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Elmore Leonard’s the king of cool. If you’ve read any of his crime novels, you always get a real sense of character and personality. (Leonard’s westerns are pretty great too, but not the same kind of cool.) I started reading Freaky Deaky a couple days ago in anticipation of the film’s world premiere. I ran low on time and only got about a third of the way through it, but it sings with Leonard’s great dialogue. One my favorite lines was spoken by Robin, an ex-con flower child gone femme fatale. She’s a writer of historical romance novels now, and describes her work as “full of rape and adverbs.”
After the screening, there was a Q&A with the cast and writer/director Charles Matthau. Moderator Kurt Loder (yes, of MTV News) said that many of Leonard’s novels seem ready made for the movies. Most of his books from the 1980s through the 1990s have already been adapted into films, including Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, and Out of Sight. Loder’s right. Reading what I did of Freaky Deaky, I could see it making the leap to screen with ease.
I’m glad I won’t finish the novel until I get some free time next week. If I finished Freaky Deaky before seeing the film adaptation, I probably would have been more disappointed.
Freaky Deaky
Director: Charles Matthau
Rating: TBD
Release Date: TBD
Freaky Deaky hit some rough patches before shooting even started. The original cast left the film due to various personal matters. So out went Craig Robinson, Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser, and William H. Macy. To replace them, in came Michael Jai White, Billy Burke, Christian Slater, and Crispin Glover. Some would consider it a downgrade, but it’s more of a lateral trade in my eyes. What you lose in bigger names, you make up for in character, and Freaky Deaky is filled with some colorful characters.
There’s Chris Mankowski (Burke), a cynical ex-arson and ex-bomb squad cop reassigned to sex crimes. There’s Skip Gibbs (Slater), a burnout former radical who now wires explosives for the movies. There’s Robin, the previously mentioned flowergirl fatale (Breanne Racano). There’s wigged-out millionaire eccentric Woody (Glover) and his weaseled-out brother Mark (Andy Dick). And there’s Donelle (White), Woody’s ultracool driver and exasperated confidant.
Freaky Deaky all centers on Robin and Skip trying to shake money from Woody as revenge for sending them to prison back when they were hippies. Mankowski gets involved in the whole plot when a rape victim named Greta (Sabina Gadecki) files a report against Woody. Turns out Woody and Mark have been using their inheritance to throw swinging, dirty sex parties.
So you essentially have three groups whose stories will interlace. Of the many characters to juggle, it’s the Woody/Donelle duo that really steal the show. Glover acts like the person the public thinks he is: totally tripped out, drunk, drugged, and in his own universe. Macy would have played Woody so different and probably much straighter and closer to the book. Glover just takes the character into some bizarre dimension. White’s plays straight man to Woody, and there’s an odd rapport between them even though all the good sense is squarely with Donelle.
The other two groups don’t fare so well, but that’s not the fault of the actors at all. Slater’s tuned-out cowboy outlaw is fine when he’s on screen, and as Robin, Racano’s got the right amount of sinister and right amount of sexy going on. (It helps that her voice sounds ADR’d, so it’s extra smoky and downright succulent.) No, the problem is all with the material and what was done with it. You have all that Leonard-brand dynamite at your disposal and wind up with a poorly wired bomb that goes poof instead of boom.
Mathau shoots through the story too quickly. The characters aren’t able to make the best possible impressions when they’re on screen because the scenes just breeze by. You dig on some moments, but few are allowed to linger. This rush throws off the comic timing in numerous scenes. That may also be a symptom of the way the film was shot. Something about the compositions and look of the movie felt less like a feature film and more like a cable TV production. The characters were confined and not allowed to inhabit the scenes or spaces they were in.
Part of me thinks that this had to do with budget compromises given the recasting the film. If that’s the case, it’s really unfortunate. There are some great scenes that could have used some opening up, a little more time to unfold, and a better eye. I’d have loved to see more of Robin playing people for dupes to get what she wants, or more of Skip since Slater’s performance seems like it could have been given more time, or more about Mankowski, whose life is much more interesting in the bit of the book I read. Even the opening scene could have been opened up more. It involves Mankowski’s last day on the bomb squad and a guy who’s about to be blown up in his own home. It’s funny, it’s tense, and it’s cool in the novel, but it isn’t quite as tense or cool in movie. (Luckily it’s still pretty funny.)
Though the book is set in the late 80s, the film is set a decade earlier, which Matthau used to evoke the vibe of 70s movies. It doesn’t quite come across since the movie’s veneer is so clean and contemporary, though the outfits help convey the period a bit (though it’s more about kitsch than verisimilitude). More could have been done with the collision of decades, especially with the idealism of the 60s being doused by the cynicism of the 70s.
The score does what it can to depict the timeframe as well, though it may also contribute to the rushed pace of the film. I like Joe’s LoDuca scores from other movies, most notably the Evil Dead films. In Freaky Deaky he gets the right amount of wah pedal and funk thump that’s pretty right on. Unfortunately, the score is played throughout most of the film. This may not sound like a bad thing, but it’s distracting if the audio mix isn’t done right and if there isn’t enough connection between the sound, the scene, and the performances.
There’s one scene in a club with a music number and a dance. It’s all set to an original title song co-written by Matthau and LoDuca. We don’t get to hear the song in full, and we don’t get to see the characters in the scene dance as freakily or as deakily as they could have. They seem boxed in, and not because they’re close up and bumping and grinding to the music, but because the scene isn’t given room to breathe. I just wanted to pull back and admire what was being shown, but off to the next scene we went. It ain’t too groovy being whisked off the dance floor against your will, especially when you were just getting to know someone better.
