In Praise of Odd Little Movies

For years, browsing at the local Blockbuster, I went out of my way to avoid renting any movie that could be described as a “blockbuster” — in the sense of a heavily promoted, big budget Hollyood studio flick with an A-list star and kabillions of ooh wow special effects.

I can’t recall what got me started on this — one Die Hard take-off too many, perhaps?

Oh, give me those movies with ensemble casts of less-than-famous actors, playing characters as individual and as memorable as the people we hope to meet in real life. Movies blessed with strong scripts, clever dialogue that wouldn’t know a cliche if it crawled in the door with a flashing neon arrow above it, and layers upon layers begging to be unpeeled by the viewer open to new connections, new ideas, new meanings, new nsights…

In any case, for years now I’ve craved those quirky independent “small” films that the UK has always done so brilliantly (along the lines of the oh-so-darkly-comic Irish film The Commitments, say). The kind of movies that only the off-Hollywood production companies had the balls to gamble on, it often seemed.

“Cult films,” if you will — the kind of movie that our Canadian film industry, at long last, has finally figured out how to do (Margaret’s Museum, for one shining example)… and that Hollywood does, very occasionally, manage to achieve (Fried Green Tomatoes, anyone?).

Barry Levinson’s Diner

Last night I found another American movie that fits my odd entertainment requirements. Diner is far from new (1982, and the DVD came out back in 2000) but for some reason I hadn’t seen it until now.

Set in 1959 in Baltimore, Diner is the “small film” that effectively launched the careers of Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, Ellen Barkin… and that of director Barry Levinson, too, really.

Suddenly, life was more than french fries, gravy and girls.What they wanted most wasn’t on the menu.

Compared to the international films in the same budget category, Diner’s not quite as cleverly conceived or as successfully executed as those who were intimately involved with its creation would like to believe — the DVD’s behind-the-scenes interviews make it clear that this was a watershed experience for the young cast — but it had to have been something of a breakthrough for a Hollywood studio, just that the film was made and released in the first place!

To be honest, it starts slow. We’ve got to hang with this long enough to start to care about the characters — that takes maybe the first 10 minutes, at most — because there’s no conventional three- or five-act plot here. There are precious few of the highly charged dramatic moments, those over-the-top live-or-die crisis points we’ve learned to expect in on-screen entertainment.

No, this is just the relatively simple story of a bunch of ordinary young guys, hanging out together at the kind of all-night roadside diner that was an icon of the era. Pure self-indulgent Fifties nostalgia, this flick.

And it works as well as it does because the casting was brilliant.

Even when you’re watching these young barely-known faces that are, today, so very well-known to the screen and tabloids, the actors take a back seat to the characters. The natural way that these guys banter and bicker and play off each other (apparently there was a good deal of improv in the making of the film) is sufficient to suspend our disbelief — and Barry Levinson says he actively encouraged some goofy ad-libbing, to get that effect — it feels like we’re included on the fringe of a group of real-life friends.

What concerns them? Whether the better “make-out music” is Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis. “Presley,” votes the lost-boy gambler, Boogie Sheftell (Mickey Rourke), on whom I suddenly developed a monster teen-type crush! But it’s Modell (Paul Reiser), not surprisingly, who has the best banter, with memorable lines like this:

We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.

and my all-time favourite:

You know what word I’m not comfortable with? Nuance. It’s not a real word. Like gesture. Gesture’s a real word. With gesture you know where you stand. But nuance? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.

So here they are, hovering on the brink of their adult lives, and on the brink of the 1960s, when male-female relationships and the conventional lifestyle of the American male — indeed, the world as they know it — is about to change forever. Strutting and bluffing their way past the universal fear of becoming responsible adults, these guys are goofy, touching, stupid, annoying, funny, and ultimately very very real.

All in all, Diner was a tasty little surprise. I’ll enjoy the DVD again, for sure, if only to drool over those fabulous old chrome-dream-machine cars and a great retro soundtrack.

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