PREVIEW
THE GOOD THIEF
Starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo and…
Directed by Neil Jordan
Opens Friday, April 18
Uptown Screen
Bob has seen better days. His face has the pallor of someone allergic to daylight. When not losing money in seedy gambling dens or making wisecracks about chaos theory, he’s shooting heroin. He’s out of money and nearly out of friends. One night, he ends up swerving all over the Pacific Coast Highway and is arrested for driving under the influence of GHB.
Oops, my mistake. That’s not Bob, that’s Nick Nolte. The actor, who plays a charismatic denizen of Nice’s underworld in The Good Thief, was arrested mere days after attending the film’s première at the Toronto International Film Festival. Nolte’s misfortunes – which included the circulation of a mug shot that made him look like a roadie for the Manson Family – may have temporarily wrested the limelight away from Neil Jordan’s dazzling new thriller, but they also illustrate how well suited he is to the role of an incorrigible junkie gambler. Nolte’s performance turns a glossy picture about a legendary thief who gets his act together for one last heist into something that feels authentic, even heroic.
"I’ve lived that life," quipped Nolte about the role, "apart from the heroin." Yeah, well, he might be splitting hairs about his choice of illegal substances, but the combination of character and actor makes for a great film.
Speaking in an interview before Nolte’s run-in with the law, writer-director Jordan agrees that The Good Thief would be unimaginable without Nolte.
"It was a bit like that when I was doing Mona Lisa," Jordan says. "I really didn’t get the character right until I met Bob Hoskins. I rewrote the part and changed it around him. In the case of Nick, I didn’t really have to do any rewriting."
The Irish filmmaker and writer developed the movie – his 13th since 1982 and most confidently realized since 1997’s The Butcher Boy – after someone suggested he have another look at Bob Le Flambeur, a 1956 feature by French crime-film master Jean-Pierre Melville. Since it wasn’t Jordan’s favourite Melville film, he felt that he could rework it freely.
"The Melville stuff I love is Le Samourai and L’Armee des Ombres," says Jordan. "I looked at this one again and thought, ‘It’s very thin.’ It’s a lovely film, but it’s very slender – minimal even for Melville. I thought that I could build a structure where the Melville movie could exist in a more complicated story."
As the film opens, Bob is dragging his sorry carcass through Nice, just a few inches away from rock bottom. With the help of his two most loyal allies, Said (Ouassini Embarek) and Raoul (Gerard Darmon), as well as a young Bosnian prostitute named Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze) and a Stratocaster-playing security expert (Emir Kusturica, better known as the director of Underground and Black Cat, White Cat), Bob develops a scheme to rob a Monte Carlo casino of a stash of priceless paintings. Roger (Tcheky Karyo) is supposed to be the cop on his trail, but he’s as enamoured with Bob as everyone else is.
Jordan was similarly smitten. "As I worked up the character, he became really entrancing," says the director. "He was an American, a kind of ’60s reject, a drop-out with this obsession with probability and games of chance. I just followed him, really, as I wrote the script."
Jordan met Nolte while the actor was performing in the San Francisco production of Sam Shepherd’s The Late Henry Moss, and he knew he’d found his Bob. "I knew that he was a great actor, but I didn’t realize his own personal history and his quirks and his way of looking at the world would fit into the character, too," says Jordan.
He notes that Nolte has both an "iconic American-football-hero-gone-wrong" kind of quality and an affection for projects that take him out of the mainstream (Affliction, Afterglow, the underrated Breakfast of Champions), making him the perfect actor to play The Good Thief’s anti-hero. Bob’s the kind of guy who may look like he’s been sleeping in the gutter, but is still the coolest guy in town. "It’s like everything’s gone but the brain," says Jordan, "though even the brain’s gone at times."
The Good Thief also contains a peculiar sort of romance, but it’s not between Bob and Anne. Instead, it lies in the banter of Bob and Roger, the incompetent detective in not-so-hot pursuit.
"The heart of the picture really is in the relationship between Nick and Tcheky’s characters," says Jordan.
"They want each other to continue. They’re enablers. In a way, Roger wants him to rob the casino, if only to see how he’d do it. He wants Bob to rob it in a way that he can’t nail him. He wants to see the guy who’d be able to pull that off because he knows the guy who’d be able to do it is a guy who has gotten rid of his drug problems and has come back to life."
As Jordan notes, it’s not the sort of cop-and-crook relationship that often shows up in the movies. "I don’t think I’ve ever seen an example where’s there’s such dependence in the two roles," he says.
"If you think of De Niro and Pacino in Heat, it’s a battle of wills, a battle of moral systems. That isn’t true in this case. Roger genuinely does not want Bob to be put away for the rest of his life. He’d do anything to prevent that."
That’s because, for all his faults, Bob’s hangdog charms are as irresistible to the other characters as they will be to viewers of The Good Thief. "There’s a fairy tale aspect to it," says Jordan. "It’s a tale of luck re-entering this man’s life. At the start of the story, Bob’s got no style. He’s sticking needles in his arm, wearing a crappy old overcoat that the dog’s dragged around for two weeks. As the movie goes on, he becomes this kind of suave, glamorous figure – he’s reinventing himself and getting rid of his habits. He’s emerging into what he used to be."
Sober and drug-free since his arrest and subsequent rehab, Nolte appears to be following in Bob’s footsteps. But The Good Thief proves that he’s a master at the art of falling apart. |
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