Last month, I rewatched Flesh and Bone, this 1993 film noir that I think is one of Meg Ryan’s most underrated films. She was known so much for being a cute romantic comedy heroine, that’s it’s easy to forget how great she is at drama. I had randomly seen this years ago and was blown away by how dark and sad and tragic the story is, and it hit Hulu in November, so I rewatched it.
The basic plot is that Dennis Quaid plays a reserved country guy who was forced into being a thief as a child by his corrupt father James Caan, and in the 1960s, him as a kid acts as bait for a farm family to take him in for the night as a lost child, and while he’s stealing their stuff during the night, his dad comes in and commits a family massacre, sparing only the baby, and scarring his son for life for his non consensual role in this tragedy.
Thirty years later, the baby is now Meg Ryan, who has lived a rough life with an alcoholic uncle, thinks her family all died in a car accident, and married an abusive gambling loser, feeling stuck in a crummy life save for her good looks. She and Dennis Quaid meet by chance (she passes out while popping out of a wedding cake at his friend’s bachelor party, he takes her home to sleep and sober up), slowly develop a relationship when her marriage ends, and then he’s racked with guilt when he realizes she was the baby that awful night.
Along with a young and uncharacteristically scrappy Gwyneth Paltrow as a cynical con artist who is now James Caan’s new protégé, Ryan and Quaid delivered masterful performances that were both out of their usual range. Ryan has this frustrated, tired vibe to her of a pretty girl who has been used up by loser men, and has no direction in life, and is just existing at this point. She is so damn good in this movie, and I don’t like that her cutesy stuff defined her career during her peak, she has way more talent than she has been given credited for, and didn’t deserve to have her popular career end over 2000s-era tabloid sexism. And Quaid is largely known for playing sexy, fast-talking charmers with big joker smiles, and he reins that all in to play a guy who is haunted, nervous, reserved, and hardly ever smiles throughout the film. This is another underrated role from him.
James Caan I wasn’t as into, I felt like his character came off as a little hammy, and didn’t feel like an actual person like everyone else did. Even Spence-educated NYC rich girl Paltrow came off as more convincing as a backroad country girl hustler than Caan did as a Southern killer. I think if he didn’t overdo the accent, it could have come off as more menacing and less “actor-ly.”
I loved hearing The Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Blue Moon” play in a scene, it’s a gorgeous song from their 1988 album.
No comments:
Post a Comment