It probably will come as no surprise to careful parsers of my cinematic musings that I'm not one of those 80s-nostalgic types. I was too young to know what was going on for most of the 80s. My memories of having perspective about the world and popular culture start in mid-to-late '88, and they begin with the frustration that I hadn't seen, nor did I have any desire to see, the types of movies my classmates liked (which included the oeuvre of the aforementioned late Mr. Haim). Around this time, some scenes from the movie Awakenings were being shot at my elementary school, which was a late-19th century red brick building that the word “quaint” was invented to describe. Awakenings, we will recall, starred Robin Williams as a shrink trying to get through to deeply fucked-up and borderline comatose patients, one of whom was played by Robert De Niro. It's probably more complicated than that, but I'm not about to watch it again to get my synposis straight; holy God that movie was fucking boring.
The point is, all the other kids were bouncing off the walls excited that Robin Williams was going to be around. Not many had much context for Robert De Niro's presence, since not too many parents of 10 year olds are the sorts who are like, “sure, let's have a family evening at home and have a Taxi Driver/Deer Hunter/Raging Bull/Angel Heart marathon.” Even my mom, with whom I was already seeing many extremely violent movies, was a little wary about letting me see some of those pictures. She had, however, taken me to see Midnight Run, and I fucking loved Midnight Run.
And so it was that when Robin Williams showed up, a whole bunch of kids excitedly flocked over to get a look, and most of them ran past where Robert De Niro was quietly standing, with a bodyguard, signing autographs for a couple older kids and teachers. Shy though I was, I still gulped and blurted out, “Mr. De Niro, I really liked Midnight Run.” And he looked up and gave me The De Niro Face, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”
When I think of the 80s—he said, gradually getting to the point—I think more of movies like Midnight Run than I do the Haim-everse. Both types of pictures are unique to the decade, but the evolution of teen-oriented cinema never interested me as much (I was too young for the 80s ones, and too old for the late 90s retro 80s teen movies) as genres like the buddy comedy. Buddy comedies were born out of the shift in Hollywood in the late 70s and early 80s from director-dominated movies to producer-dominated movies, to wit, the kind of things that make money. A lot of those 70s-era directors who could no longer get astronomical budgets to chase their white whales got a bit cranky about this shift, griping that the scripts they got were formulaic, had happy endings, and all kinds of other horrors (“Jesus Christ, this goddamn thing actually makes sense! Call my agent, get me off this picture.”)
The thing about these—admittedly commercially-motivated—pictures is that there's a lot of intelligence and substance in the best ones. 48 Hrs, for example, is a simple, linear narrative about a cop who semi-legally springs a convict from the joint for a weekend to help track down a cop-killer ex-colleague. But like in the best examples of the genre that would follow, the interplay between the stars is what makes the movie work. 48 Hrs is actually the story of how a perpetually pissed-off, openly racist white cop manages to form a meaningful connection with a hip, talkative black convict. At the end, they're not best friends by any stretch of the imagination, but they understand each other in a way they hadn't at the beginning.
Lethal Weapon will be the subject of its own entire post in the future, so for the moment it will suffice to say that it was a less antagonistic, more audience-palatable version of the same dynamic, two radically different men coming to an understanding. In the case of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, though, the buddies in question ultimately realize that they're symbiotes; Mel Gibson needs to get a lot less crazy and find stability through friendship and love, and Danny Glover needs to loosen up a little and get a little more crazy on occasion.
Now, Midnight Run is both part of this continuum and yet completely different. For one, because Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin are both white, the racial element is no longer present. But De Niro's blue-collar ex-cop bounty hunter is at odds with Grodin's white-collar embezzling accountant in a far more topical way for the 80s: the buddy reconciliation in Midnight Run is about declaring a ceasefire in the Class Wars.
This was one of the most present recurring themes in 80s movies, precisely because the domestic havoc wreaked by the Reagan administration resulted in the summation (provided perfectly in, of all places, New Jack City): “The rich get richer and the poor don't get a fuckin' thing.” Take one of Mr. Haim's most famous movies, The Lost Boys (which, in full disclosure, sucked too hard for me to make it all the way through): even though it's told from the bad guys' point of view in terms of the class war, it's still about how the nice little bourgeois family is menaced by a bunch of scruffy locals. Any number of Molly Ringwald movies involve a choice between the poor guy and the rich guy.
Back to Midnight Run. We're introduced to De Niro stealthily making his way through an apartment building, where an angry black guy with a shotgun expresses antipathy. De Niro dodges several volleys of 12 gauge displeasure, chasing his target into a hallway, where a car smashes the shotgun guy in the balls with its passenger door. Introduce John Ashton, rival bounty hunter, who insists he will be the one to take shotgun guy in. De Niro agrees, then distracts John Ashton and knocks him unconscious with one punch (all that Method training for Raging Bull clearly paid off). Shotgun guy is confused.
Shotgun guy: The fuck goin' on? You guys ain't cops.
De Niro: No, we're ballet dancers.
It transpires that De Niro works for Joe Pantoliano, in what might be his sleaziest performance ever (careful observation of cinema reveals that that is a spine-chilling achievement), the premier slimeball bail-bondsman in Los Angeles. De Niro is a little pissed that Joey Pants was going to pay John Ashton more to bring shotgun guy in, and insists on being paid Ashton's rate. Joey Pants, his essential lack of balls overwhelming his lack of scruples, agrees, and then tries to get De Niro to find an accountant nicknamed The Duke who embezzled $12 million from a Vegas wiseguy who “ran [De Niro] out of Chicago” (where De Niro had been a cop) a number of years prior. De Niro insists on a fee that will enable him to retire and open a coffee shop, and Joey Pants reluctantly agrees.
De Niro puts his police training to good use, figuring out in no time at all that The Duke is in New York. The FBI, led by Special Agent Yaphet Kotto, confront De Niro and brusquely tell him to fuck off and leave The Duke to them. Yaphet Kotto asks whether this is clear.
De Niro: Let me ask you something. Those sunglasses, they're very nice. Do you guys all shop at the same store?
Yaphet Kotto (pissed off at having to reiterate): Do I make myself clear?
De Niro: Can't you guys take a joke?
Clearly, since it was another nine years before Tommy Lee Jones would say “The FBI has no sense of humor that we're aware of.” (Men in Black, 1997) De Niro had no way of knowing that the answer was, in fact, no. On the other hand, being motivated more by his own amusement at his humor than theirs, De Niro shrugs it off, and sets off a terrific running joke by stealing Yaphet Kotto's ID.
In short order, Vegas wiseguy Dennis Farina sends two henchtards after De Niro with a million-dollar offer to turn The Duke over to them. De Niro, though, is poor yet proud, and categorically says no. He then tracks down The Duke in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone, and posing as Yaphet Kotto (though with a new photo on the ID) arrests him.
The Duke is Charles Grodin. Apropos of an earlier topic, Robin Williams was originally supposed to play the part, and you really have to see Midnight Run to see what a fucking disaster that would have been. Robin Williams is, intermittently, quite funny, but in the manner of a pinball full of nitroglycerine and cocaine. Subtlety and understatement have never been his comic strong suits, though bizarrely his dramatic work is very subtle and understated. Sigh. Rather than dwell on how frustrated I am with Robin Williams, let's instead hail Charles Grodin. He plays the Duke as, at first, a neurotic chatterbox who gradually reveals, as layers of pretense are stripped away, an almost intimidating intelligence and fierce instinct for survival.
Describing the torment Charles Grodin puts De Niro through is impossible. I usually throw in more spoilers than a street-racing chop shop, so it's not that I'm suddenly being considerate for people who haven't seen the movie yet. It's that I'd have to quote whole scenes, and they wouldn't even make any sense unless you'd watched the whole movie. Suffice to say that De Niro says “will you shut the fuck up” so often that you can't even put it in the Midnight Run drinking game. You'd be dead before Grodin throws his tantrum and they get kicked off the plane back to LA.
From here, De Niro's objective is simple: get back to Los Angeles before Joey Pants' bond defaults so he can collect his fee. Unfortunately, Charles Grodin's objective is also simple: get the hell away from De Niro so he can disappear again. They have the FBI, the Mafia, and John Ashton following them (Joey Pants having hired him for a fraction of what he offered De Niro in the hopes of getting The Duke back cheap) to further complicate things.
One thing about the cinema of the 80s—across all genres—that's alternately frustrating and reassuring is that the ending is usually a foregone conclusion. In the case of Midnight Run, you know De Niro is going to get his revenge on Dennis Farina for ruining his police career, he's going to get enough money to open his coffee shop, and yet Charles Grodin is going to end up going free. It's how you get there that makes the movie. Suffice to say, the conclusion of Midnight Run, dependent though it is on coincidence, is brilliantly executed and very suspenseful. The good guys win, the bad guys lose.
Martin Brest directed both Midnight Run, and some years previously Beverly Hills Cop as well. He began (in the 70s with pictures like the underrated Going in Style) and ended (in flames in the 00s with Gigli) as an auteur, and it probably really pisses him off that his two biggest hits and enduring classics were for-hire gigs at studios. Both Midnight Run and Beverly Hills Cop display a rare gift for balancing humor and action, using both to the benefit of each. The secret to Midnight Run's and Beverly Hills Cop's success is that in spite of both being absolutely hilarious throughout, both are action movies with funny dialogue, rather than comedies with action sequences.
The other key is good acting. Eddie Murphy, it cannot be overstated, was once the most charismatic movie star on the planet and underneath all the layers of cockiness and schtick is a tremendously gifted actor. This elevated Beverly Hills Cop above the competition. Midnight Run features two better actors, De Niro and Grodin, who meshed perfectly. So many of their scenes together flow so beautifully they seem improvised. By the end, the proletarian cop/bounty-hunter/would-be humble coffee shop owner and the aristocrat with a social conscience reconcile, realizing that in this life they can never be anything but antagonists, but in the next one, in a different world, they have a chance to truly be friends.
Which, tangentially, brings me back to the passing of Corey Haim. He was a man out of time, born a little too late to fully capitalize on the era his talents were made for; as the type of pleasantly handsome, reasonably compelling teen idol tailor-made for movies with foregone conclusions, the second the cynical 90s dawned and suddenly teen idols were angsty rather than pretty, his sun had set. The cult of irony that led to a million sneering David Hasselhoff jokes on VH1 clip shows, reality shows starring Coreys Haim and Feldman, and all other such cruelty (not to mention the drugs), doomed Corey Haim from ever making a legitimate comeback. He would never be taken seriously in this life. Maybe in the next one.
(p.s. the overwrought title of this entry is from the first verse of this song)
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