Valse crépuscolaire: “Twilight” (1998)

“Don’t you ever get tired of all the beautiful people, Harry? Doesn’t it ever bother you that they do whatever they want because there’re people like you and me who’ll clean up after them?” — Raymond Hope (James Garner)

By Scott Ross

Following Robert Benton’s beautiful, novelistic screen adaptation of the flavorsome Richard Russo book Nobody’s Fool starring Paul Newman, the three collaborated on an original. Twilight is almost an unofficial sequel, or perhaps a tribute, to the 1966 Harper, in which Newman memorably starred as Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer under a slightly altered name. (The actor was superstitiously convinced, after The Hustler and Hud, that titles beginning with an “H” were lucky for him. ) Harry Ross is what Lew Harper might have become had he continued his ramshackle existence as a barely-hanging-on Los Angeles P.I. But at least Harper had an office to sleep in; after the daughter of his friend and client Jack (Gene Hackman) shoots him when he tries to bring the underage girl home from an ill-advised fling in Mexico he lives with the man, his actress wife Catherine (Susan Sarandon) and the daughter (Reese Witherspoon) as a kind of general factotum and handyman, playing chess at night with the dying Jack, harboring an obvious yen for Catherine, tolerated out of familial guilt, and drifting aimlessly through his twilight years.

My references here to Harper are not by-the-way: Twilight has an analogous structure to the earlier picture, a comparable pace, an equivalent balance of humor and violence, and similar settings; even its characters cast kindred shadows. (There’s also a faint echo of the achingly ironic ending lines William Goldman wrote for Newman and Arthur Hill in Harper at the climax of Twilight.) But if Benton and Russo modeled their movie on Harper, it’s not a shameless imitation. Twilight certainly has its own look; Piotr Sobocinski’s rich, brightly colored cinematography resembles that of Conrad Hall’s in Harper to a degree but benefits from the advances in film stock and lighting, and from less studio set-oriented practices than was commonly the case in 1960s pictures. The movie builds from a classic private-eye setup, with unexpected murders, characters whose pasts and motives are murky, a woman at the center who might or might not be the genre’s perennial femme fatale†, and figures who are either less dangerous than they seem or its obverse.

The movie is wonderfully cast, and the actors give it zest in both senses of the word. Hackman and Sarandon almost defeat praise because nothing they say or do seems anything other than exactly right, and their professional élan is such it’s hard to pinpoint what they do that does feel so right without slavish description. Although M. Emmett Walsh feels wasted in his brief appearance (which may have been intended anyway as a fast homage to Blood Simple) we get the splendid compensations of Stockard Channing as a sympathetic police lieutenant, Giancarlo Esposito as an eager chauffeur with more enthusiastic imagination than sense, the wonderful Margo Martindale in what amounts to the Shelley Winters role, and John Spencer as a police captain who is less hostile than the norm in these things, in part because he mistakenly believes the bullet that sidelined Harry took off his penis. James Garner brings 50-plus years of amiable professionalism to bear in the role of Harry’s old confidant Raymond Hope, but the picture’s nicest surprise is Liev Schreiber’s performance as Witherspoon’s former boyfriend. It’s the sort of role we don’t associate with Schreiber, whose movies tend to the heavy, or at least to the dark, but which having seen him as the Ernst Röhm character in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in college, where he was both menacing and funny, I knew he was more than capable of playing. The character, Jeff Willis, seems at first like a conventional cad, potentially vicious and not nearly as bright as he thinks he is, but Benton and Russo play with our expectations, and Schreiber ends up, like Elisha Cook Jr. in The Big Sleep, eliciting both or affection and our pity. That’s awfully nice footwork for a detective picture.

Newman, 73 when Twilight was made, inhabits Harry Ross with a weary stoicism, a sense of black humor and an equally acute sense of, and appreciation for, the bizarre vagaries both of his profession and of the twilit people with whom he interacts. Newman was seldom unsubtle, but as he aged you never caught him acting. Harry may be a variation on the sorts of roles he’d played so well before in other pictures, and with his years of experience he must have known that he could just give the audience roughly the same gestures and inflections that had served him in the past and let it go at that. Yet Newman never slums, or phones it in, even when Harry is at his weariest. I get the sense, in these late-career performances of his, that the actor was still savoring the possibilities, and, at least when the material was good as it is here, the unexpected delights.

Elmer Bernstein’s score is somewhat old-fashioned in that he was evoking the sound he had pioneered in pictures like The Man with the Golden Arm, Sweet Smell of Success, Anna Lucasta and Walk on the Wild Side in the 1950s and ’60s, and which some younger American filmmakers were hipped to in the ’80s and ’90s. (When Harry visits Raymond at his home the record on the turntable is Bernstein’s “Jubilation,” from his marvelous 1956 LP Blues and Brass.) Whether this was his own idea or Robert Benton’s, I don’t know, but it suits the picture nicely. To a modern ear, trained especially on the cold, melody-less mood compositions that, increasingly (and except for the work of younger men like Michael Giacchino) constitute 21st century scoring, Bernstein’s music is probably too emotional, and “square.” But like Newman’s performance and Benton’s assured, un-fussy and un-hysterical direction — like Twilight itself — there is something to be said for what old men (yes, even those current unspeakable obscenities, old white men) can bring to new endeavors.

Not that any of that mattered to the audiences of 1998. Budgeted at an almost incredibly parsimonious $20 million, Twilight took in only $15.1 million at the box-office. Lost in Space made more that year, for Christ’s sake, and no one remembers it. So did Godzilla, which everyone hated.

Raymond Chandler or Harry Ross could probably find a pithy observation in that somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can.

---

*Ever since seeing Hot Millions when I was 16 or 17, whenever I encounter that phrase I always hear in my inner ear Peter Ustinov mispronouncing it, with a Cockney accent, as “fem fay-tel.” Which is at least an improvement on how at 12 I once said it: “Fem fat-tail.” The problem with us readers is that we have, at least when young, a lazy tendency to speak a word out loud before we know how to pronounce it.

Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross