Grosse Pointe Blank
NOSTALGIA WAS rife at the movies in 1997. Thanks to a vague fear of the oncoming train that was Y2K, Generation X embraced the past like never before. The original Star Wars trilogy made a hugely trumpeted return to the big screen, Austin Powers fondly fondled the Bond films of old, and Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion was one of two films that summer whose protagonists would confront the past in the faces of their former schoolmates against a backdrop of ’80s bangers. The other would do so with an equally killer soundtrack but more actual killers. Want to feel old? It’s 22 years since Grosse Pointe Blank was released!
The story of a professional hitman, forced to reassess his life when his One Last Job coincides with his ten-year high-school reunion in the town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, came to budding writer Tom Jankiewicz when an invite to his own reunion gave him the impetus to crack on with some actual scriptwriting. After all, he needed to show his ex-classmates that he’d done something with the last decade, and his idea tapped into a universal fear: have we made the best use of our time?
Picked up by John Cusack and his troupe of Chicago-based actors and writers (after Kiefer Sutherland reportedly passed on it), the script was rewritten, moulded through improv and cut down from swathes of footage by director George Armitage until what remained was a lean, efficient action comedy with an enormous heart. Over two decades on, it continues to hold up a mirror to those wistful Gen Xers still clinging to some unresolved piece of their youth, regardless of whether or not they once killed the president of Paraguay with a fork.
Martin Blank (Cusack) is a hollow man. An ex-army, former government assassin who’s now freelance, he’s approaching 30 and suffering an existential crisis. Therapy isn’t helping, because he refuses to accept that his crippling angst might be connected to his profession. “It’s not me,” he tells his marks as they beg him for mercy, when he should be telling himself. So when the chance to reconnect with his abandoned past — and his ex-girlfriend Debi (an adorable Minnie Driver), who he stood up on prom night — comes along, he decides to give it a shot.
What unfolds is flawless filmmaking. Every character is sympathetically written and acted, from the leads down to the single-sceners (pour one out for tragic Arlene Oslott-joseph, dishing out name badges at the reunion with a rictus grin of forced bonhomie). Maybe it’s because Jankiewicz based them on people he knew; maybe it’s because they’re mostly played by Cusack’s own friends and family, including Jeremy Piven as Blank’s old buddy Paul, stuck in the rat race and verging on a breakdown, and Cusack’s sister Joan, on fire as his hilariously acerbic secretary, Marcella. Look closely at the wide shot of the supporting cast dancing at the
reunion: each of them tells you everything you need to know about their character in just a few seconds of dance.
Meanwhile Dan Aykroyd is having an absolute blast as business rival Grocer, an unwelcome vision of Blank’s possible future, who’s failing to convince the self-described lone wolf to join his union of assassins. There’s a hint of post-communist political commentary here — Armitage majored in economics and political science at UCLA — but it’s a thin stratum of subtext in a film more interested in soulmates than solidarity.
And then there’s the whip-smart dialogue, from which you can pick almost any line and mine it for further meaning: “How’s your life?”, one reunion attendee asks Blank, to which he replies, “In progress”; “You’ve grown up… a bit” is a merciless dig at Blank from Debi’s father; Marcella’s remark to her boss that, “I just find it amusing that you came from somewhere,” wouldn’t be out of place in the recent, backstory-focused Bond films.
Augmenting the writing is a handful of small but perfectly formed set-pieces that consistently develop the plot and characters. Arguably the best of these is a brutal, initially slick but ultimately messy scrap (even the fights have arcs) between Blank and fabulously named rival hitman Felix La Pubelle, played by Cusack’s kickboxing trainer Benny ‘The Jet’ Urquidez. The fight erupts from nowhere, kicks you in the face a few times and is over before it’s barely begun, brought to a satisfying conclusion by the deployment of Chekhov’s ballpoint ben. Accompanying the scene are the staccato stylings of The Beat’s 1980 hit ‘Mirror In The Bathroom’: just one of a torrent of on-point soundtrack choices that intensify the nostalgia factor and raise the film to skin-prickling greatness.
But it’s Blank’s search for himself amongst his past, and his relationship with Debi (brought to life by sparkling chemistry between Cusack and Driver), that drive Grosse Pointe Blank into our hearts. Fending off threats to his life and meaningless psychobabble from all corners (“Repeat after me: I am rooted in the me who is on this adventure,” witters his therapist), Blank eventually finds peace in the bottomless, saucer eyes of a former classmate’s baby. It’s a beautiful moment, and the second of two occasions in which Cusack looks directly into camera. The first is during an early, fruitless therapy session, and the connection between the two shots suggests that the baby, and the ideas of innocence and new beginnings it represents, might just hold the answers Blank’s been looking for.
Those notions of lost youth and a simpler time are primary components of the nostalgia business in which the film trades, and 22 years later Grosse Pointe Blank is as much a subject of nostalgia as nostalgia is a subject of Grosse Pointe Blank. “You can never go home again,” Blank complains to his therapist when he discovers his old house has been bulldozed to make way for a convenience store. It’s a neat summary of the film’s melancholy message, but those of us in the real world can take heart: we’ll always have Grosse Pointe.
GROSSE POINTE BLANK IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD