by Robert Altman, 1992.
Starring: Vincent D’Onofrio, Peter Gallagher, Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett, Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Cynthia Stevenson, and Fred Ward.
Rating: 9/10, 9/10.
Well, here we go again. Here’s where I take one of the greatest movies ever made and try to say something intelligent about it. Because The Player really is one of the greatest movies ever made.
Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a film producer who hears hundreds of movie pitches ("The Graduate 2"..."A light-hearted but hard-hitting supernatural political thriller with a heart") every year. He hates writers, I suppose with good reason, and (unrelatedly) he seems to be in a lot of potential trouble with the studio—Larry Levy (Gallagher), a producer Griffin hates, is poised to take over his job. Anyway, he’s been getting threatening mail, apparently from a writer he pissed off a while back. So he goes through his records and decides that it must be a writer named David Kahane (D’Onofrio)—the timing of events is right. He goes to Kahane’s house and, looking in the windows at Kahane’s girlfriend June (Greta Scacchi)—who, by the way, happens to have the same last name (Gudmundsdottir) as Björk—calls the house. Kahane isn’t in, and in a brilliant, brilliant scene, Griffin and June have a long conversation—all the while with Mill looking in the windows and June oblivious to the fact that he’s right there—and Griffin becomes, shall we say, "interested" in her. Then he goes to find Kahane at a screening of the Italian film The Bicycle Thief, and—oops—kills him. The police (Goldberg and Lovett) know he did it, but can’t prove anything. The studio’s chief of security (Ward) seems to know he did it, and is trying to keep it quiet. June has no idea, even as their affair progresses, and Griffin’s wife Bonnie (Stevenson) grows increasingly suspicious that he’s having that affair. It all gets wonderfully complicated.
And that little summary doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface—among other things, the film is an indictment of the film industry, a brilliant self-parody, funny, sad, exciting, and full of great cameos.
Robbins is brilliant as ever. He portrays wonderfully his emotionally crippled, heartless-but-somehow-impossible-for-the-audience-to-hate character as well as anyone could have, or better. Scacchi does wonders with her loveable but hard to understand character. Goldberg and Lovett both turn in incredible comic-relief characters—Lovett’s hilariously creepy, Goldberg’s ditzy with hidden intelligence. The mostly improvised scene with the tampons is great. And we all in the audience fall in love with Stevenson as the horribly unlucky Bonnie—which makes it even harder to figure out why we can’t hate Robbins’s character, who is so horrible to her.
nb: The picture here is in black and white, but the film is in colour.