Palais Royale
(1988) Film. Canada
A.K.A.: Smokescreen 88 Minutes Dir: Martin Lavut Writers: Hugh Graham David Daniels Joann McIntyre Lawrence Zack Production: Metaphor Productions Vision International Starring: Kim Cattrall Matt Craven Kim Coates Brian George Michael Hogan Dean Stockwell Dee McCafferty Henry Alessandroni Norma Dell'Agnese Elizabeth Leslie James Collins Ric Sarabia |
Something came to me suddenly after watching PALAIS ROYALE, a 1988 Gangster Drama made in Canada. I did not enjoy the movie, but I did not hate it either. I just felt a kind of hollowness to the whole proceedings. I did try to think why this was, and by extension what makes other Gangster films. Ultimately, the film made me realise how much has to go into a Gangster movie to make it work. Budget is a part of it (I do think with period Gangster movies you can call out a cheap budget when you see it), but that is not, nor should it ever be, the important thing. Where the real work has to go into a Gangster film, any film really, is into the characters and situations. PALAIS ROYALE’s characters are weak and unmemorable, and are no match for an unfocussed plot that puts them in situations leaving us wondering why we should care.
Now this really shouldn’t be. The film has a wealth of (potentially) interesting characters to draw from, each with their own stories and agendas, and their stories intertwine and divert from each other. We have a mob boss, a crooked cop, a femme fatale with a heart of gold despite herself, her psychotic boyfriend, weaselling sidekicks, police officers both corrupt and pure, and to cap it off our innocent outside protagonist who dreams of more, coming into the fray. Any one of these characters, fleshed out, could have made a decent Crime or Gangster Drama, and with everyone combined, this could have been a great Crime Drama. Maybe it would not have been a brilliant one, but certainly it would have been a more memorable and positive one. The film’s story follows our protagonist Gerald Price played by character-actor Matt Craven. He is a book-keeper at an ad agency, dreaming of one day using his creativity and creating some ambitious ads, most of them featuring his fantasy woman who adorns the Royal Cigarettes advert outside of his flat. By chance he sees the model waiting for a taxi near his workplace, and he tries to start up a conversation. It’s horribly awkward, and on the stalker side, so she blows him off, but not before he finds out she is attending a party at a local nightclub, the ‘Palais Royale’ of the title. He attends, being confused either as a jazz musician or a paid-off cop depending on who he talks to. He sees the Royale Cigarette girl, sort of rescues her from a mob killing (she was never the intended victim in any case), and comforts her from delayed shock. She is Odessa Muldoon, (played by a young-ish Kim Cattrall roughly a decade before TV’s SEX AND THE CITY made her a TV star) a local model who dreams of more. They share some quiet moments and part ways, but we then learn she is the girlfriend of a member of the mob, and her ‘career friends’ encourage her to bring in this ‘Honest John’ in on their activities. The second main story comes when Odessa’s intimidating and near psychotic mob boyfriend Tony DiCarlo (played by character-actor Kim Coates) catches them in bed together, and nonchalantly collars Gerald into mob life by having Gerald as a driver and lookout. Neither goes all that well, leading to the third main story where we meet mob boss Michael Dattalico (played by Dean Stockwell). He is actually Tony’s long-suffering uncle, time and again giving small, simple tasks to Tony, who is just too volatile to quietly see them through. Dattalico, you see, wants to create a legitimate business empire, albeit with his crime background and less than savoury contacts. When Gerald (uncharacteristically) speaks up about how this might be done, Dattalico takes a shine to him, and gives him a new post in this semi-legal business venture, leaving Tony out in the cold. It is here I have to stop talking about the plot, not only to save from spoiling it, but also because, save for the ending events which are pretty clumsily tied together, I have pretty much described a good chunk of the film. My little description, while all sounding like set up for later key points in any film, actually make up about three-quarters of this film’s running time. You may gather from this that a key problem of this film is that it is pretty slow going, and it is. A fair bit of time is taken up with Gerald tracking down Odessa, but it doesn’t feel too long. What does feel long is when Odessa first, then Tony, try to get Gerald involved in their lives of crime. It takes up a good chunk of the film, which could have been spent developing the characters and given them incentive and motivation. It’s certainly attempted a few times, but they don’t lead to much at all. Then, when Dattalico comes it, it feels like a different film altogether. It comes so late into the film that you wonder why the writer and director bothered at all. I imagine it was more for the sake of giving Dean Stockwell something to do, and maybe an attempt to lead the movie into a direction less travelled upon, but it just seems to be a distraction at this point. This is actually a real shame, because I think the film could have been interesting if it did go down that direction. The same can be said of the whole film really, and it’s three plot strands. The whole following the femme fatale into crime and destruction has been done numerous times, but could have been made interesting with the characters and the charge of your femme fatale. Kim Cattrall just sits there really, not really creating that much allure, mystery or charm for that matter, and Cattrall and Matt Craven as a couple don’t really do much. There’s no real attraction or chemistry between the two of them (apart from what the plot requires) and you don’t really find out much about either of them, and then you find out you don’t really care because the film doesn’t care. Odessa wants to be ‘a real actress’ (yes, that old chestnut), and it is not followed on by the plot, and she’s not really given any moment to actually sell it to us. With Gerald, he wants to create great adverts, and he is given a scene to sell this idea to us unlike Odessa, but it’s filmed pretty blandly and falls flat, and is soon forgotten for the later plot developments. He actually gets a bit more development as a salesman, which goes against the early parts of the film where we think of him as a struggling creative. I thought he wanted to leave office work behind him, but evidentially not. He just trucks along where-ever he is lead. There isn’t really much made of him bumbling his way through a life of crime, and a lot of wasted opportunities for the whole ‘fish out of water’ segments come and go. Both characters seem to just exist here, but not interact or develop. It makes both characters uninteresting and pretty shallow. There are some attempts at humour for the pair here and there, but it’s so different in tone from the rest of the film, you’re just left scratching your head at why they were put there in the first place. The second story strand is that of Tony, the violent mob-boyfriend of Odessa and the bane in his mob-boss uncle’s existence. Again, it’s a story often told of the younger, brasher protégé locking horns with those around him, trying to make a name for himself and be a success story. We just never know what he is doing it for. We never know why he is so violent, but in better films we don’t really need to know. He is just fulfilling the hard case role of any gangster film. To his credit, Kim Coates plays Tony very intense and threatening, and is the best performance in the film. The third story strands was, to me, the most potentially interesting. While the whole ‘aging mobster trying to go straight’ storyline is as old as the femme fatale storyline, I don’t think I’ve come across a gangster story where the aging or burnt out mobster tries to change the mob into a legitimate and respected enterprise. It’s always them trying to leave their mob family and connections behind and the crime life trying to pull them back in (even THE GODFATHER franchise did this). But trying to change their way of life I have not seen before. It’s ambitious, admirable and kind of heroic in a sense in that the mobster is not only trying to make a clean break for himself, but all his friends or family. I would be really interested in seeing a Gangster film about that. PALAIS ROYALE sadly isn’t that film. The plot strand comes too late in the film and is dropped in the finale. It is such a shame because it is so enticing and fresh, and progressive as well. Dean Stockwell seems to have fun playing a traditional style mob boss (I imagine it’s one of those roles actors really want to play later in their careers). If the focus of the film was on this (which I think would have been better), I don’t know if Stockwell would have been the right choice, but he is fine here. It’s more a mob boss stereotype and since it’s not the focus of the movie that’s all that’s required. The film does seem to tease this legitimate business idea a bit throughout the movie. After Gerald and Odessa become acquainted, Odessa has this little monologue where she tries to explain the Gerald the commercial, more industrial world they exist in, going into detail about the companies that own this version of 1950s’ Toronto. One company, making and selling carpets, figures a lot as one of the shell companies belonging to the mob, and one which Dattalico wants to make the legitimate face of his family’s business. Some of this is interesting, and I don’t know if it’s culturally significant being a Canadian film, but again it’s not really explored. I think that is the main problem with the film. It teases these interesting ideas, but drops them in favour of tying up the loose plot strands, and not very well. I described this plot strands separately because individually they could be interesting with work, but together they don’t, at least in this form. I can imagine a three hour GODFATHER style epic could handle it, but an eighty-eight minute film requires a tightness in plot which this film just doesn’t have. What we’re left with is miss opportunities in terms of plot and characters. Again, characters and how they are performed in any film, no matter how a plot meanders and fumbles, could elevate a film to interest, but this is not the case here. Another reason I split the plot description into three is because the characters are so apart of their individual plots and don’t really intermingle, at least well. Some characters lead to other characters being released, of course, but here it feels they just belong in their own plots and nowhere else. That and the lack of general depth leave the characters feeling shallow and undeveloped. Again, a longer film could have integrated them better, but not a film less than ninety minutes. That said, I think if the filmmakers cared a little more they could have worked the film and characters out better. I suppose I should hate PALAIS ROYALE a little because it seems like it is several missed opportunities all rolled into one. Each plot strand could have been interesting, and each character could have been interesting. The film fails on both accounts. I don’t hate the film though. I just feel frustrated with it, as we have yet another film that has some interesting ideas, and while the characters overall aren’t terribly interesting, they could have been our window into getting to these ideas. Sadly they don’t, and you’re just left with this strange hollowness, which again you would not think possible with a Gangster film. |