When I learned of Ray Liotta’s sudden passing on Thursday, like so many of us my thought went back to his most famous film: Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Goodfellas. I thought of the fates of the cast of that movie. Joe Pesci won an Oscar, revitalized his career, and had a successful decade in movies before disappearing for from acting for a second time. Robert DeNiro, whose career had been an autopilot for the previous few years, managed to get it back on track, and spent the next decade doing some of his greatest work. Lorraine Bracco earned a Supporting Actress and a successful actress before she got her role of a lifetime as Dr. Melfi. Paul Sorvino officially became one of the great character actors in both film and television.
Only Ray Liotta never seemed to quite find the superstardom his co-stars did. His early career had featured truly great performances: an iconic role as Melanie Griffith’s psychotic boyfriend in Something Wild had earned him a Golden Globe nomination and prior to Goodfellas he’d starred in another landmark role as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. But Goodfellas seemed to get him typecast in mostly villainous roles (Unlawful Entry, Turbulence) or leads in terrible family films that he was unsuited for (Corrina, Corrina, Operation Dumbo Drop) Occasionally he would find a decent film, such as Cop Land or HBO’s The Rat Pack, but the lion’s share of his post Goodfellas’ film were painfully beneath his potential. This trend continued for much of the new millennium, staring with Hannibal and an endless series of pretty lousy action films such as Smokin’ Aces, In the Name of the King and revolver. And there were some pretty disastrous films where he trashed his reputation such as Wild Hogs, Observe and Report, etc. Only in the last ten years was he beginning to turn his career in the right direction, mostly in smaller films such as the undervalued Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly and Kill the Messenger. In the last three years, it looked like a full fledged comeback was finally coming with his work in the undervalued TV cop drama Shades of Blue and the final season of Amazon’s Hanna and of course his work in The Many Saints of Newark, The Sopranos film prequel, which brought him back to his roots.
What makes me wonder about Liotta’s potential was that there was a brief period in the early 2000s when it looked like another comeback was coming. In 2004, he had a memorable guest stint on the ER episode ‘Time of Death’, playing Charlie Metcalf, an angry man whose early diagnosis of stomach pains masks far greater problems. We follow the minutiae of his treatment and we learn that he has wasted his life as both a husband and a father. Rather then go through with advanced treatment that will not work, he decides to sign a DNR. It was a magnificent performance on a series that was seriously flagging at this point, and Liotta deservedly won an Emmy for Best Guest Actor in a Drama.
Peak TV’s drain of Hollywood best actors into television had not truly begun yet, so it is possible Liotta took the job because he was having trouble finding work. That said, I still don’t think he would have gotten the job had it not been for a film that came out two years earlier that had critically improved his flagging career and shown what brilliant potential he had. That movie was Joe Carnahan’s independent film Narc.
Narc isn’t a masterpiece the same way that some of the other films I’ve reviewed for this column are, though it should be noted it was highly regarded when it came out in 2002. The Independent Spirit Awards gave it three nominations, Liotta for Best Supporting Actor, Carnahan for Directing and cinematography. There was some discussion at the time of its release of Liotta being a contender for an Oscar nomination, but the category, already overburdened with several great character actors (including Christopher Walken for Catch Me if You Can, Ed Harris for The Hours, and the eventual winner Chris Cooper for Adaptation) was too crowded for Liotta to sneak in. And the film itself, while very good, isn’t nearly at the level of so many other procedural films at the time. What makes Narc unique and work well even now is the fact that had two of the potentially greatest actors of all time in its lead roles. Liotta’s potential was never realized due to bad career choices; Jason Patric, who had the co-lead, turned away from Hollywood after a brilliant start.
Few actors career have begun with more potential than Jason Patric’s. One of his first roles was in the cult classic The Lost Boys. In 1990, he starred in the noir masterpiece After Dark, My Sweet which Roger Ebert listed as one of the greatest films ever made. The next year he appeared in another brilliant procedural Rush, where he played the lead detective investigating the drug culture in Texas. He and his partner, memorably played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, become first lovers, then hopeless addicts. After these two brilliant performances Patric began to slowly extract himself from the Hollywood system. (His role in Speed 2: Cruise Control was no doubt a major factor in that decision.) Narc was the first film he had made in four years.
In the opening sequence of the film we see Nick Tellis (Patric) chasing a drug addict holding on to a baby. We never see the direct result, but we see the consequences: him before a review board, him at home unable to sleep, him refusing to go back to work. As a bone, his superior offers him a chance to get back to work investigating the murder of an undercover named Michael Calvess. Nick tells him to go to hell. That night, he looks at the file and while he’s going through, he sees pictures of the man’s infant son. The next day, he agrees to take the case, but he has a condition: he wants the detective’s former partner Henry Oak (Liotta) to work with him, despite the fact the man had a reputation from IA (justified: as the first time we see Oak, he’s in the process of beating a suspect) and has been specifically banned from working this case.
In their first conversation, both men make a clear mark of what this case is about: that it has nothing to do with the fate of the murdered cop but protecting the LAPD. Oak makes his position very clear: “The only thing you gotta know about me is that I’m gonna get the fuckers that killed Mike. If that means breaking every point of procedure, then they’re broke.”
The nature of the investigation and what it reveals I will leave for the viewer to learn for themselves because in a sense that’s not what made Narc a very good film. What made it shine was the work of Liotta and Patric who were both playing against type and close to it. A decade after Goodfellas, the slim and clean-shaven Liotta had disappeared in favor of a bulkier and bearded version. What hadn’t changed was that his anger was quiet and reserved. Patric had a handlebar mustache and looked just as world weary as he had in Rush. He rarely raised his voice through the first half of the movie, but we can tell he’s just as angry as Oak, he just hides it a lot better than him.
Tellis’ character has a wife who is several months pregnant. He’s worked undercover before and she makes it clear well before the investigation begins that if he takes on this job, she isn’t going to be around when the baby comes. Tellis can’t even explain to Oak why it matters so much to him to investigate this case – he doesn’t want the promotion and in the early minutes of the film, it’s clear he would have been happy never seeing the LAPD again. Oak had a wife who loved him much who died of cancer, but he admits in a conversation halfway through the film that as much as he misses her, he became a better cop after she died. Tellis has a relaxed form of justice; Oak has no problem with the rules being broken. In a scene that features some of Liotta’s best work, he delivers a long story about how he ended up rescuing a little girl from what was sure a fate worse than death. Things like that; he ends his story, “has nothing to do with rules and procedures and everything to do with right and wrong.”
I don’t know if Carnahan was trying to justifying every major misstep that have led to so much corruption and unethical behavior in the LAPD back then, never mind two decades later, with Oak’s speech, but it was troubling to watch then and is even more so now. The only thing that modifies it slightly is that may be as much of an explanation as we’ll ever get as to why so many police have lost their way. Oak is the definition of a cop who believes at his core the ends, however horrible, justify the means. The deeper we get into the investigation of Calvess’ murder; you get the feeling that was at the core of what happened.
Many of the critics of the era compared this film to Training Day, the hardcore action film that Denzel Washington won his second Oscar for the year before. If nothing else, I believe that Narc is by far the superior film. Training Day in my opinion is one of the most overblown and utterly farcical films ever to receive recognition from the Academy, an action film that doesn’t even bother to disguise that it’s about something deeper. That Washington ended up winning for it was due to the Academy’s misjudged sense of timing than any single element of his overblown performance (though, to be fair, they had no idea how many more chances Washington would get in the future)
To be sure Narc isn’t much subtler than Training Day; we see countless scenarios of violence throughout the movie. But unlike Training Day where every aspect of violence seemed to be solely for putting overkill on top of overkill, at least there is a purpose to what we see. Yes, both films are fundamentally about a good cop and his shadowing one far worse, but it’s being directed towards some kind of truth. And though the endings do have a certain similarity in Narc, you get a sense of tragedy in the final moments. Some might argue that it makes much of what we’ve gone through seem self-defeating and purposeless. But the revelation also gives a larger sense and why everything we see has happened and the true tragedy that has unfolded.
Narc was Carnahan’s second film and sadly he has never realized the potential that came from it, mostly wasting his time on action films like Smokin’ Aces, the film version of The A-Team, the most recent remake of Death Wish and a forgettable Liam Neeson film The Gray. He hasn’t done much better in television, though in the first season of The Blacklist showed some of his potential, including the modern classic ‘Anslo Garrick’. (He left the series after the first season) Perhaps like so many writer-directors, he only showed what he was capable of a single film which demonstrated both brilliant action, superb direction and a capability to get the best work out of your actors. I have no doubt there will be countless people trying to assess the filmography of Liotta in the weeks and months to come. Narc is my recommendation for a no-doubt forgotten film that shows us just what he was capable of when everything came together.
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