Blood and Wine

Bob Rafelson collaborated with Jack Nicholson for the former’s 1981 remake of the noir classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice.  Here they try their hand at a neo-noir.  The result isn’t in the same league as the earlier film and suffers from a schematic plot, banal visuals and uninspired directing.

Nicholson plays Alex Gates, a wine dealer and philandering husband to Suzanne (Judy Davis), a recovering alcoholic. Alex is no longer able to sustain his lavish lifestyle and that includes his mistress, Gabriella (Jennifer Lopez), a nanny for one of his wealthy clients.  He plans to rob said client of a million-dollar diamond necklace with the assistance of a crony, Victor Spanksy (Michael Caine). Stealing the necklace is the easy part.

At times is it not easy to join the dots in this wanna-be tale of greed and lust, particularly when it comes to the involvement of the stepson, Jason (Stephen Dorff), who keeps popping up in and then disappearing from  the screenplay by Nick Villiers and Alison Cross.  Partly too it may be due to the fact that he is the closest the film comes to having a wholesome character and as such doesn’t easily fit with the story of persistent turpitude.

Nicholson, although overweight and looking like Freddy Gale, the jewelry retailer from his previous film, The Crossing Guard (1995), brings a characteristically reptilian menace to Gates but in the moral stakes he’s an angel compared to Michael Caine’s Victor, a career crim (as Caine doesn't do any accent but his own they have left him as Cockney but this is not even acknowledged let alone made something of) who is dying of what appears to be tuberculosis as the two men find themselves trapped into a course of action from which they are unwilling or unable to back down.

When Rafelson keeps the business dirty the film is strong as in genre fashion the characters find themselves blighted by their own choices, the very avarice which led them to their crime putting their desired destination further out of their reach.  Unfortunately the film lets the Jason and Gabriella characters get off too lightly in the moral stakes, the former, despite a bit of equivocation, coming close to being a conventional hero and the latter, in terms of both the screenplay and Lopez's performance being completely inert, all femme and no fatale. Gabriella is, after all, supposed to be a key player in the sorry chain of events but Lopez does little more than turn up for her scenes, her famously ample ass the only thing about her performance that one cannot take one's eyes off.

The film was widely criticized in its day for its bleakness but, if anything, to work it really needed to be more trenchantly fatalistic. As it is, it gets only halfway there.   

FYI: Rafelson and Nicholson also collaborated on Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972) 

 

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