<< Front page Arts December 12, 2003

Classic Cusack hitman flick part of OFS series

“The Future is Unwritten.” This cryptic, idiomatic slogan, meant for the current schoolchildren of Grosse Pointe High School, very well could have applied to life of character Martin Blank, played by John Cusack, as he returns to the school for his ten-year reunion. After graduation, some students have become real estate agents, some have become car salesmen and some radio disc jockeys. In the decade since graduation, Martin has become a professional killer, and a few short seconds after standing by his high school locker, he will violently kill another man with a ballpoint pen.

George Armitage’s Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) is the story of Martin’s journey into his past while dealing with the stress and pressure of being a hired gun. The film is at turns hilarious, violent and psychologically resonant. Throughout, it is wittily inspired and continuously cynical. Martin, seeing a doctor (the hilarious Alan Arkin) for depression, is adamant that his livelihood is not a factor in his psychoses. “If I’m at your doorstep, chances are you did something to bring me there,” he says, mostly to convince himself. But his job is assuredly a major factor in his paranoia concerning the fragility of life while he unconsciously pines for the people and the innocence of his past.

It is a hit job that sends him back to Grosse Pointe; however, at the urging of both his psychologist and his secretary, played by Joan Cusack, he subjects himself to the town he originally fled. Other assassins descend on the hit and Martin is tailed by two federal agents, hot in pursuit. He frequently runs into the people he left behind. The stage is masterfully set in Grosse Pointe for hilariously inconvenient, awkward and violent encounters that come together to construct an excellent climax.

John Cusack is given partial credit for the story, and is so inspired that he seems to evoke terrific performances from everyone in the large cast. The lines are delivered in a deadpan style that is both funny and meaningful, fitting the film’s dark humor. “Debbie, I love you,” Martin confesses to his high school sweetheart as he smashes a man’s head with a frying pan.

The declaration is both convincing and hilariously inappropriate. The script is written in an off-the-cuff, ad lib style that is at all times witty, dry and sharp. It resembles a well-directed and on-the-mark improvisation; there is never a pregnant pause or a dull exchange. The characters’ speech comes in fits and starts, at points resembling stream-of-consciousness. It may strike the audience as odd at first, but it is true to form: real people do not deliver the assured and direct lines that occupy most films, especially films about suave hit men.

Just as the dialogue in the film is sarcastic and tough, the flippant way the actors deliver their lines implies a lost innocence. There is not a single poor performance in the film. Notable are Dan Aykroyd as a competing hit man in a quick-witted role that shows his versitility, and Minnie Driver as the woman Martin left on prom night ten years before, who puts on the best show of her otherwise lackluster career. They exist in a world where a definite lack is noticeable, be it of morality or excitement, so much so that when Martin frankly re-introduces himself to people as a professional killer, he gets a rise out of no one. As a result, the violence in the film is brutal yet appropriate. The audience is shocked not only by what the “Pointers” can ignore but by the fact that they can ignore it. As a gunfight erupts in a convenience store, a shooter standing next to a Pulp Fiction advertisement is a telling snapshot in both worlds, the characters brush off the horrific as mundane.

The story of Martin’s homecoming is itself well conceived. Cinema’s hit men have always had problems and faults; Leon from Luc Besson’s The Professional becomes overly attached to a young girl and Jeffrey from John Woo’s The Killer dies trying to help an innocent victim of one of his crimes. But none has ever had to talk about what a terrible book Ethan Frome is with his old English teacher. Martin is a fish-out-of-water in the world of his childhood and his sense of morality (or lack thereof) is forced to be wholly revised. Though his current profession is based on the destruction of life, he is unable to accept that his own past life is disappearing.

This is readily apparent when he finds the plot of land where his old home used to stand occupied by a garishly commercial Ultimart. The world of Grosse Pointe has changed as much as he has and his character’s development is grounded in a reality common to everyone: no matter how much one wishes it could be the case, “you can never go home again.”

West Lecture Hall, Science Center. Saturday, Dec. 13 at 7 p.m., 9 p.m. and 11 p.m.

   

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