The Player

The vagaries of the TCM schedule are such that I wound up with a couple of movies on my DVR that are going to air in close proximity to each other as part of TCM's Monday (Nov. 14) night lineup. So I'm going to do a post on the first of the two today, rather more than a day before it's airing, which is not what I would normally do. That movie is The Player, airing at 10:00 PM on Nov. 14.

The movie starts with a long tracking shot of a Hollywood movie studio where, among other things, we see various people pitching story ideas to the producers who are bombarded with such proposals. (As we learn later, the studio claims it receives 50,000 ideas each year and can only greenlight a dozen of them, which is rather less than when the old studio system was running.) One of those producers is Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins). Griffin is facing a bunch of issues in his life, both personal and professional.

The first issue is purely professional. The rumor mill has it that the studio is going to be hiring a hot-shot young producer, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), away from another studio, and this means that perhaps Griffin might even lose his job. The second issue is mostly personal. He's in a relationship with story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), but it's becoming a bit of a one-way relationship in that Bonnie wants to go a lot further with the relationship than Griffin does. The third issue is a combination of the personal and the professional, as Griffin has been getting unsigned postcards and faxes from some anonymous screenwriter who suggests that Griffin screwed him over, and that Griffin's life and career might be at risk for this. Griffin receives so many story proposals that he has no idea who the screenwriter might be, but he's understandably alarmed by these missives from somebody who obviously knows his routine and follows him around.

After some thought, Griffin reaches the conclusion that the most likely person to be sending him the postcards is David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) who, it turns out, lives out in Pasadena. Griffin approaches David's girlfriend, June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi) to see if she can help him find David, as Griffin would like to pay off David with some sort of deal if it will cause those postcards to stop coming. This results in a meeting out in Pasadena.

However, the meeting doesn't go well, with David knowing that Griffin is in trouble at the studio, and not accepting David's offer. The two get in a fight in a back alley, and as a result of the fight, Griffin winds up killing David in what might or might not be self-defense. In any case, even if it were self-defense, it would result in a court case that would bring all sorts of bad publicity to Griffin personally as well as the studio. So Griffin gets the hell out of there.

Of course, the police out in Pasadena are able to start putting two and two together, at least to the point that they're able to determine Griffin was the last person known to have seen David alive. It's possible in their eyes that the murderer would have seen David later, but they have the reasonable idea that Griffin is the most likely suspect. Det. Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) interviews Griffin, while Det. DeLongpre (Lyle Lovett) is in the background, following Griffin to see if he makes any slip-ups.

Aside from the killing, Griffin still has those other problems in his life. He's beginning to fall in love with June, which is a serious complication considering that Bonnie still thinks she's in a relationship with him. And there's Larry Levy, although Griffin comes up with a scheme to try to deal with him, finding a pair of screenwriters who have a proposal that as it is is not quite workable. He'll give that proposal to Larry, and then, when the unworkable part comes to the fore, Griffin will come to the rescue to fix the troubled production. But the worst thing for Griffin is that David wasn't the screenwriter who was sending him those postcards, as they keep coming.

The Player is a movie that first and foremost is for movie buffs. There are lots and lots of cameos, which are only mentioned in the closing credits, although most synopses of the movie mention the existence of the cameos fairly prominently. Some of the famous names are openly mentioned, but others aren't, and part of the fun is trying to recognize them. There's also a plethora of vintage movie posters, some of which might be a bit difficult to recognize on first viewing although most get a second pass over by the cameras.

As for the story, I found myself thinking of another Altman movie, Gosford Park, as I was watching this. Both of them are very well-crafted technically, although complex enough that the technicality is noticeable, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Robbins gives a good performance, and since he's by far the main player in the proceedings, that is a decided positive.

If you're a movie buff, I'd definitely recommend The Player.