An ex-con just out
of prison arrives at their new job and the first person they see is a drop dead
gorgeous woman. The job involves the two being in close contact. The dame
invites the ex-con to her apartment under what are clearly false pretenses. The
sparks are obvious. Soon the two are engaged in a clandestine affair. The dame
is attached to a man who is abusive and is connected to powerful, dangerous
people. The dame comes knocking on the convict’s door in tears, wanting a way
out. She knows how to get money and she wants to make a break for it. The ex-con
is skeptical but their attraction wins out and they hatch a plan to get the
money, blame the boyfriend and get out clean. It goes wrong and there’s
violence and a lot of death.
The scenario I’ve
just described has been standard for dime detective novels and the film noir
genre since the 1930s. You find variations on it in Double Indemnity and
The Postman Rings Twice. In the 1970s and 1980s we see it play out in
such films as Body Heat and the undervalued classic After Dark, My
Sweet (which may make an appearance in this series later) I have seen
variations on it to this day, most recently in Out of the Blue a movie
so by the numbers you really wonder what a director once as gifted as Neil LaBute
would have seen in the project. But when Bound came out in 1996, it was
seen as an utter reinvention of the genre for one vital reason: the ex-con was not
only a woman, but a lesbian.
If you were a
teenager growing up in the 1990s, you no doubt rented Bound from your
local video store at least once for a very critical reason. I’m not judging, as
you can tell by the title of this series, I did the same thing. Unlike many
teenagers, I was well-versed in the criticism of Roger Ebert at seventeen, and
I knew in advance that both he and Gene Siskel had been very high on the film: Ebert
put it in his top ten of 1996 and asked the Oscars to consider the Wachowski
Brothers (as they were known then) to receive an Oscar nomination for Best
Screenplay. Knowing this, however, was not the reason I rented the film
initially. However, because I actually watched the entire movie I was stunned
by how good it was.
Even at eighteen I
was beginning to get a grip on what made a movie a work of art and I was aware
of the tropes of various genres. Now there have been several thrillers in the
aftermath of Bound which have included this flip on the genre but none
of them bothered to work with the high-wire intensity that is apparent in every
moment of this film. Bound clocks in at less than 110 minutes and not a second
of it seems wasted. Considering how bloated almost every film the siblings have
made since then, it’s one of many reasons I’ve thought they’ve lost their way.
(There are others but we’ll get to that.)
The opening shows
Corky (Gina Gershon) in the title position, bound and gagged. The flashback
begins with Corky showing up at her new job and seeing Vi (Jennifer Tilly) walk
by. She’s living in one of those apartment buildings that looks like one of
those places that only the downtrodden and the criminal reside in. It soon
becomes clear that Corky is both.
Corky has taken a
job as a handyman in the building. As Roger Ebert pointed out, this was logical
in 1996: this was the kind of position he’d seen lesbians working and it fit
the trope. One day Vi knocks on her door and says that she was washing dishes
and her ring fell down the sink.
The scene that
follows has even more sexual tension then when ‘that scene’ happens. The job
takes place, Vi thanks Corky and offers her a drink. The flirtation begins almost
immediately. Corky has already seen Vi with a man but its clear she’s been
through this scene before. Eventually Corky puts her hand between Vi’s legs. “You
dropped your ring down the sink on purpose?” she says. “If I say yes will you
take your hand away?” Vi manages to gasp out. Vi begs Corky to kiss her which
she doesn’t need much bidding. I don’t know which of these kisses earned a
nomination from the MTV movie awards for Best Kiss but it might very well have
been this one.
What seems
inevitable is interrupted when Caesar, Vi’s boyfriend walks in. Immediately
hostile, he calms down very quickly when he sees that Corky is a woman. One of
the reason Bound works as well as it does is because of the era: Caesar
is jealous of his girlfriend but he is convinced she would never cheat on him
with a woman. That night when Corky goes to a lesbian bar, Violet is waiting
for her in the back of her pick up truck. The two of them ‘pick up’ right where
they left off.
The scene that
unfolds is one of the most erotic I’ve seen in any film in 1996, lesbian, hetero
or otherwise. In an era before the intimacy coordinator was considered and all
lesbian scenes smacked off voyeurism the Wachowski made sure that the scene was
coordinated so they did not offend anyone. It doesn’t make the scene any less
tense – though it was so graphic that it was cut from theatrical release to
make sure it still received an R rating – and when Corky rolls over and says: “I
can see again” you can see how the cynicism has fallen of Corky’s eyes.
Caesar is, as we
already know, connected to the Mafia in Chicago. The names are already known to
Corky and we’ve gotten a very clear sense Caesar is so comfortable with his
girlfriend that he has no problem letting the enforcers beat the crap out of
people in his apartment. Vi is terrified of the company Caesar keeps and she
knows that his job is to launder money for the mob. In this case, it’s literal
as well as figurative: we see laundry lines of hundred dollar bills, strung
across the apartment.
Vi, naturally, comes
to Corky with the plan. Corky is skeptical – and it’s worth noting, more so
then a man might be in this scenario. She knows that Vi might very well have
used her just for this very purpose and she has no interest in going to prison.
She also knows all too well how dangerous these people are and is extremely
reluctant to cross them.
Eventually Vi, after
watching Caesar for a while, comes up with a plan that she thinks will work. It
will require pinpoint precision and timing, it has to happen a certain way, and
Vi’s performance has to be perfect. If it works properly, they’ll get $2
million and Caesar will blamed and end up dead. Needless to say, it doesn’t
work.
Several studios read
the script and said that if the character of Corky was changed into a man, they’d
buy it. The Wachowskis repeatedly declined. “That movie’s been made a million
times, so we’re not really interested. They managed to get the movie made
through Spelling films of $4.5 million dollars and didn’t even make its budget
back. But the critical response was fantastic. The National Board of Review
gave the movie a special award and the movie loved in many circles, especially
GLAAD Media, which gave it’s prize for an Outstanding Film in Wide Release.
Curiously it was received a lot of admiration from sci-fi and fantasy award
groups, including the Saturn Awards which gave it five nominations. The Independent
Spirit Awards only nominated it for Best Cinematography, but then again 1996
was a huge year for independent films.
Aside from the brilliant
work of the Wachowskis and the technical aspects, this movie rises and falls on
the power of its three leads, none of whom were either well known or highly
regarded in 1996.
Known for her distinctive
voice (which has gotten her a lot of work in animation as Family Guy fans
are all too familiar with) Tilly’s career has been almost entirely in movies
that are, frankly, beneath her. In an earlier generation she would have been
the queen of B-Movies; most of her films have gone straight to video and are
not much better than the quality) Her best moment came in the 1990s when she
appeared in some movies and TV that were actually used her well: the racetrack
comedy Let It Ride, the cheating wife in Liar Liar and the gangster’s
moll John Cusack is forced to cast as the lead in Bullets Over Broadway. But
in none of those films, even Bullets, did she get credit: her Oscar
nomination for Supporting Actress was considered one of the worst in the
history of the Oscars at the time. She had a brief moment after 1996, but it
quickly petered out and aside from the occasional good film (The Cat’s Meow)
her biggest roles have been in many of the Child’s Play franchise. (For
the record, she’s brilliant as Tiffany.)
Looking at Tilly in Bound
and Bullets you sometimes wonder if Hollywood believed that the
movies made the actress and that this was all she deserved. Perhaps if she had
lived in the 1930s and 1940s she could have worked brilliantly as a femme
fatale or the dame down wrong: it’s telling that her most critically acclaimed
movies involve organized crime to a degree. The key difference between this and
almost every noir I’ve seen is that Vi genuinely does feel passion for Corky
and is willing to do anything to have a future with her. Near the end of the
movie this becomes crystal clear.
Gina Gershon had
been working for years in Hollywood, mostly in television. In 1995 she had
gotten her film break in Showgirls and while that movie cratered the
careers of co-stars Elizabeth Berkeley and Robert Davi, Gershon had managed to
get cast in Bound in her next film which saved her career. She managed
to move out of B-Movies into more mainstream success not long after: she had a
supporting role in Face/Off, then The Insider and after a while
she was able to stand on her own. She has done as many B-Movies as she has done
film and TV but unlike Tilly many of her projects have been in prestige shows.
She had recurring roles on Rescue Me ,Brooklyn Nine-Nine and even
Riverdale.
Gershon, like Tilly,
often gets cast as the villain, so in a sense her work here is closer to an
anti-heroine that anything she’s done in much of her career. Corky knows the
ropes, knows that she’s being played but she still spends the movie letting her
heart lead her. We never forget for a moment that there’s a mind underneath and
that she has the ability to pivot when things go wrong. Even as things unfold
in a disastrous fashion in the final thirty minutes and the bodies keep piling
up, she remains level-headed until a momentary flicker gives her and Vi away.
We all know how gifted
a character actor Joe Pantoliano is by now (he’d already been working for 20
years by the time he was cast as Caesar) so I’d like to talk about his hair. By
this point I’d seen him in many times on TV and movies but I was not sure about
his appearance tonsorially. In The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, he
had a full head; in NYPD Blue (he was one of Steven Bocho’s favorite
actors) he had a mustache and was wearing a cap and in Bound he has a
full head and looks relatively attractive. Of course in his most famous role as
Cypher he was bald but had muttonchop whiskers, in The Sopranos he was
clearly wearing a toupee and in Memento he had a cropped haircut and a
mustache. I sometimes wonder if how much we can trust Joey Pants bares
proportion to how much hair he has on his head in a given role.
I mention this
because in Bound, even though we know that Caesar is technically a bad
guy he’s essentially being set up by Vi
and Corky to take the fall for their crimes. Every time we see him around his
fellow mobsters (especially Christopher Meloni’s character, at a point in his
career when he had hair) you can see just how nervous he is. When
everything starts to go out of control, he becomes panicky and begins to spiral.
With good reason: he’s seen first hand what happens if you cross these guys.
All of the deaths that follow are at his hand, but he keeps panicking with each
new corpse, trying to find a way out of it, turning in desperation to VI to
help him. To be clear we know by the end of the film just how much of a monster
he is but given that we’ve known more than he does the whole time, we’re not
entirely unsympathetic. You know until Corky’s tied up in the closet and Vi’s
in a similar case in the tub.
When the Wachowski’s
broke through with The Matrix three years later, they became a household
word and the darlings of Hollywood. Roger Ebert, however, was disappointed. He
liked The Matrix but he didn’t go into raves over it: he compared it very
unfavorably to Dark City which had aired the year before and which he considered
one of the great cinematic masterpieces. Furthermore, having raved about Bound,
he saw what he considered a well-made but traditional blockbuster a
disappointment from those filmmakers.
And in hindsight he
was right to feel that way. It’s not just that the sequels were immensely
underwhelming (though Ebert actually thought higher of them then most critics)
it’s that ever since the Wachowski’s have abandoned the humanity that was very
clear in Bound in favor of gorgeous cinematography and visuals with stories
that have nothing behind them. All of their films – V for Vendetta, Speed
Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending - have been all spectacle and no substance. Only
briefly in their work for the Showtime series Work In Progress did we
get a hint of that humanity and they immediately followed it up with another Matrix
film. The Wachowskis got lost in The Matrix and never really been
unplugged; they seem to be working on yet another sequel even after the fourth
one bombed critically and financially.
This year marks the
25th anniversary of The Matrix’s release. Already many will
no doubt celebrate it as a notable event in the history of cinema. I’m inclined
to view it as a day of mourning. Bound showed two filmmakers who had
created a versatile original noir with all the hallmarks of love-story that
ended, unlike almost other noirs, with a note of optimism and humanity. The
Matrix showed two filmmakers who have since embarked on a career where
humanity is the least interesting thing about the world to them. To those who
might choose to pillory me for this pronouncement, I urge them to seek Bound
out. Then I’d give them two pills and ask which they’d rather the
filmmakers had taken. The Wachowskis went into Wonderland with The Matrix. Bound
shows just how good they were if we never had to go down the rabbit hole at
all.
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