Life on the Underbelly

by Thomas Burchfield

"Another Day in Paradise" is in the tradition of outlaw-lovers-on- the-lam films going way back to "You Only Live Once," up through "Bonnie and Clyde" and, more recently, "True Romance." Fortunately, this time, instead of post- modern attitude or gauzy rebel romanticism, we're given a harsh and bitter look at life crawling along America's underbelly: entertaining, well-made, but tough to sit through.

The film opens with Bobby (Vincent Kartheiser) a teen junkie, breaking into vending machines to subsidize his habit. The sequence is shot in a jazzed up frenzied style that reflects a junkie's craving desperation. Things however, turns brutally straightforward when a vicious security guard happens on the scene.

After barely surviving his brutal encounter with the guard, Bobby, along with his loving girl Rosie (Natasha Gregson Wagner), find themselves under the tender loving care of Mel (James Woods) and Sid (Melanie Griffith). Mel and Sid are professional thieves. Sid is a heroin addict reduced to shooting up in her groin and neck. Mel is a sociopath with a serious drinking problem and worse temper. He may have been a true professional once, but as he ages and falls deeper into addiction, his better judgment is rapidly slipping away. Sociopaths are predictable in one sense: they're always good at looking after number one. But Mel is so far gone, he can't even do that anymore.

"We're not Ozzie and Harriet," Sid points out, but nevertheless, these four characters create a perverse bond that turns the drops the notion of family values on its head, as Mel and Sid adopt the two kids and raise them in the art and craft of professional stealing. This notion of family is carried out to amusing lengths."I have to go to work!" Bobby cries as Rosie, strung out on heroin, pleads with him to stay home (home being a sleazy hotel room). "We're like a family," Sid insists on one occasion. Mel and Sid even tuck them into bed with good night kisses. And like a good father, Mel teaches the kids how to shoot smack. The only thing missing is an adorable pit bull.

In this world of twisted morality and constant betrayal, what this ad hoc family wants never matches what it gets. And what they get is always touched with death. It is in no ways a paradisiacal picture of crime. Bonnie and Clyde were romantic. "True Romance"'s characters are empty, sentimental "cute" poseurs. "Paradise"'s people are lost souls of out Jean Genet. You'd rightly run away from them on the street, but here you see them in their full pathos.

Director Larry Clark, who made a notorious splash a couple of years back with another tale of street life, "Kids", takes a mostly documentary approach to his material. Eric Edward's cinematography washes out the colors to dull pastels and lurid reds. The violence is crude, blunt and real as a movie can be. There is no attempt to prettify this bleak and dangerous way of life. Even the good times are fraught with a sense of drunken despair and meaninglessness. The only hope lies in the next job, and that hope is always dashed. While there may be an air of downward predictability about "Another Day in Paradise" it is no less painful to watch.

The performances are generally excellent, but it should be no surprise that James Woods is the real draw. Characters like Mel have been his stock in trade for years and, as usual, he brilliantly limns the shallow depths of a hypnotically charming monster. You can see the jittery dance of Mel's chameleon-like mind as he shifts his mood and temper to meet every situation with one interest in mind: Mel's. Some have tired of Woods, but I think he's far and away the closest thing we have to a modern James Cagney (if only he could dance!). It's a tricky act few actors have the speed and agility to pull off. It is a pleasure to watch Mel turn from tough and brutal to tender and sweet in an eye blink, while we know it's all an act.

Melanie Griffith is a surprise as Sid, as she breaks out of her chirpy beach- bunny image to show the tenderness and decency glimmering in Sid's brassy platinum blond soul. Unlike Mel, she knows their lives suck. Her look of creeping self-disgust as she gazes into the mirror after injecting heroin into her neck is one of the film's best moments and shows her to be a far better actress than I remembered. Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner, though overwhelmed by the two stars, do fine work. Kartheiser admirably captures both the vulnerability quaking under the facade of teenage bravado, and his naivete as he falls under Mel's carnival barker spell. Wagner is all yearning, vulnerability and fragile hope, wanting out, but with no idea how to get there, except through her one and only Bobby. Her claims of independence ring with honest pathos.

Brent Briscoe of "A Simple Plan" also makes a welcome appearance as a racist drug dealer who underestimates Mel in one of the film's most brutal sequences. However, Lou Diamond Phillips is an overripe stereotype as a gay gang leader with whom Mel shares a surprising past.

"Another Day in Paradise" has its lame moments. A scene of Bobby and Rosie discussing their possible future is excruciatingly banal and the fate of one character is neither surprising nor moving, chalking up one defeat in the film's efforts to avoid predictability. Nihilists might whine at the ray of hope provided at the end but I'm inclined to believe that even losers don't lose all.

[Thomas Burchfield can be reached at TBDeluxe@aol.com and appears regularly in Swing Time magazine.]

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