I was too young to connect to the brimmingly
sensitive John Cusack an entire generation fell for: I was but seven at the
time of 1985’s The Sure Thing, and
eleven when Lloyd Dobler raised his Boombox to Ione Skye in 1989’s Say Anything…. The Cusack I tuned into
was the slightly bruised figure visible by the end of the century: the lovelorn
Rob of 2000’s High Fidelity, a film
engineered so as to rhyme with any
boyish poplover’s romantic ups-and-downs; before that, the hitman of 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank, which may stand as
the greatest romantic comedy ever conceived with the male viewer in mind, in
that it features one character being bloodily skewered with a Biro, and another
with a job sourcing mildly obscure Eighties vinyl.
There’s a scene two-thirds of the way through
the latter film that gets me every time – an unexpectedly tender interlude
between the bloodletting and sharp-edged social satire. Our ambiguous hero, the
self-improving assassin Martin Q. Blank (Cusack), has retreated to a balcony
overlooking his high-school reunion with DJ Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver), the
sweetheart he abandoned on prom night. To the sound of Pete Townshend’s “Let My
Love Open The Door”, the pair begin to pick over some unfinished personal
business.
“I think I was overly harsh when I said you were
broken,” offers Debi, by way of conciliation. “I don’t think you’re broken. I
think you’re mildly sprained. Nothing that can’t be mended.”
“Sorry if I fucked up your life,” Martin
ventures, perhaps sensing how that “if” might be superfluous.
“It’s not over yet.”
In a film that posits contract killing as a
metaphor for the damage we can wreak whenever we get close to someone, the
scene works because it opens up the possibility of change and redemption – that
a partner might recognise our pain and forgive us all previous trespasses. Grosse Pointe Blank is a peculiarly
potent watch for men because the script, written by Cusack with Steve Pink,
D.V. DeVincentis and Tom Jankiewicz, on some level acknowledges all our worst
instincts: the desire (often misplaced) to put the world to rights, the anger
that can shade over into murderous aggression, the persistent need to do
something, anything
with our fists, our dicks, a gun – because that’s what we’ve been hotwired to
do.
Blank’s temporary solution has been to isolate
himself, first on prom night, now as an “independent contractor”. (Note
Cusack’s distinctive walk: fast, clipped, guarded, one hand forever poised on
the pistol in his pocket.) He is, however, more vulnerable than threatening:
though he insists his were deserving victims (“You should read the files on some
of these fuckers!”), we see the toll this lonely life has taken in the dark
rings beneath his eyes, and how he comes alive again circling Debi. Cusack and
Driver were a thing once upon a time, and their chemistry remains a joy: not
just affectionate and sexy but regenerative, suggestive of all manner of blanks
being filled. My inchoate late-adolescent self couldn’t help but aspire to
that.
For some while, there was talk of a follow-up –
perhaps one in which Martin Blank finds spirituality? (But, really, who needs
God when you have Debi Newberry?) Instead, we got 2008’s War, Inc., a spiritual sequel in which Cusack played a Blankish
contractor stalking the Middle East; its Bush-bashing got blunt, and it missed
Driver, for all the zip Hilary Duff brought to her role as the Yemeni Britney
Spears. There may nevertheless be something equally instructive in the morally
compromised figure Cusack now cuts on screen: consider his greasy killer in The Paperboy, The Frozen Ground’s curdled misogynist, or his sweaty,
vote-grabbing Nixon in The Butler.
Where earlier Cusack characters displayed a
puppy-eyed idealism, here are men tainted by exactly those grim compulsions Grosse Pointe Blank diagnoses. They
reflect what might have happened to Martin Blank if he hadn’t met Debi
Newberry, and his hurt hadn’t healed; if he’d given into the worst aspects of
his nature, and gone more or less entirely to seed. We don’t all wind up
bombing Cambodia or masturbating in front of Nicole Kidman, thankfully, but in
Cusack’s recent reinvention as a prolific character actor, there lurks a
valuable warning about what can happen to us once the dewy sheen of youth has
evaporated.
Grosse Pointe Blank is available on DVD through Disney.
