By Scott Ross
“Brennan ain’t no racist. He hates everybody. He’s an equal opportunity hater.”
— Detective Luis Valentin (Luis Guzmán) on Lt. Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte)
If New York City was Sidney Lumet’s perennial subject, examining police corruption was within that sphere his particular forte, and the Edwin Torres novel Q & A seemed almost written for him to make into a movie. Torres’ taut, disturbing book, published in the 1970s, limns the investigation of a veteran police detective’s shooting of a Latino gangster by an un-tested assistant district attorney, himself once a cop, the case hopelessly complicated by the peripheral involvement of a young Latina with whom the D.A. was once in love. As can be imagined from the foregoing, the novel was a complicated affair, and I haven’t even cited the wealthy, sophisticated drug lord with whom the girl is now living; a frightened gay junkie who, aside from being one of the police force’s paid informants, is the shooting’s only witness; his explosive-tempered drag-queen boyfriend; the young assistant D.A.’s shady superior who is somehow involved with both the Latin gang and their Mafia rivals; a black cop whose loyalty is primarily to the shooter; his coeval, the sharp, funny Puerto Rican officer on whose sound instincts the young lawyer relies; and the Jewish prosecutor, once the D.A.’s boss, who is perhaps the single person in authority the young attorney can trust. Yet as complex as that precis makes it sound, both the Torres novel and the superb picture Lumet fashioned from it can easily be followed by anyone with a functional reasoning apparatus… which is, alas, at least in America, an increasingly reduced pool of respondents.
Lumet was both the screenwriter and director on Q & A, and proved as adept at the former as he nearly always was at the latter. Part of the reason for the picture’s artistic success, I think, lies in how closely Lumet hews to Torres’ plot. Indeed, the only major component of the novel from which Lumet deviates is in eliminating the annoying, self-consciously literate speech of the District Attorney played by Patrick O’Neal, and that’s a loss to be celebrated. On the page you can’t believe in him; he sounds like a figure in a Henry James story, or a British stage play of the early 1950s. I suppose, given the character’s lowly origins, this might be considered a case of over-compensation, but that impossibly florid manner of speaking is one of the two areas of the novel Torres got wrong. The other is also related to speech: The way Al Reilly, the assistant D.A. (Timothy Hutton in the movie) veers suddenly from modulated sentences and educated thoughts to ungrammatical, slang-heavy sub-literate patois from scene to scene. Lumet’s screenplay renders both characters more consistently and believably.
While race and systemic corruption are the heart of the narrative in both book and film, Torres also cannily raises the question of the murderous cop Brennan’s buried sexuality. Indeed, the gay paid snitch (Paul Calderón in the movie) explicitly opines that while Brennan (Nick Nolte) would never admit to it, he is homosexual. It is of course a popular truism that the most viciously homophobic are those with the shakiest sexuality, and Brennan’s victimization of gay men, both in the Torres novel and the Lumet adaptation, suggests this without either author forcing the issue. Lumet, whose rather striking liberal contempt for homosexual men ran like a malodorous streak throughout much of his 1960s and ’70s oeuvre, at least until Dog Day Afternoon, honors this psychologically valid conceit although, thankfully, he spares us Brennan’s particularly horrible M.O., inserting lit cigarettes into the rectums of his “faggot” victims. Twice in the escalating violence of the picture’s last third Brennan plays seducer to a man he is about to murder; as with the scene when Brennan harasses a drag-queen prostitute on the street by groping his genitals and forcing him to admit he’s a man, we are left to wonder from this how much of the cop’s tactics are a ruse and how much an expression of genuine desire. Likewise, when he realizes that Reilly has become his enemy (“You went from our side to their side!”) he runs his large fingers along the younger man’s cheek, in a manner that feels both obliquely threatening and extraordinarily intimate, like the regretful act of a rejected lover.
With his dark hair and mustache and his imposing physique, Nick Nolte is a quietly terrifying figure, routinely intimidating petty criminals, stool pigeons, gangsters, attorneys and even his fellow police officers to get what he wants. Brennan seems to be a man with no interior life other than a need to cover up his crimes — a true sociopath equipped with a badge and a gun.* Nolte gives himself over completely to the role; there’s no actorish special-pleading in his performance, no wink to the audience or attempt to soften Brennan up. He’s a psychopath for whom no rules apply, and he’s gotten away with it for so long he sees no reason not to believe he always will. He thinks he’s invincible. (The character has no idea he’s being conspired against from all sides, and wouldn’t believe it if someone told him.) There isn’t a weak link in the rest of the cast either, and which includes Armand Assante as the felon around whom the murders revolve, Lee Richardson as Hutton’s former boss, Charles S. Dutton and Luis Guzmán as the officers investigating the initial killing, Fyvush Finkel as a grandstanding attorney and the wonderful Dominic Chianese as a deceptively benign mafioso. Hutton, who has always been exceptional at locating the pain with which his characters live without emasculating them, does so here as well. Aside from Nolte, however, the movie’s other great acting comes from three much less famous sources.
Jenny Lumet, the writer/director’s daughter, gives a performance of enormous poise as Nancy, the Latina with whom the Hutton character was involved. And while both Al and Nancy can be apportioned equal blame for the demise of that love affair, she is, quite understandably, unable to resurrect feeling for him for what she sees as his racist reaction to meeting her beloved father without first being told he was black. Lumet uses her beautiful features (her grandmother was Lena Horne) to express Nancy’s emotions, and aside from her initial unexpected meeting with Al as he questions witnesses she has virtually no filter; whether she is angry, or bitter, or hurt, or a combination of all three, the character’s feelings are written across the actress’ features, nakedly. The only other exception is the final scene — which unlike the original author the movie’s writer/director leaves tantalizingly ambiguous, Al Reilly’s infinite hope poised above the precipice of Nancy’s ultimate acceptance or rejection. Only then is Jenny Lumet’s face unreadable, and we become grateful for the refusal on everyone’s part to depict a definitive answer to Al’s plea. As the junkie informant Roger, unable to control his appetites for blow and sex or to govern his emotions even when failing to restrain his tongue puts him in mortal peril, Paul Calderón gives a loose, brave, defiant performance, and he’s matched by the sensuous playing of International Chrysis as Roger’s lover Josè, who doesn’t understand just how dangerous Brennan is until too far late.
I have only two cavils about Lumet’s screenplay. Although he deviates from the climax of Torres’ novel, and its aftermath, I don’t think the filmmaker’s more cynical view of things inapt; we know too much now about how the cyst of corruption is lanced and dressed by those in positions to expose it to quite believe in the old Capra solutions… which anyway were scorned by the knowing even when they were new. (Lumet also reduced Brennan from an ethnically bifurcated Irish-Italian to pure Mick, I suppose to emphasize his Anglo-Saxon bigotry.) I do question, however, why the Patrick O’Neal character insists on calling Al Reilly “Francis,” unless it’s simply the arrogance of the man. Of more concern to me, however, is why Lumet softened the contours of Brennan’s youthful crime when the one described in Torres’ book was more shocking and less explicable. But those are pretty much my only complaints about his work here, which is shot through with his usual intelligence and respect for his audience. Lumet was not interested in genre pictures, and tended in general to eschew the standard action movie set-pieces, but the conventional thriller sequences here are exceptionally well done and without the “Hey, look at me behind the camera!” excesses of others who have made crime in America their primary subject. His cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak, delivers a New York which, desaturated and often rainy, somehow seems even more vibrantly alive, and the Rubén Blades score, which includes a re-working of his song “The Hit,” has exactly the right feeling — spare and foreboding, with a Latin feel appropriate to the story and its characters.
Because I was in the midst of producing my first full-length play at Hampshire College when Q & A was released, I had no time to see any movies at all and accordingly missed this one, which I regretted. It’s a pleasure to encounter it all these years later, and to salute the humane popular artistry of the man who made it.
*Since Q & A was made in 1990, decades before our tax dollars began going to Israel’s thuggish police force to train our equally brutish cops in how to most efficiently escalate violence against American citizens, particularly — although by no means exclusively — non-Caucasians, that image feels rather prescient today.
Text copyright 2021 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 