The major reason you are supposed to be interested in Kiss of Death is that this is meant to be the big Breakout Film for David Caruso, whom you may remember as Mr. Intensity on the TV series NYPD Blue. The reason I’ve been waiting for Kiss of Death has been to see Nicolas Cage as a psychotic badman with a goatee. As it turns out, neither was really worth waiting for, but for me, the Cage letdown is the tougher cross to bear.
Kiss of Death is a good-souled-ex-petty-criminal-caught-up-in-forces-he-can’t-control movie, and it’s chief problem is that it has nothing to really distinguish it from all the other older and largely better good-souled-ex-petty-criminal-caught-up-in-forces-he-can’t-control movies. It is based on the screenplay of a 1947 movie of the same name, although the director of the current version swears on a stack of Leonard Maltin Movie Guides that there’s nothing of the original left. This is too bad—I seem to remember a scene from the original where giggling psychopath Richard Widmark shoves a little old lady in a wheelchair down a set of stairs, and something like that might just have saved Kiss of Death, or at least given us something to look forward to.
There is a choice at the center of Kiss of Death that nobody at the studio had either the guts or the good sense to make. Do you want to make a good, conventional decent-man-on-the-run piece? Okay, then ditch the director and maybe bring in somebody like Sidney Lumet, who has done this kind of stuff in his sleep; and lose Nicolas Cage, or at least the nut-case mannerisms that make him a bad joke in a conventional context. We’ll keep David Caruso—let’s pretend that he’s on parole from TV, and see if he can carry a film by himself.
On the other hand, if you want to make this a great whacked-out over-the-top thriller, well, then let Cage drool a lot more, expand his part, ditch Caruso, bring in Quinten Tarrantino as a script doctor, hire David Lynch or maybe Lars von Trier to direct, wind ‘em up and let ‘em go. You’d have the movie of the decade, or at least movie of the week, which is about 4 1/2 days better than you’ve got right now.
As it is, Kiss of Death is a real Todd Stottlemyer of a movie: 11-and-10 won-loss record, ERA in the high 4’s or low 5’s, takes up space in the rotation and pitches lots of innings, but not much more than that. Like Steven Brunt says, it’s those .500 movies that’ll kill you every time.
While You Were Sleeping—which might also be called Two Engagements, a Wedding, and a Coma—is about beautiful lonely people, and is based on what is—along with mistaken identity—the most popular of old comic chestnuts: the lie that grew and grew. It was made by a Disney subsidiary, and has five and a half Disney Moments scattered throughout, which is skating perilously close to the edge, but it never falls off.
This is because it has three big things in its favor. First, it’s very, very funny. Second, it has this incredible supporting cast of people like Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns and Peter Galleger and they do a lot of great ensemble work. But most important, it stars Sandra Bullock—who with this movie will easily step ahead of Meg Ryan as Hollywood’s most beautiful and convincing funny-girl-next-door. The camera loves her and she was making people swoon in the aisles.
Still, what fascinated me the most about While You Were Sleeping was it’s major conceit—in fack, the conceit of a whole genre of films—that we can be made to like and even believe in the notion of the beautiful lonely person. Think of it. I don’t know of any people like this—gorgeous, charismatic, sane people who cry in their solitary eggnog at Christmas. All the good-looking, intelligent funny people I know are all married to one another and having one hell of a good time. Yet we will accept the existence of people like this in a movie. Why?
Well, maybe it’s that seeing a beautiful person in our own emotional situation legitimizes the feeling for us. If those society lionizes above all—and those are the beautiful—if they’re lonely and screwed up and unhappy, well, it must be all right for the rest of us to be that way, too. I dunno, maybe I’m gonna have to reread my Aristotle—I’m sure he’s got something about this somewhere. All I know is that it didn’t make my feelings feel legitimate at all.
Nice movie though, and it’s gonna be a monster hit.
-Broadcast on Definitely Not the Opera, 1995
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