Romeo Is Bleeding (1994) - the pain of regret:

Review by Jack Kost

You ever wonder what hell is like? Maybe it ain’t the place you think. Fire and Brimstone. Devil with horns, poking you in the butt with a pitchfork. What’s hell? The time you should have walked, but you didn’t. That’s hell.

– Gary Oldman as Jim Daugherty / Jack Grimaldi.

Atmospheric, intense, suspenseful, seductive, dark, cold, moody, bloody, brutal and brilliant …

Romeo Is Bleeding (1994) is everything I want my favorite noir / neo-noir genre to be.

The movie opens with a one-man pity party.

There’s no pity like self-pity and Jim Daugherty (Gary Oldman) is feeling oh, so sorry for himself.

He leads a very different life to the one he destroyed five years ago.

Now, he’s running a lonely diner off the interstate.

The diner is empty.

After he cleans up, empties ashtrays, he uses the spare time to look through a photo album.

Through flashback and voice-over narration, he takes us through his previous life and the events

leading up to him being here.

We learn who he was before he became Jim Daugherty through the witness protection program.

Before he landed himself in trouble, he was Jack Grimaldi, a sergeant in the NYPD.

He’s a wise-cracking smart-ass with his brains in his balls, and he talks about love – a lot!

Jack Grimaldi:

“Do you know what makes love so frightening? It’s that you don’t own it; it owns you.”

He’s also a serial adulterer.

Nailing any woman willing to give it up to him.

His latest mistress is Sheri (Juliette Lewis), a cocktail waitress who wants Jack to fully commit and make a life with her.

Lust and Greed are the deadly sins that cloud his judgment.

Infidelity and money are his main priorities.

Jack Grimaldi:

“Well, like they say, a man don’t always do what’s best for him. Sometimes, he does the worst. He listens to a voice in his head. What do you know? He finds it’s the wrong voice. That’s what love can do to you.”

Annabella Sciorra is perfect as his long-suffering wife, Natalie, in a controlled, convincing and heart-breaking performance.

When she stands at the refrigerator, turns and points Jack’s own gun at him, her eyes burn and there’s an intense moment of stillness where we hear the mood music rise with the sense of heat in that kitchen, and we’re unsure if she’s actually going to shoot him.

There’s a neat touch with a distant bell tolling in the background; a for whom the bell tolls moment.

She turns it into a jokey gotcha moment, but we can tell the intention was there.

Before she lightens the moment with a smile and a wink, it’s as if she’s thinking: I know what you’ve been doing!

Jack can be romantic with his wife, when he wants to be, with dances under the stars and little gifts.

However, the romantic gestures don’t fool Natalie.

The camera, like the necklace in a later scene, is a guilt gift.

Jack has been up to his old tricks again and Natalie is on to him.

When he gifts her with a brand-new camera, Natalie unwraps it with a knowing look and a sarcastic tone to her voice.

Natalie Grimaldi:

“Okay. Now either I was really good, Jack, or you were really bad.”

Jack asks: “How come you never show me those pictures you take?”

Natalie deflects his question.

It’s not explained whether Natalie has a private detective following Jack, photographing his philandering, or she is tracking Jack herself.

It makes no difference.

Natalie adds the pictures of Jack’s numerous mistresses into the pages of the album, after their wedding photos.

As if to make the point: here’s us at our happiest moment, and the following pages of this album are the gallery of women you destroyed us for.

Natalie is quietly gathering the evidence of his multiple betrayals.

Biding her time.

Leading up to the moment she will leave and divorce him.

The end of their marriage doesn’t happen the way she might have envisioned, when Jack returns home panicked, bloody and missing a toe.

He gives her the half-million in mob blood money he’s collected and sends her out of town with instructions to set up a new home for them to share in the future.

Their farewell scene in the car is perfectly acted, as Jack pleads with Natalie not to abandon him.

Natalie walks out of his life, raising her hand in painful resignation, as she turns to him and says: “See ya when I see ya.”

With his colleagues and the mob, Jack is playing a dangerous game; playing everyone in his life for fools, working both sides against the middle.

He’s part of a team of detectives, liked and respected by his team, but he tips off the mob as to where prosecution witnesses are hidden.

The witnesses are murdered and Jack is paid well for his disloyalty: $65,000 a time,

for every witness he gives up to the mob.

The mob boss is the quietly menacing Don Falcone (Roy Scheider).

Jack thinks he’s got it all worked out, until he meets Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin).

She is caught on a job, arrested, and kept in protective custody until she can stand trial.

Falcone fears Mona will give him up as part of a plea deal.

Lena Olin is perfectly cast as a ruthless stone-cold femme fatale, seductive and cunning, with brains to match her beauty, a killer smile and a maniacal laugh.

Jack tries to distance himself from the mob, but they’ve got him on the dangle.

Jack is in – until Falcone says otherwise.

Jack thinks he can play Mona, the way he plays everyone else in his life, but it’s really Mona who’s toying with Jack.

She sees him for exactly who and what he is.

Mona is smarter than Jack and lethal.

Her movements are precise.

Cat-like.

Almost balletic as she steps, squats and glides around Jack, knowing exactly how to seduce him.

Like the Praying Mantis, Mona kills her men after mating, when she has no further use for them.

In the car scene, leading up to Mona forcing Jack to bury Falcone alive, Mona shares her “first time” experience.

The way she speaks, we’re led to believe she’s talking about the first time she made love to another man,

until she talks about how she closed his eyes, left him there, and returned to her home.

Mona concludes: “I guess you never forget the first time.”

A tear falls from her eye, like it was a beautiful moment in her life,

but she’s really talking about the first time she murdered someone.

Through the brutality, raw emotion is displayed.

Tears are shed by almost all the characters.

We believe their pain and fear because of the high caliber of the acting.

The entire cast of talented character actors shine and deliver powerful performances, including those in supporting or cameo roles: Will Patton, Ron Perlman, Dennis Farina, Tony Sirico, Michael Wincott, David Proval, Larry Joshua, Jay Patterson and James Cromwell.

The story comes full circle with Jack left alone.

A haunted and hollow man.

His career and former life destroyed.

Despised by the colleagues who once respected him.

Cast out to his desert highway exile.

He still hangs on to a tenuous shred of hope, that one May 1st, or December 1st, his wife will walk back into his life.

All will be forgiven.

They can be reunited and make a fresh start.

We – the audience – know it’s never going to happen.

Maybe, deep down, he knows it, too.

But he’ll never admit it.

His wife is gone.

Forever.

But he still hangs on to that hope.

Convincing himself that, even after all that happened, she still loves him.

Jack is in hell.

The hell of his own making.

That faint, futile, tenuous hope, is all the comfort he has left.

Seeing Jack alone at the end of the movie, I remembered a line from the 1970 Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi:

“Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone.”

I get the feeling that song would resonate with Jack, as he sits and rereads the letter he wrote to his long-gone wife, the letter she never received.

In the end, Jack may feel he’s a fool for love, but he’s just a fool to himself.

By the way he treated his wife, it can be argued that, although he talks a lot about love,

he’s too selfish to know what love really is.

He screwed up his chance for true love with Natalie and ended up with nothing but loneliness, shame and the pain of regret.

Romeo Is Bleeding was directed by Peter Medak, written by Hilary Henkin,

and released in the United States on February 4, 1994.

The note-perfect music soundtrack, by Mark Isham, is one of my favorites.

When I first saw the movie during its opening cinema run, I left the theatre, went to a music store, and bought the soundtrack CD straight away.

One of my favorite scenes and sections of music is just over 37 minutes into the movie, where Jack goes to the records department, looks through Mona Demarkov’s file, steals an audio cassette tape from the evidence folder, and listens to the recording in his car.

The music includes atmospheric background swells, emphasizing the sinister undertone.

This is a key scene: Jack discovers the danger Mona poses to him, the extent to which she can manipulate and destroy others … and yet, though his own selfishness and stupidity, he goes along with her regardless.

Romeo Is Bleeding is beautifully filmed, well-paced, impeccably written, compelling and mesmerizingly stylish.

Of the many neo-noir erotic crime thrillers, particularly those made in the 1990s, Romeo Is Bleeding is one of the best.