The film of George V. Higgins's novel, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle", is a happily brutal, bleak without artistry, cold-hearted and life-denying piece of amorality in cinematic form, populated with actors whose characters possess no character (the filmmaker's fault, not the actors) and only barely resemble human beings as they mug their way through recitations of some of the most anti-dramatic and banal dialogue I've ever heard in a mainstream Hollywood production. The only excuse for making a film like this is to make pure, unadulterated evil look hip, cool, and therefore falsely exciting. But how can you make losers, traitorous cops, and thugs look interesting?Well, one way among other things is to sprinkle the actors' dialogue with the most casual and blissfully ignorant racist assumptions equating only Blacks with welfare and sub-standard living conditions, which of course serves the purpose of validating the selfish, furtive, low-life moves of Eddie and his so-called friends (???) by implying that even though they may be bone-headed criminals that routinely botch-up their little capers, at least they ain't n-----s. For those of us who have the courage to question the debatable validity of those assumptions, please read Barbara's Ehrenreich's 1991 article in Time magazine entitled, "Welfare: A White Secret." And then do the research that she did, in case you disagree with her conclusions.
Another way to make the death of life appear to be dramatically compelling is to get creative visually, in this case recording the action in long, slow takes reminiscent of documentaries, and to de-saturate the film stock so that color is drained from Nature. This makes the footage look "artsy", though I don't completely understand why that is. It's a production value that is routinely employed (and at other times successfully) to make things appear more "realistic", but here it only serves to make this film a more detached and unfeeling experience. It's as though the filmmakers said, "Life is miserable, and misery loves company, so let's make Nature look the way we feel".
There is only one, brief scene in this film that admits the possibility of joy in life, and that's when Eddie lovingly embraces his sweet, matronly Irish wife, Sheila, in the kitchen as she washes dishes. Whether it's her dutiful attendance to her lowly domestic chores, or her non-accusing, selfless acceptance of Eddie's legal troubles, it's clear that his suddenly amorous gesture is motivated by loving feelings so strong that she giggles with girlish satisfaction at the urgency of his forgivably mis-timed carnal need.
Movies may reflect life in its various aspects, but the reflection is more useful and constructive when we don't focus exclusively on death, and man-made death at that.
― ian, Sunday, 3 November 2013 17:13 (ten years ago) link