The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (22 page)

The story of two down on their luck small-time crooks in New York's Little Italy was adapted from a bestseller by Vincent Patrick. Starring two actors who were poised to become the King and Crown Prince of Hollywood,
The Pope of Greenwich Village
met with indifference at the box office.

The story centers on two Italian cousins, the even-tempered Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and the foolhardy Paulie (Eric Roberts). These two are close, as close as 99 is to 100. “Italians don't outgrow people,” Charlie says when explaining why he continues to hang around with his dimwitted cousin. “They outgrow clothes.”

Broke and out of work, the pair dream of being rich. The shady Paulie cooks up a scheme to pilfer $15,000 in cash with the help of safecracker Barney (Kenneth McMillan). The heist goes bad when a corrupt policeman (Jack Kehoe), who also had his eye on the money, happens across the makeshift gang and is accidentally murdered. Paulie neglected to mention that the money belongs to a local gangster and was supposed to be used to bribe the police. Charlie and Paulie are in
big
trouble with nowhere to turn. They can't go to the police, and as the money they took belongs to Little Italy underboss Bedbug Eddie (Burt Young), they can't seek protection from the mob.

The Pope of Greenwich Village
was meant to be a showcase for Mickey Rourke's intense method acting style, but it is Eric Roberts as the bumbling Paulie who steals the show. Paulie is a loudmouth loser, the kind of guy whose get-rich-quick schemes always backfire, usually with consequences for everyone around him.

You often want to slap Paulie for being so stupid, and he does take his share of lumps, mostly from Charlie, who loves his cousin but doesn't hesitate to hand out some corporal punishment when Paulie messes up. Eric Roberts is so intense he all but breathes fire. His character is stupid, but Roberts plays him as a more dangerous guy, someone who doesn't know how dumb he is. There's an optimism to his foolhardiness that prevents the viewer from hating him, even for all his shortcomings. It's an offbeat, showy performance that eclipses the more experienced technique of the top-billed Mickey Rourke. It's a sensational onscreen accomplishment for Roberts, who in the years since has rarely lived up to his potential. He book-ended
The Pope of Greenwich Village
with strong showings in
Star 80
(1983) and
Runaway Train
(1985), but his subsequent film roles have mostly been forgettable riffs on his earlier, more exciting work. Today he's generally referred to as “Julia's older brother.”

Although overshadowed by Roberts, Rourke has some tasty moments of his own. He's a blinkered guy; his whole life revolves around his friends, family, and neighborhood. Life, for Charlie, barely exists north of 14th Street in Manhattan. He is a man-child, someone who got big, but didn't grow up. A total product of his environment — the corrupt neighborhood of Little Italy — Charlie idolized the gangsters and lives by their credo. “Something I learned a long time ago about honest work,” he says, “People tell you they got honest work for you. You know what they got? They got a shit job, that's what they got.” He's a slacker who craves respect, but doesn't know how to earn it.

Rourke does a nice job with Charlie; you can almost smell his desperation, his longing for a better life. While the characterization occasionally veers toward an ethnic stereotype, he reins it in, turning Charlie into a real person rather than a gold chain-wearing, wildly gesticulating cliché. Rourke has a tendency to play over the top, but I've always seen that as an extension of his real personality, and as such, he has a core of believable humanity.

On the other end of the scale are the performances of Geraldine Page as the dead cop's mother and Kenneth McMillan as the safecracker. They provide a nice counter-point to the ostentatious work of Roberts and Rourke by underplaying their roles. As Page is confronted by two cops investigating her crooked son, her quiet resolve forcefully diffuses the situation without resorting to unnecessarily flamboyant actorly flourishes. She's tough as nails, and by the end of the scene, you know it.

The Pope of Greenwich Village
isn't a story-driven film. The run-of-the-mill plot is a poor man's
Mean Streets
, but it's the characters that make this movie worth watching. Anyone who has seen the movie will remember the stickball game, played by suit-wearing, wise-guy wannabes, or Paulie's pained cry after Bedbug's thugs mutilate him. It's an entertaining slice-of-life look at people on the fringes of the underworld.

Ron Jeremy is the biggest (nudge nudge, wink wink) porn star in the world. With over 1,600 adult films to his credit (including
Blowjob Adventures of Dr. Fellatio
,
Ejacula 2
, and
Dirty Bob's Xcellent Adventures 35
), Jeremy has been working in the adult film business for nearly a quarter of a century.

One would expect a documentary about his life to be salacious, sleazy stuff, and while
Porn Star
does have elements of baseness (how could it not?) it chooses to focus on Ron Jeremy the man, not the movie stud. It could be seen as a porn industry puff piece, as it certainly ignores most of the downsides of working in the sex industry, but that isn't the point of the film. Despite the inclusion of a sequence where he is tested for aids during the shooting of
Ally McFeel
,
Porn Star
is not a cautionary tale, like Stacey Valentine's emotionally raw
The Girl Next Door
, it is simply an edgy
E! True Hollywood Story
-style look at an actor who has made his living showing off his nine-and-three-quarter-inch appendage.

Shot over 18 months and edited from 150 hours of film, the film offers up interviews with Jeremy's family who fill in his backstory. We learn that he holds a Master's Degree in special education, and once taught school. We also discover that he doesn't own any luggage, preferring to use garbage bags, even when traveling first class. His friends poke fun at him, talking about his legendary cheapness and suggesting, “He's proof that someone forgot birth control.” We also get a glimpse at Jeremy's legendary phone book — actually a ratty binder held together with duct tape and literally crammed with hundreds of thousands of numbers, all written in what appears to be hieroglyphics. In the film the binder is played for laughs, although it might have been interesting if the filmmakers had explored the psychology behind the neurotically compiled address book. It probably reveals some obsessive psychological trait that might have shed more light on Jeremy, and his compulsive need to feel connected.

For his part Jeremy is very open in front of the camera, sometimes almost too much so. He can be a charming guy when he wants to, but there is an air of desperation that bleeds through his well-constructed public persona. “Porn's the purest form of acting. I'd like to see Sir Laurence Olivier perform
Macbeth
, in its entirety, with all that dialogue —
and
a boner. It's not that easy,” he says defensively, before adding that he'd rather “have a role in a Steven Spielberg movie” than do more porn.

Director Scott J. Gill doesn't manage to dig as deep as say, Terry Zwigoff's
Crumb
, but he does humanize Jeremy and somehow makes you feel pity for a man who says he has slept with over 4,000 women.

German director Tom Tykwer seems to be fascinated by movies that play with time. His best-known movie,
Run Lola Run
, was frenetic, set at a heart-attack pace that turned the clock upside-down and told the same story three times with a trio of different outcomes. That film became an unexpected international hit, prompting Tykwer to reteam with his
Lola
star Franka Potente for his next movie. Once again in
The Princess and the Warrior
he plays with time, but in this one he has shifted gears, slowing the action down to a more restrained and thoughtful pace.

The Princess and the Warrior
is the story of two broken people, Sissi and Bodo, and the strange ties that bind them. “I think it is a very descriptive title,” says Tykwer, “since the film gives these special strange creatures the same dimension as is usually reserved only for historical heroes. They deserve a description like this, which is not ‘The frustrated soldier and the cranky nurse,' although the film could well have been called that. Sissi is a princess in that she is the secret ruler in this psychiatric establishment. In the same way Bodo is a warrior, in a battle against himself and his feelings. Although they are not fanciful characters, they can lay claim to this dimension.”

Potente — back to her natural blonde locks after the shocking red hair of Lola — is Sissi, a nurse in a psychiatric institution. She is worshiped by her patients, but her life is monotonous and secluded. While taking care of some banking in the busy city of Wuppertal, she has a chance encounter with a down-on-his-luck ex-soldier named Bodo (Benno Furmann) when he inadvertently causes her to be hit by a truck while crossing the street. As she lies under the vehicle, unable to breath, Bodo slides in next to her to avoid the police who are chasing him. In a very intense scene he saves her life, breathing much needed air into her lungs through a makeshift tracheotomy tube. It's an incredibly well realized moment. Tykwer blocks out all the sound except for Sissi's labored breathing, and there is a stillness that simulates the after-effects of an accident. Anyone who has ever been seriously injured will attest to the peaceful calm that envelops you as your body goes into shock. The scene seems to take forever to play itself out. With her sporadic gasps as a soundtrack, this accident scenario packs more realism into five minutes than any five episodes of
ER
.

Saving Sissi's life is not simply an act of altruism; Bodo uses her to outwit the police, even riding in the ambulance with her while holding her hand. When she wakes, he is gone, and all she has is a button from his coat gripped tightly in her hand. During her long recovery she thinks about Bodo, convincing herself that he is the one great love of her life. Two months after the accident she tracks him down, only to discover that her angel of mercy is a bitter lonely man who wants nothing to do with her.

Sissi makes it her mission to discover whether their paths crossed through simple luck or the complicated mechanisms of fate itself.

“In the cinema people are always being thrown into decisive situations,” says Tykwer. “I like the thought of saying over and over, ‘What else could have happened to my life? What else could have happened to your life? What could have happened to us?' I think it is wonderful that in the cinema you can set this speculative machine in motion.”

Speculation is one of the trademarks of Tykwer's films. His previous two outings —
Winter Sleepers
(1997) and
Run Lola Run
(1998) — examine how fate and coincidence collide to guide the lives of his characters.
The Princess and the Warrior
sees Tykwer push it to a whole new level, weaving a fabric of chance happenings that bring Sissi and Bodo closer. Or
are
they chance? Call it what you will — fate, divine intervention, or coincidence — but the characters become slowly intertwined in ways they could never have imagined. Tykwer wisely doesn't offer any easy answers and leaves much up to individual interpretation, particularly in the final act of the film.

A multi-layered script like this demands believable performances, and in Franka Potente, Tykwer has found just the right actress to portray the iron-willed but unsophisticated Sissi. She is a grown woman with the mannerisms of a child. Potente gives her a strange physicality that at first seems unnatural, almost like a tentative new foal just learning to walk. “I always said, ‘She's like a virgin. She doesn't know anything. She's very naïve,'” says Potente. “She's like a child, but very curious, so there is something soft and subtle about her. She is kind of careful, but she's also forward and she's brave. We tried to find something in the body to tell the audience that's what she's like.”

“Franka has done an incredible job,” said Tykwer. “Sissi seems too inexperienced to walk around like a normal person. It is all Franka's creation, and has nothing to do with the real Franka.”

In this film nothing is what it seems on the surface. Take the character of Bodo (Benno Furmann). He is a thief, an ex-soldier, a tough guy who can be reduced to tears at the slightest provocation. He's a conundrum, a deeply damaged man with a violent streak who is capable of acting tenderly, as he does under the truck with Sissi. Furmann brings an unpredictable, dangerous feel to the character; he's like a coiled snake that could strike at any time.

“Benno is somebody who can act wonderfully well with no effort,” says Tykwer, “who is very playful but also very physical, for whom a difficult character like this does not seem to be written. In Benno I have found someone who understood in such an intuitive way just how far this character could go. Occasionally one is lucky enough to find that an actor is himself going through a phase in which a certain role speaks to him particularly clearly, in which you suddenly have revelations in which you know that there is nothing more you can do; even if I direct till I'm blue in the face, it simply happens because someone has found out a certain truth for himself. All I can do in a case like that is to create trust.”

The Princess and the Warrior
got lost in the shuffle. After making a splash at several international film festivals, the movie was sentenced to big screen purgatory when its distributor went bankrupt on the eve of its theatrical release.