Tradition and Elegance in ‘Tequila Sunrise’

Q: Wasn’t his morality a little ambiguous?

A: Isn’t all our morality a little ambiguous?

--Interview exchange between Peter Bogdanovich and John Ford.

Ambiguous morality, how it sinks some people, how others swim above it, is the core theme of Robert Towne’s glittery new L.A. thriller, “Tequila Sunrise.” Maybe that’s one reason some people have difficulty with it. In the past decade, we’ve come to expect non-ambiguous, Superman-style morality in our mainstream movies. And one like this one, with glossy trimmings and an extra philosophical spin, may seem too much of a hybrid.

This film noir for modern times centers on the volatile relations between two old friends on opposite sides of the law, the woman they both love, and dark forces--a brutal cop and a devious drug smuggler--standing behind them. It’s set in a contemporary L.A. of upscale restaurants and plush beachside apartments, of fiery South Bay sunsets, luscious reds and yellows (the colors of a Tequila sunrise), icy, metallic blues and blacks; a world of paranoia and voyeurism, with sophisticated police surveillance catching everything in a video-electronic web.

Yet the story goes back to the palmiest days of the Dream Factory. The two lead characters--ex-cocaine dealer Dale McKussic (Mel Gibson), and his erstwhile high school best buddy Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), now a narcotics cop--are linked movie-movie opposites. They’re like crook Jimmy Cagney and priest Pat O’Brien in “Angels With Dirty Faces” or gangster Clark Gable and D.A. William Powell in “Manhattan Melodrama”: Two pals who’ve brawled their way up on different sides of the law and now face friendship’s ultimate test of betrayal or faith. Everything acts to tear them apart: their jobs, their life views, and their associates, the woman (Michelle Pfeiffer as restaurateur Jo Ann Vallenari) they both love.

It’s an impossibly romantic notion. And, in a way, “Tequila Sunrise” is an impossibly romantic movie. On one level, Towne wants to give us the shock of current reality. On another, he’s obviously trying to reawaken some of the glamour and excitement audience used to get at the Hollywood movies of the ‘40s: the film noirs with Bogart, Lancaster or Mitchum, the earlier buddy movies with Cagney and O’Brien, the iridescent romances with Darnell, Hayworth.

Yet you keep hearing complaints that the movie is slow, confused, hard to follow, too glamorous or slick, too self-consciously literary, that there’s not enough “Lethal Weapon”-style action, that it’s the product of a burnt-out sensibility, that some of the characterizations lack danger or edge, that it’s immoral because it glamorizes big-time cocaine dealers. And though some of these complaints touch on interesting areas--and others, like the last, are quite wrong--they all miss the essential quality of “Tequila Sunrise,” what makes it different and special.

It’s a movie--among precious few these days--where the drama and tension are concentrated in the dialogues, the words and the spaces between them. Nowadays, we often don’t appreciate good dialogue in movies because we get it so seldom, unless there’s an adaptation from stage (“Da”) or novel (“Little Dorrit”). But Towne is a truly elegant scenarist in the tradition of old studio writers like Ben Hecht, Samson Raphaelson, Preston Sturges, Daniel Fuchs and Billy Wilder. And “Tequila Sunrise,” for all its sordid subject matter, is an elegant movie, a throwback.

Most of it takes place in swank or empty-looking interiors, where the drama lives in flickering glances between the characters, a subtle shading on a single line, a sudden mysterious shift of direction. It isn’t really a tired movie. Nor is it a celebration of the drug culture. One of its most obvious points is that cocaine, and its trade, have compromised, destroyed or weakened most of the people in the film, crooks and cops alike.

There’s a giddy dialectic to the film. It’s a genre piece, but it’s shot through with realistic observation. Its characters ring psychologically true even in the moments when their actions seem most preposterous and romantic--in the melodramatic convolutions of the climax.

The actors have different rhythms, timbres, sonorities, mixed together like a jazz quintet or chamber work. Raul Julia’s Mexican drug cop, Escalante, is like a dark guitar, full of moonlit arpeggios and strums; J. T. Walsh’s Maguire is an ominous, low-rumbling woodwind. Gibson’s character has a deceptively easy, inwardly tortured sonority: like a cello doing bop and Bartok. Pfeiffer’s Joanne has the swift, piercing flights of a violin in full pizzicato; while Russell’s Frescia is brassy and brazen, a trumpet flaming out with sass.

It’s Russell who delivers the great, key performance; it’s his Frescia, the cop trying to juggle friendship and duty, who is really the central character. Russell--with slicked-down hair and a natty wardrobe modeled after Lakers coach Pat Riley--tears into his part with the ferocious confidence that Michael Douglas showed last year in “Wall Street.” His eyes have a ratty, mean glitter; his smile is fierce; he’s murderously articulate.

Yet for all his brass, Towne and Russell bring out the idealism and gentleness that tie Nick to McKussic and Joanne and made him a cop in the first place. Both Nick and McKussic are good men in hostile environments, but Nick is the survivor, McKussic the dreamer.

There is one often-mentioned complaint about “Tequila Sunrise” that’s probably right: Towne has softened the character of McKussic too much, not given him enough menace--and then paradoxically made him too heroic in the last section of the film. (Initially, as Towne wrote it, McKussic was fashioned on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. He remained more passive, acted on. And his “heroic” final action was actually accomplished by another character: the brutal DEA agent, Maguire.)

Some audiences--especially in a city where police estimate that around 85% of the street crime is drug-related--may justifiably scoff at the notion of a principled ex-drug dealer. But McKussic’s condition has a certain symbolic logic: His values were shaped in an era when cocaine wasn’t necessarily perceived as a scourge. Now, trying to adjust himself to a different reality, he finds himself trapped in the past, unable to escape the stigma of his own mistakes. (Translate “Tequila Sunrise” to the bootlegging years and you’ll see how traditional the story really is.)

Recently several films--most obviously “Running on Empty,” “1969” and “Distant Thunder”--have tried to reconcile us with the past, symbolically reclaim the casualties of the Vietnam War era.

In a way, “Tequila Sunrise” belongs with this group. For all its movie-struck glamour, it suggests that our preconceptions about morality and heroism, especially the ones we see most often in movies, are often fatally flawed. Good men, like McKussic, can do evil things; evil men, like Maguire, can fight for “good.” Murderers like Carlos can be charming; friendships die, are reborn and mutate spectacularly under society’s pressures. Most disturbingly, no one side of any question--political, social or even criminal--has a monopoly on either good people or bad ones.

In the face of all this--this seemingly gloomy portrayal of a world in flux and chaos--the resolution of “Tequila Sunrise” has some resonance and beauty. Towne, poet of graceful maneuvers in a corrupt society, has made an old-fashioned movie-movie, yet the reality and pain beneath and the words above sting it to life.