One Night At McCool's (2001)

Journeys, turning points, the crucial epiphanies of personal growth when someone learns something improving about themselves - these warmly charming moments are, of course, irritating to watch at the best of times, but particularly in comedy films, so the very few comedies so heartless as to skip all that are accordingly the ones that stand out in our affections. This one is kind enough to be precisely that cruel. It comes out at the pre-kaboom period of transition between the naughty 90s and the, I suppose, actual 00ies, where the fad of dark comedy crime film finally gets too self-conscious about its own assumptions to carry on with itself any more. At first glance, it’s just a film noir spoof with some neat tricks but it’s actually one of those interesting little movies that surreptitiously says a lot of unflattering things about American society, and who, I ask, is to say wrongly? It turns out that spoofing the femme-fatale pulls a Jenga brick which collapses the fragile tower of American male pride.

One by one, three men, each trying out a different way to be a real man, each unhappy with it, meet the same hot babe and instantly superimpose on her their ideal woman, while she plays along because she in turn is driven by her own obsessive need to fulfill her ultimate goal. The joke (apart from having three gullible men to play for suckers instead of the customary one) is that the only objective of this femme-fatale is to have a nice house. Her scheming criminal enterprise is to work towards a bland housewifey life of suburban domestic normality, and of course this is what leads to doom and destruction for the men, as indeed it does seem to in a lot of relationships, frankly.

Up until the dovetail climax, this is all told in flashbacks, in a different version from each of the doomed losers, and all to different listeners. Fortunately this isn’t just a remnant of the 90s love of extravagant complexity in screenplays, though it is that too, much as the previous year's Reindeer Games represents the black-hole density of plot-twist excess that the neo-femme-fatale movie had reached by this point. Here the device has an actual purpose, as it marks out each guy in his class and culture – the rich lawyer with a family and suburban home confesses his version of events to a mildly disgusted therapist; the moralizing Edgar Hoover-ish authoritarian detective confesses to his pruriently excited priest; and the working joe would normally confess to a bartender, but he already is a bartender so he confesses to the scornfully unimpressed hitman he’s hired, cluelessly turning for comfort from one crook to another.

The casting is quite a coup for this and finds a deft solution to the problem of the modern femme-fatale genre by giving that role to Liv Tyler. The classic 1940s noir generally bows to the need for a scene where the guy says "I mean, obviously fuck no" and storms out, only to succumb to febrile anguish and crawl back to the knowing look in Barbara Stanwyck's eyes. With increasingly exaggerated ice-queen man-eaters of the neo-noir variety – Kathleen Turner, Sharon Stone and a fortiori Linda Fiorentino – it's harder to answer why he'd find a nails-hard psychopath irresistible when the relationship starts going wrong and have us take it seriously. Tyler, by contrast, plays it just right, which is to say, not seriously and at the same time true to the feeble reality of men’s weak spots - a flattering, literally eyelash-fluttering girly-girl with a babydoll breathiness to stroke men’s egos like Bugs Bunny in a dress and lipstick. The parodically handsome Matt Dillon is spot-on for a dumb mook, Paul Reiser seems born to play the obnoxious pervy lawyer, and John Goodman is right out of a black-and-white movie as the detective. Michael Douglas, veteran victim of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure, is a nice genre-fan pick for the vulgar hitman. I always like a bit of Mikey D. 

In a sort of a sweary fairy-tale set-up, these four male characters each stand for a different route to manhood and a different way of getting life wrong. Randy is a laddish dude, but aimless and immature; Carl is an ambitious professional but a sleazy narcissist; and Dehling is an upholder of law and order but a smoking self-righteous volcano of hypocritical repression. I’ll come back to the hitman. With the other three, Tyler's Jewel is not just some chameleon who plays a different part to each. The second grand joke of the film is that it’s the men who invent who she is in their heads as soon as they see her – a girlfriend to Randy, a sex-bomb to Carl and a radiant angel to Dehling – and all she has to do is roll with it. Pretty soon Randy is covering up her murders for her and, in keeping with tradition, it only makes him the weak one in the relationship; but all three men think they’re getting the woman of their dreams as she stands back and lets them, as it were, manipulate themselves. But even to leave it at that would be a bit lazy, so in a nice added touch, she's just as much a deluded daydreamer as they are. It’s un homme fatale who ends up on top in this movie, and yet so très noir is the unforgiving spirit of it that you wouldn’t want to be him, either.

I saw this at the cinema when it came out and didn’t like it then because it seemed too tame and too reactionary. Seeing it again now, though, I don’t know why I rejected it so blithely, it seems abundantly inflammatory enough to defeat both objections. In style, you can tell straight away it’s from a past era when comedy crime-thrillers had apparently whatever budget they asked for, lush with dolly shots, tracking shots, crane shots (including a great parody crane-shot, with a soaring orchestral score) and a final shoot-out that again aches with the 90s, full of the Americanized Woo-ing that seduced a decade’s stunt directors, including a cloud of feathers and those bright red blood-squibs which are now long gone from action films but which I really really miss. It has the visual flair of a director determined to make that bright splash with his major debut, but the stand-out shot of the film is a simple one of Jewel standing ominously expressionless in a doorway like a ghost as she silently takes possession of a house, and then closes the door. Also the film ends on the kind of psychotically callous flick of the wrist that I always wish for comedies to end on, but rarely see it granted outside of South Park. 

All this gets us rolling along with a typical 90s-style string of brash violent gags, until we notice it’s taking the piss out of more than old crime movies.When all three flashbacks are told through eager, salacious confessions, it throws into relief that the whole femme fatale idea is really just bar-room male vanity looking for a veiled outlet. The folktale of your life getting ruined when a foxy devil-woman bewitched you is a cocktale of self-pity and leering humblebrag; but when the femme fatale is made into a joke, the real target emerges as the male narrator who perseveres with the standard film-noir self-importance. A good deconstruction just by itself: One Night At McCool’s leverages that into something even more, though.

It’s all there in the sheer unimaginativeness of the way the men see Jewel. It’s not just that the film sends up clichés, but that these three horny idiots can only see Jewel as one of those clichés, while she bases her life around more clichés. None of them are living in reality and that, in our postmodern age, is what reality is. The way they lust for Jewel (or how they imagine her to be) mirrors her tunnel-visioned need for the advertised junk she imagines will fulfill her. But between them there’s only an infinite regress of their lad’s mag fantasies of her and her catalogue fantasies of what they can give her. The film then mirrors that contempt for the men in it with contempt for the men watching it (Paul Verhoeven's favourite trick). The Playboy send-ups work as a joke on how neo-noir movies had vastly over-done the sex-scenes by that point, but they’re also a meta joke at the expense of the male audience, laughing at these morons tripping over their dicks for her at the same time as they’re falling for the exact same beer-commercial T&A.

What we've been watching, of course, has been that fairy-tale, where Goldilocks finds fault with all the bears, and with all the qualities of a fable that implies. By the end, each of the three, I believe the term is, pathetic specimens, is systematically picked off, either as losers, or as humiliated by their own desires, or as pathologically hypocritical about their desires, in a schematic dismissal of our prevailing values, until the hitman is the last one standing - and it's the hatchet man who comes and saves Goldilocks from the bears' cottage. This dirtbag, played by Douglas with a nice air of having given up on life, fits the film's vision perfectly - he's the only one who knows how to satisfy the vapid daydreams of consumerism by recognising them for what they are and playing them back to her, because the mindset that feeds those aspirations is ultimately the criminal mindset. He wants what the other men want, but unlike them he can see right through her, and accepts her hollowness as the perfect match to his cynicism in a self-defeating spiral. To be the unillusioned one, the jerk who drives away unscathed, is the scummiest thing of all. In the bullshit charade of manliness, it may be that immaturity, bourgeois success and state power are all both grim and ridiculous options, but to get a happy ending in this world is worse - the only way to win is to be the most dehumanized one (and the casting gives us a Gordon Gekko echo).

In other words, it’s pretty much a synopsis of America. There are no good options (except to be a black gay Marxist, but that's implicit) and everyone's mooning and drooling over stupid manufactured images of their unreal objects of desire with nothing but a pyramid of exploitative deceptions perpetuating their respective pipedreams. The director was Norwegian, and he’s been muzzled into making crappy kid’s films ever since.