Get Shorty
First screened in December 1995 / Most recently screened in August 2024
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld. Cast: John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Dennis Farina, Delroy Lindo, Rene Russo, Danny DeVito, James Gandolfini, Jon Gries, David Paymer, Jacob Vargas, Miguel Sandoal, Renee Props, Martin Ferrero, Patrick Breen, Bette Midler, Harvey Keitel, Penny Marshall. Screenplay: Scott Frank (based on the novel by Elmore Leonard). VOR:②
Leonard seems like a high hill for movies to climb, so points for effort. But this is borderline pedestrian while thinking it's chic?
In the run-up to its October 1995 release, the movie magazines and nationally broadcast infotainment TV shows sure touted Get Shorty as a big seasonal event, a surefire hit, and the rare comedy to constitute an all-but-certain Oscar play. (Note: it wasn't.) At 18, I had never heard of Elmore Leonard, and it was clear that reverence for his colorful pulp novels was at the root of all this hype.
Almost everything was new to me at 18, so my mind stayed open, but I didn't really buy any of this. The stills all looked like characters (actually just costumed actors) sitting around listening to each other. John Travolta had not been in the top five reasons I loved Pulp Fiction, and finally catching up with Saturday Night Fever had been a real letdown, if not an affront. The idea of a mobster who fancies himself a film producer waiting to happen did not sound innately to me like a solid-gold premise, and Barry Sonnenfeld didn't seem like a director one project away from unveiling a masterpiece. But hey, I'd seen Species and How to Make an American Quilt on their opening days! I obviously wasn't above anything. I decided to go find out, since reviews were indeed fond.
I remember nothing about that first viewing of Get Shorty, which is really rare for me, besides the pronounced atmosphere of "Is that all there is?" Re-seen three decades later, it's not hard to see why: there's just not a lot there. Dennis Farina has some snappy early scenes that he pitches with admirable but not too-outsized zing, just shy of comic-book broadness. The only actor who's really cooking from a Leonard recipe—or at least hitting the frequency of ripe but ever so slightly dangerous farce the movie seems to be chasing—Farina deserved to be around more often. (Okay, I'll give you Hackman as a runner-up in the Leonard stakes, but I still think Farina's giving more eccentricity and edge.)
Otherwise, Get Shorty is all Hollywood actors amiably playing pretend, half-donning personalities, half-donning accents, slightly over-trusting their material and their director (which at least is better than phoning things in). They hit their marks inside Sonnenfeld's mostly boring frames, unimaginatively cut together. The script's the thing, and without having read the novel, it's not hard to project what adapter Scott Frank has achieved with voice, tone, and doubtlessly condensed but still spirally structure. I just think Sonnenfeld's direction flattens a lot of what is very plausibly rounded, sophisticated, or delicious on the page. Not that Get Shorty isn't tasty in its way, but imagine a new restaurant papering your neighborhood with rather tony advertisements weeks out from its ballyhooed opening, and then the day comes, and they're actually a Pepperidge Farm outlet. As filmed, Get Shorty is a light sugar rush that's at most 50% granulated cane, at least 50% artificial sweetener.
Also, while we're out here fancying ourselves producers: you want Get Shorty to work, keep the script, keep John Lurie's score, but drop Travolta (his characteristically preening superficiality and calculated character choices are only occasionally good for an inspired idea), and recast him with Alec Baldwin. You've suddenly got a movie, with a funny Chili Palmer who's also credibly sexy and maybe a little dangerous. The other actors have more to bounce off of, too, and I bet different takes give you multiple colors to paint with.
This isn't rocket science, people! For a movie that presents as wryly knowing about the ways of Hollywood, Get Shorty makes what I see as a key error at the top of its casting pyramid, squeezes less juice from its screenplay than its author supplied, under-exploits what should have been several sure things in the supporting cast (Lindo, Russo, Gandolfini, Paymer, all fine, but none up to potential), drops in an unbilled cameo by an actress who broadly embarrasses herself, and manages to seem a little navel-gazy even by the standards of comic noir or industry satire. I don't know that I'd be this hard on it if the promotional rollout hadn't been so aggrandizing, and up itself. As a temporary distraction on, say, TBS or TNT, it gets the job done. But a Golden Globe, and a $115 million worldwide gross in 1995 dollars? Get serious. Grade:C+
