In the last two weeks I have watched Body Heat, Red Rock West, Romeo Is Bleeding and now this. If I have learned only one thing, it is never trust women under any circumstances whatsoever. Ever.
(Only now that I have uploaded the poster do I realise that the same director made this and Red Rock West, he must either really love women or really hate them. I can’t tell.)
Linda Fiorentino plays Bridget, and with apologies to the conniving, self centred and occasionally psycho bitches in the above films, she may be the most diabolical.
Bridget is a telemarketing supervisor, but when I say she is a supervisor she supervises in the same vein as Alec Baldwin does in Glengarry Glen Ross. If I worked under her I would either quit or punch her out on the first day, and without being over PC she deserves more the latter.
After a hard day being a bitch she goes home to her hubbie Clay, played by Bill Pullman. It turns out that Clay, following the plans devised by Bridget, has made a lucrative deal selling illicit pharmaceuticals to naughty types as a side project to his apparently selling illegal prescriptions.
The deal has netted them $700,000 (remember this is 1994, so that’d be around 2.5M in today’s bucks), and although the plan worked it didn’t go entirely like clockwork. As a result Bill is a little bit wound up, and some ill-advised words by Bridget get her a slap, which doesn’t go down well with her.
Now it’s hard to tell if this was pre-planned, and given what she does later I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was, but Bridget decides to do a runner with the cash while Clay takes a shower. This would be annoying at the best of times, but Clay financed his dodgy deal by taking money from a loan shark, and one who has a nasty habit of meting out punishment to thumbs and other digits that require medical treatment.
Bridget seems to have been in similar trouble before, as the first person she calls when she pauses for breath is a lawyer, and during the convo they discuss back and forth her options and the ramifications if Clay catches up with her. It is decided that she should not spend the money, but seek a divorce from Clay and hold onto the non-traceable cash until then. Easier said than done. Rather than head to her former stomping ground of Chicago, where it seems Clay would obviously track her down, Bridget settles in a smaller country area where he wouldn’t think to look, changes her name and gets a job at an insurance firm.
By now we fully realize that Bridget (now Wendy) is an opportunistic bitch, totally self absorbed and fairly foul mouthed. She starts banging a local guy named Mike, who turns out has been burnt badly by a short lived marriage and desperately wants out of town. He sees Wendy as a ticket out, assuming that she is worldly and can help him. Mike might be a trifle naïve, but he coincidentally works at the same firm and once he knows this he latches onto Wendy for dear life, in the hope that she might love him back.
By this stage we should know better, and if Mike had been watching til now he would have passed this chance up and saved himself a lot of bother.
Wendy/Bridget is a class A bitch. I’ve said it before above but it is worth expanding on. I’m not sure if the movie initially made her out to be an anti hero but she has precious little redeeming qualities, every tidbit of information gets stored somewhere in her memory to be used against the provider later. Even when she is lying low she is actively planning other means of making a quick buck or improving her situation.
Of course Mike would be better served not trusting anything that Wendy said and staying the hell away from her, even if he hung around he should never have told her anything about himself…. especially when she was being nice to him. But then we would not have had a movie.
The one thing that can be said in her favour is that most of the time she doesn’t pretend that she is anything but a bitch, and in a strange gender role reversal it seems that Mike feels that he can change her. But while he is trying to work her, she is working him far more effectively. Wendy sees a flaw in the system, where using the insurance company’s data somehow she can identify (apparently) cheating husbands with large insurance policies. She then rings the wives to offer, in a roundabout way of course, to kill off the dodgy hubbie for a cut of the policy proceeds.
Clay finally tracks Wendy using a PI, who she neutralizes quickly, so he hires another, at this point Wendy realizes that he isn’t giving up and simply letting her take the cash so she offers a compromise.
The finale shows just how far Wendy will go to get her way, and it is a looooonnnnngggg way folks. I won’t ruin it here, and it is a little too cosy for my liking, but if you can ignore a couple of lucky coincidences it makes for an effective movie.
Plot wise I can forgive some minor leaps of faith, if the film has a significant flaw it is in the casting of a young Peter Berg as Mike. Bill Pullman is OK as Clay, and Fiorentino is ideal as the cold and dispassionate Wendy/Bridget, even though the role was so well written and clearly defined that perhaps a dozen other actresses might have been as effective, if they were willing to go as far of course!
Peter plays Mike as a little naïve maybe, but not nearly stupid or desperate enough to get publically and emotionally flogged by a woman, no matter how hot she might seem. I just couldn’t buy that a good looking guy who had an important role in a large insurance firm and no noticeable flaws or shortcomings (aside from blind trust), could put himself in the situation that he does. But I guess Hollywood, even with low budget stuff, would rather have pretty actors than someone more fitting, I would think a young Steve Buscemi might have been just pathetic and believable enough.
Final Rating – 7 / 10. Like “In the Company of Men”, it is refreshing to see someone take a risk and play an irredeemable character. Not a “happy” movie, but a pretty good one if you can ignore some plot holes near the end.
