I had seen director/screenwriter Joe Carnahan's heavy handed Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane (1998) and wasn't expecting too much from his second directorial attempt, Narc, slated for release in early January. I was, however, taken aback at the way in which Carnahan and actors Ray Liotta and Jason Patric (Sleepers) had transformed a classic cop mystery movie from a clich‚ into a truly worthy cinematic effort.
The film basically follows the tried-and-true cop genre plotline. An undercover police officer is gunned down, and the police have no leads as to the perpetrators of the crime. Two narcotics officers, Nick Tellis (Patric) and Henry Oak (Liotta), are assigned to the case, bringing their tainted careers to light. In an exclusive interview with 34th Street, Liotta extols the virtues of his character's extremes, lauding Carnahan in the process.
"One second I'm beating someone, and the next I'm crying. I mean, [in my first scene in the movie] I'm beating some guy with a pool ball, but what I'm saying is 'If you ever touch your wife and kids again you're dead — then you're really going to be in trouble.' [That adds] a certain sensitivity, and honestly, that's all Joe [Carnahan]. We committed to the depth because, with my character, the guilt [within him] runs so deep that it allows for those extremes of sadness and violence."
These extremes manifest themselves visually as well. A grotesque shot of blood dripping from the mouth of a suspect is juxtaposed with the idyllic, peaceful scene of Jason Patric sleeping with a baby on his chest. These contrasts profoundly polarize the film and thus create a masterful collage of images.
Carnahan's success with Narc has not gone unnoticed. Since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, Carnahan has become one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood. It remains to be seen, however, whether Narc is just a fluke, since Carnahan's first movie was not exactly a success.
According to Liotta, "His first movie Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane... well it sucked, really. Don't write that. I'm joking, I'm joking. C'mon, that's off the record. Stop writing! It just wasn't... God, you guys go right to the pens. I mean, it was okay... I mean, you really couldn't see Narc in Blood, Guts — that's for sure."
Despite his reluctance to be quoted, Liotta makes a good point. Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane showed nowhere near the artistic maturity that Narc does. While falling into roughly the same genre, the main problem with Carnahan's first film was that the dialogue was completely overdone and unbelievable. In Narc, however, Carnahan managed to create two characters that almost perfectly matched the dispositions of Liotta and Patric. Liotta himself confesses that "he wrote such a good script, that basically, we just had to align [our characters] with what he wrote. It was all in the script, we didn't have to add anything."
"[Carnahan] wanted to shoot it in a very Cassavetes style — that being hand-held shots, naturalistic lighting, fly-on-the-wall [camera technique, where the camera is almost invisible, causing] us to act in a very real manner," Liotta explains. "I mean, it's very much a '70s-type movie — like the movies I grew up on... The style in which we shot it is kind of rare these days. Even the edgiest movie of the '90s is still nothing like what it was in the '70s, and this harkens back to that period of time."
Liotta is referring to a time in movies when scripts were primarily character-driven. Consider Deer Hunter, Chinatown, Godfather, all the great '70s films that centered around character conflicts. "It's just not black or white," Liotta adds. "It's very complicated. We have very deep characters, but it's still a cop story, it's still a whodunnit."
Narc, although maybe not on the same level as the aforementioned films, does its best to capture the spirit of '70s filmmaking, infusing a clich‚d plotline with true pathos.
