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.
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