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The first shot—Terence Stamp tying his tie as the image comes into focus and The Who's "The Seeker" revs up—is as good as any Steven Soderbergh ever fashioned, a hundred no less striking follow. Boorman and Resnais are the acknowledged influences, others include Mike Hodges, Cervantes, and Harry Callahan's color photography. The trim Cockney specter just out of jail and landing in Los Angeles to avenge his late daughter, a wayward bird "with fondness for dangerous men." Cubist editing reflects the fractured mind, and makes way for the occasional remarkable long take: After a beating from a gang of hoods, the protagonist rises from his ashes, produces a new gun and follows his foes into the building, then strides out to roar at the camera. Peter Fonda is his fellow Sixties artifact, seen in his Santa Monica mountains lair with poolside moll to The Hollies' "King Midas in Reverse," the rock 'n' roll mogul ("Not specific enough to be a person... more like a vibe") who's taken the hippie zeitgeist, "packaged it and sold it." The young Stamp of Loach's Poor Cow is a remembrance faded and lovingly integrated, his façade of cool crumbles slightly before Bill Duke's nonplussed federal-agent Buddha. "The old faces. They're nowhere. Different characters nowadays." Luis Guzmán's grubby nobility and Lesley Ann Warren's worn swan force deserve films of their own, Nicky Katt and Joe Dallesandro are Angelenos as if written by Pinter. There's a Tati gag with a henchman and a cliff, "Magic Carpet Ride" for once properly used, and some of the most profound visions of regret and loss on film. Soderbergh's masterpiece, assuredly—the ache of missed chances and bad choices, the loneliness of vengeance, the search for true emotion in an ocean of postmodern fragmentation. With Barry Newman, Amelia Heinle, and Melissa George.
--- Fernando F. Croce |