Undoubtedly the most purely cinematic novelist
writing today, the prolific Elmore Leonard shares a long history with
Hollywood. An experienced scriptwriter himself, his novels move and jump like
screenplays, marked by quick cuts, short scenes, the deft deployment of
dialogue, an efficient establishing of location, minimal authorial intrusion,
and a fidelity to the surfaces of objects and actions. Not surprisingly, more
than a dozen of his books, both Westerns and crime stories, have undergone the
sometimes curious process of translation into film.
Despite his critical and commercial success and his
skillful use of the vocabulary of cinema, most of the adaptations of his work
rarely attain the quality of his fiction. Films like 52 Pickup, Glitz, Cat Chaser, and Out of Sight achieved only a moderate artistic success and
performed unspectacularly at the box office. Others, like Stick, Touch, and most
recently, The Big Bounce, flopped
with both audiences and critics.
Aside from some tough early Westerns like Hombre and Valdez is Coming, the best film versions of his novels are probably
Jackie Brown (based the novel Rum Punch) and, of course, the extremely
popular and profitable Get Shorty.
Leonard’s Be
Cool, a sequel to Get Shorty,
employs the same protagonist, the former shylock turned movie producer Chili
Palmer (John Travolta again), set once again, naturally, in Los Angeles.
Although the book itself characteristically bristles with references to movies
— a Leonard motif — this time around Chili, now a producer, at least
temporarily forsakes the cinema for the music business, which turns out to
involve more complication and danger than the film industry. Chili decides to
manage the career of a promising young singer, Linda Moon (Christina Milian),
an idea that lands him in trouble with the holders of her contract, Raj (Vince
Vaughn) and Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), a rap music mogul named Sin LaSalle
(Cedric the Entertainer), and assorted hoodlums and hitmen.
Chili intends to sign Linda with a company
controlled by Edie Athens (Uma Thurman), the brand new widow of a former mob
colleague who was shot by some Russian mobsters. Most of the movie shows a
series of confrontations between Chili and one person or another out to kill
him. Every time he and Edie return to their homes, a delegation of gun-toting
thugs greets them. Chili, armed only with his cool, talks his way out of every
situation and of course, solves the manifold problems attendant on dealing with
the various murderers who run the record business, rescues Edie from her
husband’s debts, and defeats the would-be assassins of every ethnic
origin-black, Russian, Italian (sounds like an exotic drink).
Be Cool features a dozen or more
characters and uses a number of aural and visual motifs to fix their styles.
Each set of characters appears accompanied by appropriate music and, most
strikingly, each drives a readily identifiable automobile — Edi Athens has a
1950s Thunderbird, another character zooms through the Hollywood streets in a
Ferrari, and of course the hip-hop mogul and his entourage arrive in a caravan of
Hummers; Chili, whose Cadillac suffers a fatal shooting, tools around in a
nondescript subcompact.
Despite all the bizarre characters, the constant
music, the flashy visuals, and the array of recognizable faces, Be Cool flattens out its action into a
repetitive series of scenes and actions and an easy, mostly perfunctory
approach to both its music and its humor. Christina Milian’s uninteresting
voice and repertoire hardly demonstrate the great talent Chili, Edie, and Steven
Tyler of Aerosmith, badly playing himself, apparently believe she possesses.
Despite the moments of violence — a couple of shootings, a vicious beating
— even the brutality seems unconvincing and awkwardly comic.
Most of the actors overplay their parts, especially
Vince Vaughn as a simpleton of a music producer who attempts to behave like a
black pimp. As a rule of thumb, by the way, one should avoid movies featuring
more than one person without an actual, ordinary name — in this case, both
the comedian who calls himself Cedric the Entertainer and a popular wrestler
named The Rock play major roles and manage to challenge Vaughn in going over
the top.
Although he looks trim and self-possessed, Travolta
appears to be sleepwalking through his part this time, so relaxed that he in
fact seems to be acting in a different movie. In one of the many allusions to
all sorts of previous pictures, including Pulp
Fiction, he and the lush, leggy Uma Thurman dance together, one of the most
graceful and pleasing moments in all of Be
Cool. The movie ultimately presents an odd paradox, the puzzling problem of
how the director, F. Gary Gray, could make so slight and disappointing a
picture from the work of so lively and cinematic a writer: Elmore Leonard
deserves better and in fact, is better.
Be Cool (PG-13), starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric The
Entertainer, Christina Milian, André Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Harvey Keitel, The
Rock, Robert Pastorelli. Cinemark Tinseltown, Loews Webster, Pittsford Plaza
Cinema, Regal Culver Ridge, Regal Eastview, Regal Greece Ridge, Regal
Henrietta.
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2005.
