At the Museum of the Moving Image, I saw an 1992 indie movie called In the Soup, starring Steve Buscemi as a struggling wannabe filmmaker who gets caught up with a charming con man named Joe (Seymour Cassel) who keeps dragging him along on schemes with the promise of funding his movie. It was decent, shot in black and white, and showing the old rough grittiness of early 90’s Lower East Side. It was pretty funny, especially Will Patton as Cassel’s deeply psychotic brother (with echoes of Christopher Walken’s quiet menace in Annie Hall), Buscemi’s befuddlement at Joe’s tricks, and Stanley Tucci’s hilariously bad French accent. Also, Jim Jarmusch doesn’t seem to have ever aged, he’s had the same white hair for nearly forty years and still looks the same.
I did feel bad for Jennifer Beals playing a pretty thankless role as the neighbor love interest of Buscemi’s character Adolpho, who just gets roped into Joe’s screwball madness and is seen as an object. Similarly, I did cringe at seeing Sam Rockwell in an early role as her developmentally disabled brother, where his disability seemed to be the whole joke. Also, contrary to what the director said in the intro, this was not Rockwell’s first movie. Obviously the director knows him and I don’t, but he had a few other film credits prior to this movie, whenever it was filmed.
The film, despite winning awards at the time, was largely forgotten and nearly lost, but was recently restored, and it looks great. I think it mostly works for having a great supporting cast, Cassel as a charming scene stealer, and it being a capsule of NYC from nearly thirty years ago.
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