I asked for water
and they gave me rosé wine
a horse that knows arithmetic
and a dog that tells your fortune
-Elvis Costello, “Uncomplicated”
There isn’t much I was asking for from 1990’s Bright Angel. The description on Kino Lorber’s site made this sound like a neo-noir. I knew it was set in Montana and Wyoming, so I had my fingers crossed for something in the vein of Red Rock West or maybe Blood Simple. Failing that, maybe it would be a character study like Melvin & Howard. Instead, it managed to be none of those things. In the end, I’m not even sure what it was.
The movie opens with a father and son played by Sam Shepherd and Dermot Mulroney, respectively. I’m not sure if what they are doing is really duck-hunting. I would describe it more as wholesale slaughter using a pump-action shotgun. It’s like a Mafia hit on some waterfowl. This event does not even seem to have any relevance to anything that follows it.
They return home to find Will Patton standing in their kitchen with the usual intensity he brings to a role. Shepherd’s wife / Mulroney’s mother is packing and she is leaving with Patton. We won’t see either of these characters again.
Mulroney looks to be in his mid-20’s, yet he seems to have a mental age somewhere between 10 and 12. He seems bewildered by momma leaving. He is as dim as Peter Sellers’s character in Being There, but without the beatific smile or the demeanor of the Buddha. Mulroney is a blank slate that stays blank straight through to the end credits. Unfortunately, he is our lead.
He has a friend played by Benjamin Bratt. As the town’s bad boy, Bratt seems to be the only person in this picture who really understands his character. That said, he seems about as juvenile as Mulroney, such as when he catches a fish and yells out, “Come look at this fish I caught! It’s a really big fish!” I wonder if he also still yells for his mom’s attention when he successfully rides a bike without grabbing the handlebars.
The two end up on a road trip to take Lili Taylor to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where her brother is in prison. It is strange to see this darling of 90’s indie film positioned as a femme fatale. She is a seductress who is not seductive in the least. The baby doll voice she uses here is grating. I did not believe a single minute of her performance.
Together, Mulroney and Taylor make one of the screen’s least watchable couples. She’s obviously using him, but I suspect she finds him too dull to be worthy of much effort. It’s like the cliché about having a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. Nor do we really know the endgame she has in mind. Instead, she goads this wannabe-boxer into a watering hole’s no-holds-barred fight contest, where he has his ass handed to him. I have no idea why she does this. I suspect that, had she given it any thought later, she also would wonder why she had done that.
There’s an odd cameo by Bill Pullman as a shifty character Taylor is going to pay to not testify against her brother. When Pullman first appears, he is chewing on something. Given the weirdness of his performance, I thought it was scenery, but it turns out to just be toast. I’m not sure what he was going for here but he seems to be channeling Crispin Glover.
Most unexpected is Delroy Lindo as Mulroney’s wheelchair-bound uncle. This is an exceptionally angry man with a gun collection that might even exceed that of the creep in Targets. His dream is to gun down the people who caused the accident that resulted in his confinement, as he believes they are going to come back “to finish the job.” What this has to do with Mulroney and Taylor and their road trip is beyond me. We will not see this character again.
The only good performances in this are from Shepherd and Bratt. I feel complimenting Shepherd here is unnecessary as he is always good in movies of this type and in this setting. I imagine they just turned on the cameras and filmed him doing whatever he was doing in real life at the time. Bratt is interesting to see here, especially if you primarily know him from Law & Order. But then the movie dispenses with him early in the road trip, and we will not see this character again.
I have no idea what Bright Angel wants to be. Given the relative lack of plot, I would normally assume such a picture to be a character study, but the characters here just aren’t very interesting. At the same time, they are too odd to be portraits of everyday people. The title leads one to believe the viewer will see a bright angel or two, but all I found here are dim bulbs. I do not intend to ever see any of these characters again.
Dir: Michael Fields
Starring Dermot Mulroney, Lili Taylor, Sam Shepherd (for about 10 minutes)
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray