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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Woodward is presented as Mr. Naive, a childlike goody-two-shoes with no clear idea whatsoever about drugs or the wicked ways of the men in the entertainment industry. Walsh is so subdued he barely exists, except as a vehicle for wretched, soap-operatic magico-realism fantasies in which Woodward grills the dead Belushi on-screen while Belushi lies around sweating.
"If you hated needles so much, what were you doin' stickin' them in your arm, huh, John? Answer me, John? ... What was so painful that you couldn't even close your eyes at night without drugs?" Walsh seems exasperated, more by the hopeless duncery of the film than by Belushi's unregenerate ways.
"I can't breathe. Breathe for me, Woodward," gasps Belushi, at the last.
Oh for fuck's sake.
Not even J.T. Walsh could salvage his part in this abortion. If devil cocaine didn't piss all over Belushi's grave and embugger his memory, this movie certainly did.
For some reason, even though he was in the movie only for about seven minutes, one of Walsh's most memorable roles was as Cole, Annette Bening's long-con mentor in "The Grifters" (1990), who lures unsuspecting Texas oilmen into what they think is a crooked stock-market deal. His manic pathology is the thing to watch here. "How do we do it? Machines!" Walsh shouts, every inch the cufflinked yuppie alpha male. "It is bee-yootiful!" He exuberantly leaps from the couch and flings open the door to a fake office, excited to give his mark a look at his beautiful roomful of state-of-the-art supercomputers -- actually an unfinished cavern of broken plasterboard, conduit wire and garbage bags. Walsh plays a seamless pathological liar -- someone so completely deranged by his own fabrications, he starts to believe he can turn water into gin. Bening tells how Cole eventually "retired" to Atascadero, a facility for the criminally insane; Walsh is shown in the flashback crawling around a bed on all fours, surrounded by mirrors, clutched by paranoia, arching his back like a baboon, gibbering, "I can't move I can't move, I can't move, I can't move..." He crawls backward up the 1980s ersatz-deco padded headboard and screeches at Annette, with the whirling pupils and jackknifing nerves of someone who has grappled with irrational fear and maybe lost a few times.
Walsh got a good break being cast in "A Few Good Men" (1992) as Lt. Col. Matthew Markinson. OK, I know what you're thinking, formula moviemaking with an A-list cast, Rob Reiner, the military, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore -- I was skeptical, certainly -- and yeah, Demi clonks out each line like she's unloading industrial air conditioners -- but hoo, whadda tight script! Tight as warm vinyl over underage porn stars! It moves like a cheetah. Really, it's the kind of DVD that has you yelling advice at the TV set in the middle of the night and not even feeling pathetic about it.
Walsh gets to show some range -- he isn't just a paranoid schizo or a venal military bastard -- in this one he's a nervous wreck, for reasons of morbid sensitivity, cowardice and moral failure. He also gets to be demoralized and abused by Jack Nicholson, which must have endeared him to Nicholson forever. It all sits on the eyes with Walsh, and in this film, you see pain under duress under ethics under duty. When it comes to mixing the emotional hard stuff, Walsh is the bartending equivalent of Tom Cruise in "Cocktail" -- it's a little role but one full of internal stunts.
