CINEMA: Equal Opportunity Evil

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The job offer back up the road didn't pan out, and his last five bucks have disappeared into his gas tank. Looks like Red Rock, Wyoming, is the end of the line for Michael (Nicolas Cage). And it's not exactly a job hunter's paradise. But when Michael stops in the local bar looking for a little vocational guidance, he is astonished to discover that he's just the man the proprietor is looking for. Wayne (J.T. Walsh) needs somebody to bump off his wife. As it turns out, Wayne is just a little too eager to fill this vacancy, for he violates the most basic rule of personnel placement: always check a prospective employee's references.

Had Wayne done so before handing over a $5,000 advance to Michael and telling him to get busy, Wayne would have learned that Michael was not Lyle from Dallas, the hit man he has been impatiently awaiting. And if Michael had been a little less desperate he might not have pocketed the cash. But then, if people were in general a little less stupid and and a lot less greedy, there would have been no need to invent film noir in the first place.

Red Rock West belongs to that genre's low-budget country-and-western subspecies. Michael is a classic film noir protagonist, essentially a good, slightly dim sort who is drawn into evil's web because of a momentary weakness and whose struggles to escape serve only to entangle him more tightly. In film noir, the spider at the center of such a web is usually a woman, and in this case she is Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle), Michael's intended victim. After he spares her, she expresses her gratitude by luring him still nearer to destruction. Film noir also typically calls for a dash of psychopathy, and in Red Rock West that is provided by Dennis Hopper, who plays the professional killer and causes lightning flashes of madness to streak across the screen. Red Rock West has the customary film noir hint of civic corruption (barkeep Wayne is also the town sheriff) and reveals the equally conventional link between crimes present and a large crime past.

In film noir, evil is endemic in our history and our society, inescapably embracing both sexes and every social type. Putting it mildly, the genre is -- or was -- cynical and subversive. But given the power of humanistic piety in contemporary movies -- it is virtually the only acceptable tone for American films seeking an adult audience -- film noir, if it's done at all, is usually accompanied by nostalgic winks and genial, reassuring cues of self- consciousness. Just kidding, folks, say the filmmakers. Red Rock West, in contrast, is all furious conviction. Its humor is sardonic; its ironies are conveyed by violence; and its view of human nature is bleak.

Even more perverse, from the Hollywood packager's point of view, the film's stars do not have big-time chic and guaranteed box-office appeal, and, Hopper aside, they work in an intense but minimalist vein. Meanwhile, the director, John Dahl (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Rick) is young and virtually unknown.