Color of Night
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Richard Rush. Cast: Bruce Willis, Jane March, Ruben Blades, Scott Bakula, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Lesley Ann Warren, Kathleen Wilhoite, Jeff Corey, Andrew Lowery, Shirley Knight, Eriq La Salle. Screenplay: Matthew Chapman and Billy Ray. VOR:①
I'm being generous with the movie quality-wise, but I can't do the same for originality or lasting value. Famous today only for Bruce's freed willy.
Look, this movie is absolutely ludicrous in plotting, in structure, in its very notion of psychology (which is where the whole plot sits!), in eventual dénouement. And speaking of the finale, please do place Color of Night in the very top bracket of movies where it's both challenging and hilarious to conjecture whether the filmmakers really believed we would be shocked!! by the narrative's big reveal. Bruce Willis is not really the actor to pull off a wily therapist trying to get to the bottom of all the pathologies and closet agendas in a laughable patchwork of "group therapy" regulars, nor is he quite the guy to communicate the experience of being intimately traumatized twice over in a matter of weeks, or maybe days. Jane March is not really the actress to nail what this role asks her to nail. It's not even clear what kind of actress she is, though she at least seems more expressive and creatively engaged here than in The Lover.
I'm a little surprised I didn't dislike this more? And that the 140 minutes (!) felt shorter than that? I can only imagine the Director's Cut was the right call over the universally lambasted theatrical flop. For a movie that's plainly too long, it doesn't feel laggard, and despite the dubiousness of several performances (Warren, Dourif, O'Connor, Wilhoite), there's something to be said for watching actors get to take some time with what's trying to be a character-driven murder mystery. I'd even submit that Lance Henrisken is more than solid in a role that's a few degrees askance from his usual. Ruben Blades is fun in the "go big or go home" role of a pissy, loose-cannon homicide cop. And though Richard Rush does not emerge as any kind of Nicolas Roeg, Brian De Palma, or Paul Verhoeven, there are scenes and moments that suggest some potential even for this wackadoo screenplay in the hands of a bolder, weirder director: a rattlesnake in a mailbox, a furtive exit by a sexual con artist almost caught in the act, a suicide whose reflection ripples in the nearly liquid glass of a skyscraper while she plunges.
Please don't misunderstand: even the version the director preferred is not a good movie. The title ballad that yearns over the end credits (weirdly a radio hit at the time, at least in northern Virginia) sounds like a funeral dirge sung by a mad torch singer, just as her pills are kicking in. You can see why the folks laying down a track over the end of an Even More Basic Instinct would be thinking about burials. But the people involved looked like they were trying things, at least occasionally. And I didn't have an awful time. And if it were made today, Luca Guadagnino would almost certainly direct it for Apple or Hulu or Netflix, and that's the version that needs to stay dead. Grade:C–
