfectly into the genre I have described as “Los Angeles” films, movies
that take place in the city, to which outsiders are attracted, feeling
themselves, a first, as outsiders before they come to recognize that, as
outsiders, they completely belong.
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