Stand Up Guys

+Stand Up Guys (dir. Fisher Stevens)

Like the recent fogey musical Quartet, Stand Up Guys gives some aged icons the chance to exercise their old skills and charm as performers exercising their old skills and charm, to snatch a bit more light from their dusk. What Guys lacks in opera it makes up for in grittier sentiments, a more general profane wit than Billy Connelly provided, and witty reflections on the existential American crime genre.

The opening sequence interweaves two destinies. Doc (Christopher Walken) paints his brilliant sunrises. His best friend Valentine (Al Pacino) is released from prison after serving 28 years without ratting out his boss. Doc takes Val to his modest apartment, then to a night of partying. Their old boss Claphands (Mark Margolis) has not forgiven Val for his son’s death on a job, so he compels Doc to kill Val before 10 a.m. or Claphands will kill them both. Unlike a similar setup in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976), here Val twigs to Doc’s assignment and the two pals move candidly toward the inevitable shoot-out. There’s rather more gunfire here than in Quartet.

The film’s main theme is the distinction between merely living and becoming fully alive. All three men have been in prisons, Val literally, Doc in his uneventful retirement and their partner Hirsch (Alan Arkin), whom the lads break out of his nursing home for one last romp. Off his oxygen tank, Hirsch races the stolen car because the adrenalin rush keeps him alive. When he’s left waiting, he dies. The unrealized or half life is the real prison.

Of course sex is central to the heroes’ vitality. Val pops a handful of Viagras to score at a brothel, run  by their old madame’s daughter. His priapic overload takes him to the emergency ward, where he meets Hirsch’s daughter, Nina (Julianna Margulies). Hirsch, who grew his prowess through a vacuum cleaner, is an even greater success at the same brothel. Despite his triumph, he feels guilt for betraying his long-dead wife. Doc abstains because he alone is a grandfather. Abandoned by his daughter, he anonymously enjoys his granddaughter, Alex (Addison Timlin), the waitress at his daily diner. Alex is impressed at Val’s hunger (three large meals within a few hours), an emblem of the doomed ex-con’s appetite for life. Like the madam, all three gangsters’ constructive care for their young women contrasts to Claphands’ mortal bitterness over his son.

These stand up guys are men of honour and integrity. They’re Old School (as the DJ notes) because they define themselves by what they do. As pros, they take pride in critiquing and improving their craft. They affirm their own codes. Doc is so Old School he doesn’t have a cell phone. Val and Hirsch don’t know about no-key cars but they retain their old driving skills. Their ethics require courtesy, politeness, justice, as Val demonstrates when he negotiates a dance with a young woman (a homage to A Scent of a Woman, 1992). All three men resolve to avenge the rape of the woman they find in the trunk of their stolen car. With a nod to New School feminism, they give Sylvia (Vanessa Ferlito) eight minutes with her trussed up rapists and a baseball bat before the drug squad pounces.  As Val later reports, they “gave the girl back her life.”

      When the film closes on the same sunrise painting it opened on, we infer our heroes have gone out in a blaze of glory. We don’t see them fall because they’re stand up guys. We don’t see them survive because their existentialism tells them how they live or die is more important than whether. If they do die, it’s a kind of rebirth, reflected in the scene where they break into a store to get natty new suits. Like the priest scene, the Flashy New Suit scene is a convention of the classic gangster film, but it always connotes the start of the gunsel’s career. Here it’s the end. Or is it rather the once resigned heroes’ return to new life?