To say that Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man is a sensuous thriller
would be absolutely accurate and rather uselessly trivializing.
Sensuous thrillers have, after all, in recent years become a dime-a-dozen
phenomena. American filmmaking today represents a near-classic
example of a decadent period in art, and the rush to re-mine the
rich genres and styles of our cinematic past is one of its chief
characteristics. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong in that,
it can prove a fatal formula for filmic imagination when coupled
with the current lemming-like attention span of Hollywood commerce.
The revival of interest in film noir – which began to manifest
on screen during the 1980s and thus far shows no signs of abating
– can be attributed, as much as anything, to this jejune copycatting.
The really fine ones have been few and far between (The Grifters,
arguably, first among them), but there have been just enough to
fuel the retro-noir trend as one of the few low-budget, safe-bet
alternatives to blockbusterdom. Most of our leading directors,
even those with sensibilities fundamentally at odds with the genre,
have, at least once during the past 15 years, tried their hand
at it.
What an unexpected and satisfying pleasure then, at this late
stage of an old game, to have an American master remind us that
we have more interesting reasons than the current failure of imagination
for enjoying these dark studies of people of low degree – reasons
that have to do less with our cinema’s self-cannibalization and
more to do with who we are and how we live today. Adapting his
screenplay (pseudonymously credited to Al Hayes) from an original
screen story by John Grisham, Altman has fashioned a dark jewel
of a film in which the use of noir elements is not the usual matter
of a few stylistic (quite often, extraneous or misapplied) flourishes.
Like the great, vertiginous, post-WWII noir, The Gingerbread Man
is a window on a seductive, unsettling, psychological state –
the classic noir state of the center not holding, of the threat
of disunity from within – a window which, though of no useful
perspective to the threatened protagonist, provides the viewer
the comfortable distance of framing. We are able to lose ourselves
completely in the world of the film because Altman creates a complete
world, one in which style and substance are indistinguishable;
and yet, even as we identify with the noir characters’ bad behavior,
their brazen weaknesses, corruption, and the mess they make of
things, we shadow their missteps without falling into the void
with them. The Gingerbread Man is a authoritatively conducted
walk on the dark side; it is moviemaking that leaves you with
slime on your heels, some fine points of moral ambivalence to
chew, and a grin on your face at Altman’s still-developing capacities
to entertain.
In this character-driven hejira through paranoia and human failing,
Kenneth Branagh plays Rick Magruder, a self-indulgent but successful
Savannah attorney, who has made a name – unpopular with the local
law enforcement – in defending cop killers and other dicey, high-profile
cases. He seems something of a sexual addict. He loves his children
but usually picks them up late at his ex-wife’s home and never
seems to have enough attention for them. He drinks a little too
much. He’s arrogant. He’s charming. It’s as hard to take a barometric
reading of his moral center as it is for the meteorologists to
gauge whether Geraldo, the off-shore hurricane that threatens
Savannah throughout the film, will indeed make landfall. In the
end, both tensions break and ciety at large, confuses data and
real information; he is often on his cell phone but rarely in
the conversation that most matters. In the postmodern colors,
tone, and temperament of our era, Robert Altman recreates in The
Gingerbread Man the noir narrative as a quest for authenticity,
and posits a hero whose fragmented values and attention span seem
maddeningly familiar.
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