THE LIMEY II – Terence Stamp
Aside from memory, there are superbly rendered details that distill the characters: Wilson radiates affection for Eduardo’s help in tracking down Valentine by fondly calling him Sancho (as in Panza). All of these things — along with Eduardo’s and Elaine’s motivations, and the portrayal of the relationship between the hitmen — work well. In fact, they work so well precisely because there are no specifics, but generalities sharply etched so that the viewer ‘feels,’ as well as understands, the motivations and relationships. That allows the viewer to feel what goes on inside Wilson, thus creating a stronger identification with him than would be gotten were all things laid out in a nice, neat line.
Also, The Limey succeeds greatly because it allows many such little moments to flower — some of them (like the banter between the hitmen over gays) wholly unneeded for the essential plot, but when added they increase the ‘realism’ of the art. Another good example is the use of Cockney rhyming slang by Stamp. It’s never overused (five times, by my count), but were it gone, no one would yearn for something like it. However, once there, it indelibly helps sketch Wilson’s character. This is the essence of good writing done subtly. But such writing is not limited to characterization. The fact that the two hitmen’s own greed ends up enabling Wilson to get to Valentine (the opposite of what they were hired to do) is a nice bit of irony, and even the fact that only a few weeks (apparently) have gone by since Jenny’s death, and Valentine is already boffing a younger, prettier girl — one who is the daughter of his old friends — says all we need to know of the depth and sincerity of the man as well as his later claims about what really happened to Jenny when she died.
The Artisan Films DVD is terrific. The transfer is excellent, in its 16:9 widescreen version. The DVD also offers great extras, including television and theatrical trailers, an isolated music score, production notes, and very detailed cast and crew information. Bar none, however, the commentaries are the real cherries on the cake. The ‘’60s docu-commentary’, with selected comments by Stamp, Fonda, Warren, Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Dobbs and Soderbergh is quite good, being in tune with the whole film’s tangential play off its many characters’ iconic 1960s personae. Stamp speaks of how English acting has changed over the years, his relationship with other 1960s icons, and it all makes for an enjoyable diversion.
But the DVD’s real gem is the commentary featuring Soderbergh and Dobbs alone. It’s one of the best around, and the bickering between the two, with Dobbs continually hectoring and berating Soderbergh over choices he made in the final film, and Soderbergh’s continual defenses and slaps at the difference between writing and film, is not the typical Abbott and Costello routine it could have devolved into. Instead, it’s an illuminating discussion of art and film.
Dobbs seems to resent much of the film because its positive aspects are routinely hailed as Soderbergh’s work, such as the scene where Wilson reenters the warehouse to kill the drug dealers, but the camera stays outside — which Dobbs claims was in his script and not a directorial choice — whereas claimed negative aspects found in reviews of the film (notably Emanuel Levy’s in Variety) accuse the screenplay of being ‘underdeveloped.’ (Even positive reviews, like James Berardinelli’s, claim The Limey is founded on the ‘thinnest premise.’) Yet, the screenplay is anything but underdeveloped. There are so many little scenes that add character development, something Dobbs wanted more of. But then again, to beg the cliché, too much of a goof thing can be bad.
For instance, Dobbs wanted Fonda’s character to have a lengthy soliloquy on the ’60s zeitgeist, but Soderbergh cut that and he was right. In his commentary, even Fonda pans the soliloquy as being too saccharine and out of character. One need not know everything about every character. Valentine is a slippery, seedy son of a bitch. Knowing why he’s that way is always going to be an exercise in futility. Also, it’s likely that Valentine is incapable of such reflection. Dobbs also wanted Wilson to reflect upon and mention a criminal mentor, back in England, called Lambeth. But we already get enough hints of his past from the Poor Cow scenes; some mystery has to be retained, lest viewers be subsumed in the petty.
Another example is Dobbs’ desire to have the two hitmen, played by Nicky Katt and Joe Dallesandro, explicitly shown as being related, with Katt’s character the nephew of the older, dumber man. But this would have done nothing to aid our understanding of the characters. We simply do not need to know more, and, of course, we get a bit of their collective greed a bit later on as it leads to their demise. Soderbergh got this right, whereas Dobbs’ elaborations would have weighted the film down in unnecessary detail, as well as some questionable psychology (think of the most outdated Hitchcockian villains). I recall the line from Woody Allen’s Another Woman, where the lead character, played by Gena Rowlands, states something to the effect that just because some things (like feelings) are important to the writer does not mean it has import to the objective observer, who will see something as maudlin, overblown, and embarrassing.
However, Dobbs rightly revels in his claim that it was he who pushed Soderbergh to fragment the narrative of the film even more than his original scenario, and he uses shots of a contemplative Wilson to debunk the notion that ‘thinking’ cannot be shown on film, or at least not creatively enough to ensnare a viewer. Additionally, he elaborates on the parallelism I mentioned earlier, and goes into the notion of doubles, that almost all the characters pair off into groups of two: Wilson and Eduardo, Wilson and Elaine, Wilson and Jenny, Valentine and Jenny, and so on. And finally, he contextualizes such approach as a literary technique adapted to film, instead of an actual cinematic technique, while showing how a screenplay can be filmed word for word, yet also be unlike what had been envisioned by the screenwriter (as when Dobbs complains of the Valentine character keeping a photo of Jenny in the stairwell).
Dobbs scores another point when he complains about critics who crib information from production notes, not the film. In the case of The Limey it’s critics who claim Wilson’s first name is Dave, due to the Poor Cow scenes. But while footage from that film is used, we do not know if the Poor Cow flashback scenes definitively point to Wilson being that character or merely a character from another fictive universe for Soderbergh’s own purposes. (Some critics have also claimed that characters are named after letters in Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad and they’ve gone on to name the lead characters in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, even though said characters go nameless in the films in question.)
Dobbs and Soderbergh also discourse on why Hollywood films tend to ignore issues like class, race, and what people’s wages are. This point, made a decade before the current economic crisis, shows the universality of such a sentiment and why so many films are so lacking in ‘real realism.’ They also talk about the demise of the studios’ B and low-budget film units. Given how often young directors are handed huge budgets to make films aimed at twelve-year-olds, a revival of studio-backed B films (rather than the straight-to-DVD crap of the last twenty years), as a sort of ‘farming system’ for directors with talent (think of former B filmmakers Samuel Fuller, Jacques Tourneur, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Wise), makes perfect sense. Finally, in a move that is either a bit of an oddity — or an attempt at innovating audio commentaries — there are moments when Soderbergh’s and Dobbs’ remarks overlap one another, as if recapitulating their film’s visual editing techniques.
In sum, The Limey is a rare example of that most overused and abused term: the cinematic masterpiece, one that explores memory as a thing in itself, as a way to communicate, as a form of regret. It asks serious question about the human psyche — not just those of kind, such as What is good? or What is evil?, but those of degree, such as What constitutes a crime? and When does one’s action become a crime? That in addition to the aforementioned queries of whether the film itself — the vehicle for this philosophizing — is dream, memory, fantasy, or even if Wilson ever really gets (or got) off that airplane.
Going back to Woody Allen’s Another Woman, that film ends with the explicit question: Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost? The Limey shows better than any film I can think of, that the answer to that query can be neither or both.
© Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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Tags: Alain Resnais, Amelia Heinle, Barry Newman, DVDs, Film Reviews, Gena Rowlands, Jacques Tourneur, Joe Dallesandro, Lem Dobbs, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzmán, Melissa George, Michelangelo Antonioni, Nicky Katt, Peter Fonda, Psychological Drama, Robert Wise, Samuel Fuller, Steven Soderbergh, Terence Stamp, The Limey, Thrillers, Woody Allen
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Interesting review. It’s always great to read praise for Ed Lachman. Sarah Flack, Elliott Davis, Anne Coates and Ed Lachman have made excellent contributions to Soderbergh’s work. Have you seen John Boorman’s Point Blank? It’s a BIG influence on this film, and a much better film.