By Tricia Olszewski
Forget everything that Cops has taught you—according to John Dahl’s You Kill Me, drinking and homicide actually don’t mix. At least not when you’re Frank Falenczyk, an alcoholic hit man who once prided himself on his murderly precision. When his Buffalo-based gangster family forces him to go to San Francisco and dry up, Frank resists, but he eventually takes the 12 steps to heart. Particularly the one about making amends: “I don’t regret killing them,” Frank tells his girlfriend of the victims he’s listing on paper. “Just killing them badly.” And so, the next of kin of the woman whose eye he sliced instead of her throat gets a $50 gift certificate to Macy’s.
The monster-with-a-sensitive-side premise has been done before, mined for laughs (Analyze This and That) or melodrama (The Sopranos). Here, the premise is spun as nearly intolerably cute. Ben Kingsley’s Frank isn’t a sexy beast—he’s a compact, well-dressed package of charming tics and few, funny words. He’s initially appalled by the AA meetings he attends, but he’s soon sharing ’n’ caring, and when he meets Laurel (Téa Leoni), a—naturally—beautiful Californian whose tongue is as sharp as his knives, she wants to love him. But, darn it, she’s got boundary issues. They meet, by the way, in a funeral home: Frank was strong-armed into taking a temporary job as an embalmer, and one day he was working on Laurel’s stepfather when she brought in bowling shoes for the deceased to wear. Now that’s a story to tell your grandkids.
Thanks to a delicately woven, genre-crossing script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (who, in a departure, also worked together on The Chronicles of Narnia) and the strength of its leads, You Kill Me keeps its potential wackiness in check. (Though the Polishness—and drunkenness—of Buffalonians is emphasized so heavily that the city, represented by Winnipeg, Manitoba, becomes a caricatured character itself.) Much of its humor is culled from Frank’s AA experiences, whether it’s his introduction to the process (his look of subtle alarm every time someone introduces himself and is quickly accosted with “Hi, [Blank]” is terrific), his blossoming candor (“The only way I’m going to get to [kill] again is to stop drinking”), or the members who share their stories (“You know, it’s a whole lot easier fucking girls you don’t like when you’re drunk”). The film doesn’t just poke fun, however: There’s a quite uncomfortable scene where a merry family at the funeral home, laughing the whole time, is trying to force a drink on Frank, as well as heartbreaking consequences whenever he does give in.
Kingsley is a font of dryness as Frank, making his character bug-eyed and uncomfortable in his own skin when he’s sober. His exquisite comic timing and expressiveness is impressively matched by Leoni, who on more than one occasion makes too-sly jokes work with great physical follow-through. (Also notable is Bill Pullman as a real-estate agent/babysitter, schlubby in an ill-fitting raincoat and bad haircut—he’s tasked with watching Frank but looks like he can barely keep it together himself.) And just when their scenes together start to get too lovey, the filmmakers know how to cut the sugar: The expected new-couple montage, for example, features shots of them practicing knife-wielding on a head-shaped watermelon.
You Kill Me doesn’t completely abandon its gangster roots, though, while it’s vacationing as a romantic comedy. There’s tension and violence as Frank’s family deals with a rival that the hit man had failed to whack because he was drunk; Dahl, who also balanced similar moods in The Last Seduction, switches between locations and plotlines smoothly. The only surprise as the pieces come together is that you’ll likely have enjoyed the movie more than you might have thought.
The creators of Brooklyn Rules abided largely by only one: If anything mob-related was popular enough to become cliché, it was good enough for their movie. The film opens in a church as the main character narrates, talking about his boyhood in the titular borough and how it affected him and his two best buds as they grew up. Fast-forward to 1985, when one’s working in a butcher shop and going to college, one’s a bumbling, directionless innocent, and one’s flirting with the local family. Cue conversations about whether being feared is the same as being respected, as well as plenty of whatsamatta-you banter full of “da”s, “foockin’”s, and “douchebag”s.
Alarmingly, this amateurish story was written by Terence Winter, a veteran Sopranos scribe—apparently he’s saved his first-draft scraps for the big screen. Alec Baldwin is billed as a star, but his slightly over-the-top yet effective turn as the boss, Caesar, is minor—the kids are allowed to run the show. Freddie Prinze Jr. is Michael, the cartoonishly accented, responsible lead character who’s studying pre-law and adjusts his personality for his WASPy classmates and Brooklyn friends accordingly. Michael has big dreams but tries to keep his lives separate, confessing in voice-over that “in my neighborhood, it was better to keep ambitions like water polo to yourself” and acting reluctant when his buddies want to accompany him to a party in the city for Ellen (Mena Suvari), a fellow student Michael’s trying to date. (For good reason: The mixing doesn’t go so well.)
Meanwhile, baby-faced Bobby (Jerry Ferrara) is religious and good-natured, wanting nothing more than to start working for the post office so he and his squeeze can settle down. Carmine (Ocean’s Thirteen’s Scott Caan) is the troublemaker: Smart but vain—both about his looks and in feeling indestructible—he begins doing small jobs for Caesar, seeing it as the only agreeable way to make a good living in his ’hood. He dismisses Michael’s concerns. Of course, trouble is waiting, and Carmine’s antics start to involve his two friends as well.
The three young actors do have a likable presence onscreen, but Michael Corrente directs them to extreme Brooklyn-isms—such as those awful accents—that make the work at times skirt parody. The film is interesting mostly when it integrates the real-life rise of John Gotti with Carmine’s story, and its inevitable tragedy is heartbreaking, even if you see it coming from practically the start. But like the mob life, none of its perks is enough to make Brooklyn Rules worthwhile.