Flak Magazine: Review of Matchstick Men, 09-19-03

For those familiar with the work of Ridley Scott, the rational response to the trailer for Matchstick Men is, "Why the hell is he directing a wacky comedy, and why is there a 14-year-old girl in it?"

To the first point, well, the movie — which bills itself as a lighthearted look at an obsessive-compulsive con man who reconnects with an estranged daughter who wants to learn the tricks of the trade — is a ruse. This shouldn't surprise: Scott is cinema's most vulgar art snob. His Hannibal Lecter seems a perverse personal fantasy, a museum curator with such contempt for the middle class that he actually eats their brains; or, consider Maximus' Ridleyian admonishment of "Are you not entertained?" to the bloodthirsty plebians. In short, Scott has a sublime contempt for his audience that you have to admire — he's not afraid to kill the Gladiator, turn Hannibal Lecter into a vigilante antihero, paint Christopher Columbus as a genocidal villain or tell Harrison Ford to fuck off at the suggestion that Blade Runner's Deckard should be a straight hero. Whatever he can do to screw with us, he'll do. Ridley Scott will never be test-marketed into blandness.

Still, there's the matter of the 14-year-old girl. Frankly, it's easy to be scared for actress Alison Lohman: Consider Scott's grotesque vision of childbirth in Alien, the prostitute replicants in Blade Runner, the beatings of G.I. Jane's Demi Moore and the paternalized sexual attraction between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Hannibal. Scott seems to delight in torturing women — it's easy to imagine him thundering, "I'm going to drive these bitches off a goddamn cliff!" during the Thelma and Louise production meetings. And so the most shocking thing about Matchstick Men is that Scott coaxes an affectionate, nuanced performance from Lohman as Angela, the daughter of con artist Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage). Lohman's spunky tomboy performance is truer than the usual navel-exposed, detached wise-ass teen — rather than repressing her anger, she acts on it matter-of-factly, bending eager adults to her will. Lohman's emotions are barely contained in the thin skin of adolescence: Cage takes great joy in making her smile, and we feel his helplessness at her meltdowns. As an actor, Lohman (who's actually in her 20s) commands attention precisely as a teenager would because she can erupt into pain or joy at any time. Such skill is required for the movie's typical/outlandish grifter plot, and Cage and Lohman make the relationship work: We see that true con artists are born, that Angela really is her father's daughter even though they've never met. They're both strung so tightly that the mutual affection melts away their anxiety — her teenage sloppiness is the antidote for his obsessive-compulsive life, and his attention salves her neglect. Certainly, Lohman and Cage generate the warmest moments ever felt in a Ridley Scott movie.

Then Ridley fucks the audience. Like we should have expected.

The ending will probably make or break the film for you, but at the same time, it's dirty pool for a critic to spill the beans when a movie hasn't even been in theaters a week. Nevertheless, the fact that every other review of the film talks about what a letdown the ending is should suggest that they're feeling the Ridley-"love" as well. Of course it's a conman movie, so of course there's a big con, and of course that big con is nestled in a bigger con — it's the nature of the grift — but where a good heist movie thrills with its higher logic (and often morality), Matchstick Men goes bitter on you. Not that bitterness is itself a fault, but considering how much effort Scott puts into making a romp out of the first two-thirds, you can't fault viewers and critics from feeling dumped upon.

Still, there's something to be said for Scott's vision of Los Angeles. Scott, whose film career began as a set designer for the BBC, is an imperialist thug whose contempt for America is barely held in check; most recently, he excoriated US wishy-washiness about committing to military action in Somalia with Black Hawk Down. But Scott has a special, dark place in his heart for Los Angeles, the dysfunctional wasteland of his Blade Runner — he sees it as a smoggy wasteland, more of a permanent state of mind than model of efficiency. Consider Roy Batty, a non-human replicant infected by the atmosphere; likewise, in Matchstick Men, the agoraphobic Roy goes mad at a breath of LA air, spiraling downward in the California sunshine, twitching like a robot gone haywire. Cage thrusts his head and darts his eyes, shaking like a wet dog, chain-smoking as if the cigarettes clear his lungs of Los Angeles, constantly wiping the LA dust from his window moldings, scrubbing LA dirt from his carpet — he's even afraid to jump in his chlorinated pool. The sterility of Los Angeles — from Roy's regrouting of tiles and the spotless windows of LAX to the detachment of Roy's con games — is a sickness.

And, to Scott, so is the fetishization of Hollywood and Vegas hipness. Roy employs a Rat Pack affect — swimming pool, vertical blinds, stone fireplace, Sinatra standards (on vinyl, no less), martinis for entertainment — that becomes the canvas of his antiseptic dysfunction. Scott, working from a script co-written by Ocean's Eleven screenwriter Ted Griffin, seems to abhor that film's stature as the paragon of Hollywood style. The Ocean's Eleven remake is an entirely superficial affair with no emotional development, whose GQness is a thick lacquer coating a flimsy story. Scott's Old World snobbery and contempt for American nouveau riche sensibility turns Rat Pack vanity into obsessive-compulsive insanity. The director uses his camera — which tics along with Roy, or blinds us with the light that disorients him — to create an intimate, internalized portrait of a deeply flawed human being. It's the sort of man Danny Ocean would be, if there were anything to those films.

So if you can accept the fact that Scott hates Americans for being a bunch of vain, superficial pussies, then Matchstick Men is a pretty good movie that offers a badly needed rebuke to what Hollywood calls "style." The screenplay provides some good grifter gab ("Not con man, con artist"), and creates three memorable characters. Aside from Lohman and Cage, Sam Rockwell's turn as Frank, Roy's protégé, is the sort of "cool" character young Hollywood excels at. Frank is the Maxim-hip counterpoint to the pretentious Sinatra charm, making his living selling bogus products to the ignorant masses — the director's comment on the Hollywood machine. It's this character upon whom the movie turns, and as commendable as Scott's love of sticking it to the audience may be, he really should have restrained himself here. What would be more shocking, more disconcerting, than an intimate family drama, Ridley Scott-style? Moreover, that ending undermines Scott's otherwise successful departure from his usual ostentatiousness, showing that even a pompous directoral overlord like himself can excel in the small moments that lift genre films into something closer to art; it's uplifting to see him employ his considerable skill for something so human. The Ridley intensity has already yielded a substantial legacy, but the glimpse at his softer side on display in Matchstick Men make you wonder if perhaps, someday, he'll craft a truly intimate film, one in which there's no bloodletting, no bludgeoning, no killer pigs. Until he's ready to let us hug the teddy bear inside, however, Ridley Scott is going to keep sucker punching the audience, and that's why this one feels like a bit of a cheap shot.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)