Posted: 06/25/2007

You Kill Me

(2007)

by Matt Wedge

For a five-year stretch in the late ’80s to early ’90s, director John Dahl delivered three great indie-noirs with Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, and The Last Seduction. With major studio backing and a larger budget, he dropped his first creative bomb in the form of Unforgettable, an incomprehensible mess that was part sci-fi, part murder mystery and all ridiculous. It lacked the sly sense of humor and clean but complex storytelling of his earlier efforts. With a string of solid but unremarkable projects (Rounders, Joy Ride, The Great Raid) in the ten years since his first real misstep, Dahl seemed destined to quietly ride out the rest of his career as a studio director for hire. Perhaps sensing this, Dahl attempts to prove he still has a little creative life left in him, returning to his indie roots with You Kill Me, a dark-comedy that is as engaging and clever as his early films but lacks the cynical bite that made them such a treat.

Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast) is an alcoholic hit man for Roman (Philip Baker Hall, The Insider), his uncle, who runs the Polish mafia in Buffalo, NY. Frank’s drinking has become such a problem that it’s impairing his ability to do his job. This leads to Roman shipping him out to San Francisco to sober up and stay out of trouble. There, he is set up with an apartment and a job working at a funeral home by Roman’s contact, Dave (Bill Pullman, Zero Effect). As Frank struggles to stay sober with the help of Alcoholic’s Anonymous meetings and his sponsor Tom (Luke Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums), his life is further complicated by a budding romance with Laurel (Tea Leoni, Flirting with Disaster). Laurel has a “trouble with boundaries” and enjoys Frank’s purely truthful demeanor, barely batting an eye at the news that he’s an alcoholic who just happens to kill people for a living. When his mob family finds itself under attack back in Buffalo, Frank finds that his ability to get on the wagon and stay there might be the only thing standing between them and annihilation.

Dahl’s greatest accomplishment here is that he is able to take a plot that is fairly predictable and tell it in a way that feels fresh. Instead of pounding away at the one-note joke of a hit man trying to rigorously follow the twelve steps of A.A., he gives the film a loose, improvisational feel. While the twists and turns are never exactly surprising, the way that Dahl presents them is different than is expected in this day of post-Tarantino, ultra-cool violence and glib dialogue. The brief moments of violence, as Dahl shows them to the audience, are sudden and brutal. There is nothing cool about it; just the matter-of-fact way of life for these very screwed up people. There is also a nice believability to the development of Frank’s romance with Laurel and his friendship with Tom. Each relationship is natural, never coming across as being forced, despite the absurdity of the situation.

Not surprisingly, Dahl is able to get good to great performances from most of his cast (this is, after all, the director who managed to rein in the excesses of both Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper in the same film). As Frank, Kingsley turns in a fine comic performance that is as much about his deadpan expression as it is his clipped accent. Wilson continues his efforts (along with this year’s Vacancy) to break away from relying on his laid-back charm with a quietly effective supporting turn. Leoni’s work is the real surprise. She has always been a capable actress, likeable but never as impressive as those around her. Her Laurel is a woman who has been deeply hurt and teeters at the edge of desperation on a daily basis. Not one word of dialogue is spoken to this aspect of her personality. It all comes out in her face as she struggles to decide what, if any kind of a relationship she wants with Frank. Her transformation into a confident woman, choosing to pursue love, no matter what, is a joy to watch. The only member of the cast who seems out of place is the normally reliable Pullman. He overacts to an extreme, playing up the scummy side of his character. He goes through the film, scrunching up his face as though in pain at all times. It’s an odd choice that does nothing to make him more interesting, just more obnoxious.

The main problem with the film comes from the script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. They have several interesting, multi-dimensional characters that are stuck in a story leading nowhere. While Frank’s recovery and subsequent rediscovery of his humanity leads him through several nicely subtle comic adventures, there is never any doubt that he will find himself back in Buffalo, looking to even up the odds in the mob war. A sense of surprise about the story is missing, as is a feeling of danger for the characters we’ve come to know and like. Never once are you concerned that things are going to turn out badly for any of the leads. Without that tension, the script relies too heavily on some overly clever dialogue and the inherent absurdity of the situations.

Despite the flaws, Dahl and the cast give us a film about wounded people finding each other that is funny and sweet. Even though he was not able to fully overcome the deficiencies of the script or infuse it with the noir sensibilities that have served him so well in the past, this is still Dahl’s most satisfying film in over a decade.

Matt Wedge is a writer and film reviewer living in Chicago.

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