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'Night Falls' -- and so does Lumet
May 22, 1997
Web posted at: 8:29 p.m. EDT (0029 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- The strange case of Sidney Lumet continues. Lumet has directed some 40 films in his career, and a couple of them, "Dog Day Afternoon" and the broadly satirical "Network," are great, two of my all-time favorites. A few others are flawed but at the very least contain some memorable performances. That leaves about 35 that range from the mediocre to the hair-raisingly awful. I'm still trying to cope with the knowledge that I once wasted a fistful of brain cells on "The Wiz," and 1992's "A Stranger Among Us" starred golden girl Melanie Griffith (!) as an undercover cop masquerading as a Hassidic Jew. Insert your own Melanie Griffith joke.
VXtreme streaming video of Night Falls (1.2M/32 sec. Night Falls: Partial trailer) (2.9M/114 sec. Night Falls: Full trailer)
Unfortunately, the hair raising continues with "Night Falls on Manhattan." Lumet has always had an obsession with police corruption, and one of the many problems with this movie is that he's pretty much already made it three times before. "Serpico" has a better lead performance (from Al Pacino), "Prince of the City" has a better screenplay, and "Q&A," well ... that one stinks, too. In fact, Lumet has traveled this course so many times, "Night Falls on Manhattan" feels more like a series of half-remembered gestures than an actual film. And the cliches, my God, the cliches.
Get a load of this plot. It's like something James Cagney and Pat O'Brien would've starred in 1938. Andy Garcia plays Sean Casey, a brand new, idealistic assistant D.A. whose father (Ian Holm) is a lifelong New York City undercover cop. One night Pop is critically wounded by a Harlem drug lord, taking, as he does, about eleventy-thousand bullets in the upper torso while trying to break down a door. The drug lord then kills three cops while fleeing the scene. District Attorney Morgenstern (Ron Liebman, and, believe me, I'll be getting back to him) has a conniption fit over this, but the cops don't have time to catch the guy because he soon turns himself in under the council of a '60s radical attorney played by Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss' old age makeup makes him look like his scalp is rejecting a skin graft.
In a politically motivated move, Liebman's character bypasses the usual procedures and allows Garcia's wet-behind-the-ears assistant D.A. to prosecute the case! That way we can get some absurdly contrived scenes where this whiz-kid successfully tries his own father's assailant. This is the courtroom equivalent of the top dancer breaking her leg so that Judy Garland can take over the show and wow Broadway, and Lumet certainly knows better.
That's literally just the beginning, though. What looks like the actual plot is just a set-up for what will come later when (I'm not kidding here) Liebman suffers a heart attack and Garcia is nominated as the new candidate for district attorney. And he wins! This guy ought to buy a lotto ticket, but quick.
Suffice it to say that the rest of the movie deals with Garcia's taking Dreyfuss' advice and going after some corrupt cops who were in cahoots with the drug lord. Guess who's involved? If you guessed Garcia's pop, you get no points because that's obviously who's going to be involved. I've seen less transparent episodes of "Sanford and Son."
With the exception of Garcia, who is very good, the performances are over-modulated to the point that you could detect them from outside the theater. Lumet has always had a tendency to let actors go over the top, but Liebman's district attorney is so overheated he seems more like the district Fuehrer. He's constantly standing on tables and bars while yelling (spittle flying) at large groups of underlings. The guy screams every line and goes pop-eyed at the slightest inconvenience. It's like he's playing to Helen Keller. He also likes to pound his fists on tables while making points and letting out blood curdling screams when his assistant screws up his Chinese food order. This heroic effort puts Liebman in the running for worst performance of the year. It's not like you couldn't see that heart attack coming.
I don't know what's going on here. Liebman is usually a very reliable actor, and so is Ian Holm. Holm doesn't approach Liebman's level of obviousness, but it's not for lack of trying. These characters are New Yorkers, you see, so all of them (and Holm in particular) say things like "all tree of us" and "dem udder rats." That doesn't mean that several people are actually trees and that some types of rats can be milked. What it means is that a bunch of actors are trying very, very hard to project the flavor of Manhattan in broad, shorthand strokes. "Dog Day Afternoon" is one of the great New York movies, and even "Serpico," for all its miscues, conveys the boiling intensity of the city in a thoroughly convincing manner. By now, though, Lumet isn't content with subtlety. Even his casting of secondary roles is getting tiresome.
I've lived in New York for seven years now, and, regardless of what movie directors would like you to believe, the island is not populated solely by guys with big guts, baggy eyes, and double chins. Practically everyone in the cast, besides Garcia and Lena Olin (in the thankless role of the love interest), looks ready to be hoisted onto a hospital gurney. Holm's crooked partner even has a discolored, chipped front toot. Sorry ... that would be "tooth."
"Night Falls on Manhattan" contains one very bloody shooting, and lots of foul language because New Yorkers just can't help themselves. 110 minutes. Rated R.
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