MIAMI BLUES
Q&A
I have less of an aversion to the cop-movie genre per se than to what this genre has become. Both subgenres cited above have tended to support the law-and-order social agenda promulgated by Reagan and Bush, which presents cops not merely as the defenders of the law, but also as the upholders of the status quo and the only thing standing between middle-class tranquillity and chaos. They may not always be impeccable law abiders themselves, but their own imperfections are generally viewed as secondary to the necessary and honorable tasks they perform, which usually amount to “wiping out scum.” In effect, the knightly credo of Philip Marlowe and certain other private gumshoes has become the rallying cry of the movie cop–“It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it”–except that now the “dirty job” isn’t so much ferreting out the truth as it is blowing the heads off serial killers and drug dealers. (There are some acute remarks about this trend in Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Vineland.)
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In the 60s, in his highly influential book The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris cordoned Lumet off with several other liberal directors under the category of “Strained Seriousness” (“At his best, Lumet’s direction is efficiently vehicular but pleasantly impersonal”). At that point Lumet was mainly known for his liberal-humanist sentiments (a pejorative association for most auteurists that linked Lumet to such stylistic nullities as Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer) and as an adapter–of Tennessee Williams (The Fugitive Kind), Arthur Miller (A View From the Bridge), Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), and Anton Chekhov (The Sea Gull); his other projects seemed much too scattered and varied to suggest much stylistic or thematic consistency.
For better and for worse, all of these characteristics are on full display in Q&A, based on a novel by the New York state supreme court judge Edwin Torres, which follows the efforts of Al Reilly (Timothy Hutton), an earnest assistant district attorney, to expose a killing committed by crooked cop Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte) in Spanish Harlem as less-than-justifiable homicide. It’s entirely to Lumet’s credit that though the film has a running time of 134 minutes it never seems sluggish or padded, largely because his grasp of various interlocking New York milieus–the police force, the city government, the Latino crime underworld, and the world of transsexual prostitution–is so finely detailed. What’s less convincing is Lumet’s overall sense of good and evil, at least when it comes to depicting his hero (Reilly) and villains (Brennan and homicide bureau chief Kevin Quinn, played by Patrick O’Neal)–none of whom are a fraction as lively or as interesting as the characters surrounding them.
I haven’t seen George Armitage’s previous features–which include Private Duty Nurses, Hit Man, Vigilante Force, and Hot Rod–but it’s clear that the subgenre that Miami Blues belongs to is not of Armitage’s own making. It can be roughly defined as the low- budget “criminal on the run in a big city” film that was also the source of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1959. Godard placed a good deal of importance on the criminal’s doomed romance during his flight from the law, and his extraordinary stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, did so much with and for their parts–as the flamboyant, nihilist hood and his innocent yet ultimately betraying lover–that this subgenre took on a slightly different profile after they were through with it. It is to the post- Breathless form of this subgenre that Miami Blues owes its allegiance.
Most of Junior’s subsequent criminal exploits consist of him impersonating Moseley–holding up criminals and making off with their stolen goods or money by using Moseley’s own badge and revolver–and his behavior often suggests that he’s more interested in the childish pleasure of playing cop than he is in the actual thefts. (Maybe it would be more precise to say that the roles of thief and cop become merged in his head, so that he can’t always tell them apart.) Junior’s glamorous, grandstanding fantasy about being someone like Moseley is contrasted throughout with the total unglamorousness of Moseley himself. It’s an ambiguity that the whole movie is structured around, and has a lot to do with what gives the movie its punch–suggesting that what “cop” means to this ex-con is just as mythical as what “criminal” means to a cop like Brennan in Q&A. For my money, this is just as serious and as provocative as the friendship between an old lady and her chauffeur.
