by Hadley Hury
He kept his eyes open wide. Looking. He stretched out his arms and brushed the leaves as he went. Not hurrying. At least not too quickly.
***
By two o-clock he had watched the movie and edited his review.
Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man is a small but triumphant masterwork
To say that Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man is a sensuous thriller would be absolutely accurate and rather uselessly trivializing. Sensuous thrillers have, after all, in recent years become a dime-a-dozen phenomenon. American filmmaking today represents a near-classic example of a decadent period in art, and the rush to re-mine the rich genres and styles of our cinematic past is one of its chief characteristics. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong in that, it can prove a fatal formula for filmic imagination when coupled with the current lemming-like attention span of Hollywood commerce.
The revival of interest in film noir,which began to manifest onscreen during the 1980s and thus far shows no signs of abating, can be attributed, as much as anything, to this jejune copycatting. The really fine ones have been few and far between (The Grifters, arguably, first among them), but there have been just enough to fuel the retro-noir trend as one of the few low-budget, safe-bet alternatives to blockbusterdom. Most of our leading directors, even those with sensibilities fundamentally at odds with the genre, have, at least at least once during the past 15 years, tried their hand at it.
What an unexpected and satisfying pleasure then, late stage of an old game, to have an American master remind us that we have more interesting reasons than the current failure of imagination for enjoying these dark studies of people of low degree, reasons that have to do less with our cinema’s self-cannibalization and more to do with who we are and how we live today. Adapting his screenplay (pseudonymously credited to Al Hayes) from an original screen story by John Grisham, Altman has fashioned a dark jewel of a film in which the use of noir elements is not the usual matter of a few stylistic (quite often, extraneous or misapplied) flourishes. Like the great, vertiginous post-WWII noir, The Gingerbread Man is a window on a seductive, unsettling, psychological state—the classic noir state of the center not holding, of the threat of disunity from within—a window which, though of no useful perspective to the threatened protagonist, provides the viewer the comfortable distance of framing. We are able to lose ourselves completely in the world of the film because Altman creates a complete world, one in which style and substance are indistinguishable. And yet—even as we identify with the noir characters’ bad behavior, their brazen weaknesses, corruption, and the mess they make of things—we shadow their missteps without falling into the void with them. The Gingerbread Man is an authoritatively conducted walk on the dark side; it is moviemaking that leaves you with slime on your heels, some fine points of moral ambivalence to chew, and a grin on your face at Altman’s still-developing capacities to entertain.
In this character-driven hejira through paranoia and human failing, Kenneth Branagh plays Rick Magruder, a self-indulgent but successful Savannah attorney. He has made a name for himself, unpopular with the local law enforcement, by defending cop killers and other dicey, high-profile cases. He seems something of a sexual addict. He loves his children but usually picks them up late at his ex-wife’s home and never seems to have enough attention for them. He drinks a little too much. He’s arrogant. He’s charming. It’s as hard to take a barometric reading of his moral center as it is for the meteorologists to gauge whether Geraldo, the offshore hurricane that threatens Savannah throughout the film, will indeed make landfall. In the end, both tensions break and some air gets cleared, but not before Altman has sucked us into his accelerating vortex of narrative and spiritual atmospherics. Branagh’s casting is brilliant: he makes Magruder unsympathetic and attractive by turns: smart, passive aggressive, bad-boy likable, with self-doubt that verges on self-loathing, worthy both of our scorn and of saving. The performance, low-key, delicately observed and detailed, and featuring a superb low-country accent, is Branagh’s best in quite awhile.
The most archetypal form in the story is the troubled and troubling noir female (Embeth Davidtz) who takes Magruder for the ultimate ride that will either take him to the just wages of sin or to their mutual redemption. Davidtz is good in the somewhat underdeveloped role; she keeps the viewer off-balance just as she does Magruder. Her Mallory Doss is not easy to like but she’s had a hard time, so it may not be her fault that she has a look in her eye like that of a wet alley cat. (Robert Downey Jr., lending local color as a tipsy private dick, gets one of the movie’s best lines when Magruder assigns him to watch Mallory for a night: “You got me here babysittin’ Pandora…”)
It’s hard to know how much of Grisham’s original story remains on screen; most of the brilliantly fluid cinematic narrative is clearly Robert Altman at the top of his mature game. One can’t help but suspect that the subtle character-layering, the evocatively saturated mood, color and tone, and the edgy psychology derive from Altman’s screenplay. One of the most satisfying aspects of The Gingerbread Man is its marriage of Altman’s characteristic insistence on unrushed, character-driven storytelling with steadily mounting suspense.
The director is marvelously aided and abetted by cinematographer Chagwei Gu and by his son, Stephen Altman, whose Savannah production design—rain-slick wrought iron and cobblestones, candlelight, Spanish moss, and gleaming mahogany sideboards—is a central aspect of the overall design.
Noteworthy is the fact that an unusually high percentage of setups are middle-distance shots through paned windows; backlight frames the characters, frequently in handsome 18th and 19th century interiors, against the night and the coming storm. We see the paneled libraries, antique furniture, exquisite fabrics, flowers, and silver cigarette boxes glow in lamplight, the stuff of civilization. But the characters inside these rain-streaked windows become increasingly anxious, their movements jerky and unsure, like spoiling watercolors. Altman masterfully builds a dissonant tension as the material world of old Savannah reassures us and suggests the protagonist is relatively untouchable, even as we sense his world unraveling. As the tale twists to its hairpin conclusion, the hurricane flings itself onshore, and Magruder’s amoral self-absorption pulls a noose around his neck, we realize that The Gingerbread Man is, quite specifically, noir for the ’90s. Instead of the psychologically and economically displaced anti-heroes of the genre in its late-’40s heyday, the outsider here is an articulate, well-dressed, sardonically witty attorney; instead of being outside by virtue of post-war urban anomie, the crisis he must finally confront is that he is standing outside his own life. Instead of being led astray into a life of crime through a real but misguided love for an evil, scheming woman, he is less sympathetically corrupted by insular sensuality and boredom. Magruder, like society at large, confuses data and real information; he is often on his cell phone but rarely in the conversation that most matters. In the postmodern colors, tone, and temperament of our era, Robert Altman recreates in The Gingerbread Man the noir narrative as a quest for authenticity, and posits a hero whose fragmented values and attention span seem maddeningly familiar.
Several lines of squalls, like gray armadas with tall ragged thunderheads for topsails, advanced in the afternoon and, with the thunder rumbling and the rain slashing down the windows behind the half-closed louvers of the bedroom shutters, Hudson slept.
Chapter 10
Sitting on one arm of the brocaded chesterfield Sydney drew a deep swallow of scotch and read the letter. Again.
Chaz had brought the letter along on the first Sunday in March to the Buckhead restaurant where he was meeting her after an afternoon of sorting through his father’s papers. She had known something was wrong immediately. He was breathing heavily, his eyes first darting nervously around the restaurant and then riveting expectantly on her. When their wine arrived, he had produced the letter from his pants pocket.
“Something with the inheritance?” Sydney asked, even before looking at the thick le
tter that had been folded back into its envelope. She had passed the last several days in increasing irritation over the new knowledge that although Chaz would be inheriting a little more than a million dollars, a bit more than she’d guessed, his father had stipulated, in his parsimonious Presbyterian wisdom, that it be doled out as a trust until Chaz reached the age of forty. To distract herself, she had focused instead on the matter of the unremarkable but spacious house off Blacklands Road. It wasn’t the best end of the street but it was still good. They could live there, mortgage-free at least, or realize perhaps six or eight hundred thousand on it.
“No, not exactly,” said Chaz. He had stared fixedly at the small bowl of freesias in the middle of the table. “Just read it.”
***
Sydney would always remember exactly what she felt on reading, that first time, the letter that Chaz had discovered in his father’s desk. Always a quick study, she had, indistinctly but with instinctive certainty, seen her life rearrange itself before her eyes. Before she had finished reading the letter, she had known that her life was changing or, to put it more accurately, that her life was suddenly taking on its inevitable shape.
Now she laid the letter on the table and paced the room slowly, trying with the adjustment of a frame here and the smoothing of a rug there to enforce the sense of calm that she had learned to muster in any situation. For someone who had never really known a moment of internal peace in thirty-three years, and who had of necessity thrived more in a realm of anticipation than in the present tense, it was a useful tool, and had enabled her to become a perspicacious strategist in setting and attaining goals. If it might be said that some people were goal-oriented, Sydney was goal-driven. But this rapacious need to get to the next place often did its best work when she tempered it with a cool and critical stillness. Indeed, this combination of living with a mind in overdrive and one foot on the emotional brakes had, over the years, become instinctive. Where once, for a period in her twenties, her dreams and plans and frustrations sometimes kept her awake long hours of the night, she now could summon a remarkable objectivity that helped her channel her energies more usefully. It had certainly served her well as an actor, and now that she had left that career behind it served her well as she moved forward in her new life. And though this capacity for self-preserving poise perhaps did not engender any real serenity or relaxation of her constant vigilance, it at least produced some semblance of regenerative rest occasionally, and, here and there, for scattered moments anyway, an approximation of contentment.
As she wandered idly now about the room, placing the files back into her leather brief, sitting in the club chair and leafing through an auction catalogue, going for another ice cube for her drink, Sydney realized that until she had read the letter for the first time, that evening three months ago, she had actually been allowing herself to toy with the notion that her life was sufficient. That a handsome man who adored her and sizeable bucks and a house on a leafy street in Peachtree Battle were enough. Halfway through the letter, however, she realized that she had, uncharacteristically, been fooling herself, and Sydney did not suffer fools kindly, especially when the foolishness was her own. And so, less than five minutes later when she had handed the letter back across the table to him, she was back on track, in a whole new world of possibility, one that she recognized as truly worth her aspirations, effort, and skill. She had lifted her glass and smiled until he returned the toast, and she had spoken in a subdued but encouraging tone.
“You should go down and visit him, shouldn’t you?”
And later, as the Porsche had swept through the pristine, fragrant air of Atlanta in early spring, around the curve past St. Philip’s Cathedral, she had said, “And, in answer to your charmingly persistent question of these last several months, I am ready to marry you now. I had been thinking late summer, but now, I think, the sooner the better.” She reached over and he gave her his hand. She held it tightly, and as they turned into Peachtree Hills, she laid her head back.
He needed her.
Despite the intermittent slashes of discreetly pale streetlight through the barely leafing tree branches overhead, the face that he saw was, as usual, radiant, constant, and sure.
***
Sydney paced and sipped the last of her scotch, and waited for her knight errant to return. It seemed reasonable to assume that before they slept that night she would know more about how she should help, take charge. Organize possibilities. Her questions were ready, as were a subsequent array of responses and next-step options. She was prepared, she imagined, for anything Chaz might say and, of course, she was perfectly prepared to interpret how he said it. She had never intended to be in a position in which she would have so much riding on him. She loved him, she knew, and she loved his ravishing, slightly dissipated good looks, his sexiness, the way his desire for and trust in her shone from his eyes unguardedly, but she had never been blind to his weaknesses. But she drew courage and a quiet excitement from knowing that she had never once in her life taken an uncalculated risk. Although not perhaps in the way he had once said, Chaz’s father had been right about one thing: He’ll be fine.
She would see to it.
Chapter 11
Charlie brought the drinks out onto the upper gallery, following Hudson’s gaze toward the sunset, southwest over the Gulf.
“It’s yours in a way, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. He handed Hudson his drink. “That’s how I’ve always felt.”
“I guess you’re right. I never articulated it that way but, yes, you’re absolutely right. Just like people have their own river or lake or pond. This is our ocean.”
“Well, for you Memphis folks, it really is. The Mississippi River feeds it, connects you to it.” He gestured over the railing of the gallery. “Your blood’s out there.”
Hudson smiled. They had been having parts of this conversation for many years. He had always known that one reason Charlie took a shine to him was that he’d recognized Hudson’s passion for the Gulf. “Well, you grew up on the Ohio, which leads into the Mississippi.”
“Not the same. We seemed a little more removed in Louisville. When I was a boy we vacationed in Virginia, where both my parents had family, usually the mountains. Once or twice the beach, such as it is, Virginia Beach. Didn’t know what real sand was till I got down here in the Navy. The Gulf and I adopted each other.”
“Forty years?”
“Forty. My God.” He squinted into the sunset, sipping his drink. Standing straight, with his white hair whipping in the wind and his other hand on the railing, he looked like a captain at sea. Or the benevolent lord of a great estate, which, it occurred to Hudson, he no doubt was. He looked like a man who had been in this place not four decades, but always, a man in whom place and soul have become inseparable.
“I remember,” said Hudson, “when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of winters in Memphis, from dreams about Fort Walton and Destin—that’s where my family used to come—and being completely wrecked that I wasn’t really here, but there, with my third or fourth grade class to walk to in a cold rain. The dreams were so vivid, so real. I couldn’t believe the cruel joke. It was devastating.”
“Poor little guy.”
“For a lot of years I think I fairly well lived for those two or three weeks in summer. I was always the navigator, in charge of the map, for the family car trip. I had everyone scouring the shoulders of the highway for the first trace of sand like prospectors for gold. We always had a contest as to who first smelled the ocean. When we hit the coast, before we got to wherever we were staying that year, my sister and I made my poor father pull over and let us out. We ran up the dunes and just stood for a minute or two. I guess that first sight of the Gulf was the purest joy I knew.”
Hudson had been looking out to sea, but turned now to Charlie. “I wondered what it would be like now. If I’d feel either the excitement or that in some way I was coming home. The summer’s something of a test flight. I’ve been on automatic pilot
for quite awhile.”
“And?”
“Nothing, here, there, or anywhere, is the same.” He paused. But it’s…good…. It’s good.”
“God, I hope so. Maybe not pure joy, oh no. But something that’s always been here for you, something real.” He grasped Hudson’s arm. “Something.”
Hudson nodded. They took in the magnificent view for another minute or so, framed by the tall old trees, the broad beach at Laurel white in the distance against a tangerine sky and the water going cobalt. “Let’s go in,” Hudson said. “Probably not for an old salt like you, but it’s still pretty warm for a hot-natured, air-conditioning addicted city slicker like myself.”
“Did you notice how I whisked you up here through the sunroom? I’ll show you why, now. I have a surprise I’m pretty happy about and want to share with you in the living room.”
***
“It’s a Walter Anderson. I’ve had it about a year now and I’ve never had a picture mean so much to me. It’s Western Lake at sunrise.”
Charlie sat in his favorite chair in the long, handsome room, facing the large oil over the mantel. “I can sit here for hours, perfectly content, usually reading or doing a crossword puzzle, but sometimes just listening to music and looking at it. Great company.”
Hudson could understand. The landscape, some five feet wide and four feet tall, was at once imposing and retiring; it drew you into its rich color treatment of the lagoon that lay just to the east beyond the side porch of Charlie’s house.
“It’s so fine.”
“Apparently it was one of the last things he did and someone got hold of it and had it in their home in D.C. for years, and then a dealer in Palm Beach got it who’d been over this way once or twice and knew what the inscription on the back meant. She called and made me an offer—an arm and a leg—but, of course, I had to have it. It was meant to be in this house. Right up there.”
