MOVIE REVIEW : Bluesy Thrills in ‘Monday’

If “Stormy Monday” (selected theaters) can’t in all honesty be called a success, it can certainly be called a great-looking diversion. It pulls some of its energy from Melanie Griffith, who even when she is miscast and virtually ignored (“The Milagro Beanfield War”) becomes the sand in the oyster--and she is hardly ignored here. More energy comes from the film’s sensual use of light and color at the hands of its splendid cinematographer Roger Deakins (“1984,” “Sid and Nancy”), and the rest comes from Sting, as arresting and authoritative in a “small” role as he is at the center of one of his own concerts.

The most interesting thing about Mike Figgis, “Stormy Monday’s” British writer-director is that, as a former musician, he composed his movie’s music too. It shows. He has set his film-noirish tale of a rich, shady Texan (Tommy Lee Jones), greedy for a controlling interest in the British industrial town of Newcastle, in and among a background of jazz clubs and the modern English music scene.

His young Irish protagonist Brendan (Sean Bean), who drifts onto the Newcastle music scene willing to take any job he can get, gets the undivided attention of Sting because of the boy’s love and knowledge of American jazz. (Sting, Newcastle-born, is in his own element as Finney, the scruffy jazz club owner.)

It’s a movie that seems to have grown straight from a music lover’s heart, with its bluesy score and its huge blown-up Weegee photographs for atmosphere. And there’s Sting’s lonely improvised double bass solo, using Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and photographed with warm spots of orange against bruised browns and mauves.

“Stormy Monday’s” story will inevitably recall “The Long Good Friday,” with its smooth upscale gangsters working with the local establishment to try to make a real-estate killing on English waterfront land. Alas, that’s as close as the two films ever come. Each time “Stormy Monday” (rated R for violence and brief nudity) works up a little tension, it drops it.

It has an even more than usually disposable noir plot. As a savvy Minnesota girl who has come too far and seen too much, Griffith is on Jones’ payroll on a semi-permanent basis, whenever Jones needs an alderman charmed or an out-of-town client entertained. If her association with the dangerous Jones was personal as well as business, it happened out of our sight.

What happens between her and Bean, however, is warm and predictable and in clear view. So it becomes the tarnished but gutsy youngsters against the Machiavellian Jones, with Sting as the wild card.

There is also a subtext of American corporate fingers touching and changing everything: In the throes of its America Week, the Newcastle town square has a towering Pepsi bottle like a grotesque Maypole in its center.

Griffith and Sting are the picture’s electricity; he probably hasn’t been this fascinating since “Quadrophenia,” and her appeal is that sweet combination of a woman who can take care of herself perfectly well but at times just doesn’t want to. Providing a sort of grumbling European undercurrent to the action are a group of Polish musicians, here called the Krakow Jazz Ensemble, cross-cultural visitors who become an integral part of the action. From their names (Hart, Jolly, Day, Davis, Deane and Payne) they may be a mite removed from Poland but their souls, their faces and their sounds would pass.