Miami Blues

Miami Blues is the kind of movie that makes one wonder if it started life with good intentions and somehow went wrong or if it was just outright misbegotten.  It takes a while to register that all the wrongness is actually intentional.  This puzzlement probably wouldn’t be applicable if you knew that director George Armitage's screenplay is based on a series of crime novels by Charles Willeford whose style recalls the gallows humour of Elmore Leonard.  I haven’t read any of them so I can’t tell if Armitage’s film does them justice but taken in itself it does, at least in its latter stages, achieve a blackly comedic charm

Alec Baldwin plays Frederick Frenger Jnr, a petty crook just out of jail  who flies in to Miami, soon hooks up with an air-headed but good-hearted prostitute, Susie Waggoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) but their plans to settle down to white-picket fence normality is jeopardized by Jnr’s sociopathic criminality and Detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward) who suspects Jnr may have been responsible for the death of a Hare Krishna devotee.

Once you get over the diabolical ‘80s fashion the main hurdle to face is the elliptical plot.  Hoke, who is the hero of Willeford's novels, a classic career cop – burnt out from spending too long cleaning the sewers of life, holed up alone with a bottle of bourbon for companionship and whose unorthodox approach to interviewing suspects involves taking out his false teeth, finds Jnr. in no time flat and sits down to a hearty meal with him and Susie.  Jnr returns the visit, steals his gun, badge and false teeth and uses the former to commit more crimes although how he knew where Hoke lives is unexplained.

In hindsight (and there really is no other way to process the film as going forward its intentions are opaque) there are lots of good ingredients they just don’t come together in a coherent whole and although the film seems to want to you take the incongruities as part of its off-kilter sensibility it just feels like not enough work has been done to get things right.  It’s only as the film goes along that it finds its feet culminating in a demented holdup and a final showdown between Hoke and Jnr

The performances are excellent with Fred Ward bringing a wry sense of humour to Hoke’s flat-footed efforts, Baldwin engaging with his buffed physique and wired demeanour and Jennifer Jason Leigh is winning as the hooker with a heart of gold.

Although overall it doesn't come off, for lovers of the off-beat at least there's enough in Miami Blues to give it a go. 

 

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