Grosse Pointe Blank 1997
Grosse Pointe Blank is one of my favorite movies, but I never wrote a review. I have had it on DVD for years, but was happy to pick up a digital copy recently which warranted another viewing. I wasn’t sure it would hold up, but happily it still seems like a nearly perfect film to me. John Cusack is perfect in this role, the king of 80’s teen romances and comedies, playing a guy who disappeared from an idyllic life in the suburbs to become a hit man, as if all that 80’s hope and optimism got destroyed by 90s malaise. The movie also has a fine cast of supporting characters, starting with Minnie Driver, who struggles a little with the American accent, but is just the perfect high school crush: beautiful, smart, funny, adventurous. Alan Arkin is absolutely amazing as Cusack’s therapist. Joan Cusack has one of her best performances as well as John Cusack’s administrative assistant, multi-tasking her way through any difficulty. Jeremy Piven overplays his part, but is still fun as one of Cusack’s good friends. Even Dan Aykroyd is good in this as a rival hit man. I generally don’t like improvised dialogue, but the character-setting scenes here seem less improvised and more crafted through workshopping maybe. Or just good writing and casting.
In addition to a great cast and characters, the movie has a good balance of being funny, insightful, violent, and romantic. This movie wouldn’t be good without the main character being a hit man, nor would it work as an action movie without the romance and comedy. Being a hitman represents any kind of compromised path someone might take that solves some problems while causing deeper ones. A guy re-evaluating his life in mid-career makes the movie an ideological sequel to The Graduate about that guy after college and even Risky Business about that guy in high school, not surprisingly, three of my favorite movies.
The last magical component of the movie is the music, a perfectly curated collection of 80s songs that you feel like Minnie Driver’s character might have picked out from her own vinyl collection, playing almost constantly. After one viewing of this movie, I went to Wikipedia’s page about the movie and started downloading as many of the songs as I could find. I knew a few of them, but really enjoyed some of the deeper cuts like “Matador” by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, “Go” by Tones on Tail, and “Lorca’s Novena” by The Pogues. And some only deserve the few seconds that show up in the movie, but it is a nice starting point. The soundtrack itself is by Joe Strummer of The Clash and interesting in its own right.
Anyway, this movie definitely still holds up for me. Happy to have seen this one again.Written: 15 Jun 2022
Owned on: DVD, Digital