MOVIE REVIEW : ‘January Man’s’ Charm May Leave One Cold

A singular quirkiness has been the most engaging quality of “The January Man’s” writer, John Patrick Shanley: characters like Nicolas Cage’s in “Moonstruck,” who lost one hand because of love--well, love and not paying attention to a bread-slicing machine--or the assortment of Bronx poets and psychopaths in “Five Corners.”

There’s a very Irish quality to Shanley’s work, a wild lyric hand with character and dialogue that makes his pairing with Irish-born director Pat O’Connor all the more understandable. (Thus far O’Connor has made a mad quinella of films: the distinguished “Cal,” the delicate introspection of “A Month in the Country” and the truly loony “Stars and Bars.”) Unfortunately, this same unpredictability is what makes “The January Man” charming and exasperating at the same time.

Its characters are the Manhattanites whose speech patterns intrigue Shanley so, from an intrepid, utterly unorthodox ex-detective, Nick Starkey (Kevin Kline), to a Tammany-style mayor (Rod Steiger, with an aureole of white hair) and a vindictive police commissioner (Harvey Keitel).

In proper Shanley cat’s-cradle style, Keitel is also Kline’s brother, and Keitel’s now-wife, Susan Sarandon, was the flame who fed Kline’s home fires only a few short years before. And to thicken the plot, it is the mayor’s 23-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who begins an impetuous affair with Kline just as this romantic thriller opens.

Some years earlier, Kline was banished from his slot as the police department’s great intuitive master sleuth to the New York Fire Department (?!) on trumped-up allegations of graft. It turns out to be dirty family doings.

However, the amiable Kline has settled as contentedly into the life of a firefighter as he had into the life of a detective--perhaps more so. Putting out fires and saving children seems a little more straightforward to him than dealing with the twisted mentalities of the world of homicide.

But after the serial killings of 11 young women over as many months, from somewhere comes the cry to bring hero-firefighter Kline back as special investigator on the case. It’s a move made over the reverberating protests of precinct Capt. Danny Aiello. However, it comes at the bellowing request of mayor Steiger, and as any actor can tell you, it is a losing battle to get into a screaming contest with Rod Steiger, “The Last Hurrah” himself.

O’Connor and Shanley give generous texture to Kline’s character, to his friendship with Ed-the-artist (the charismatic Alan Rickman, “Die Hard’s” saturnine villain), to the torch that Kline still carries for Sarandon and to the setup for his immediate hot-sheet romance with Mastrantonio. Yet, enticing as all this is, it wreaks havoc with the movie’s crime-thriller format, which requires that we at least pretend to believe Kline’s method in fathoming the killer’s madness.

Kline begins with the provable theory that the killer has used prime numbers as the dates of each of his previous 11 murders, and thus will strike on a predictable January date. As the unflappable Ed turns into a wizardly sidekick, Kline goes into three-dimensional computer imaging and side trips to the planetarium to flesh out his diagram of his quarry’s mental processes. It makes us mesmerized by the workings of this psychopath’s mind and frustrates us mightily when we learn as little as we do about him at the movie’s end.

Kline’s leaps of intuition might put even Sherlock Holmes’ eyelids at half-staff in disbelief. And if those leaps bother you, don’t even think about the jumps in behavior that Sarandon’s biting, mink-swathed matron must make during the course of the film (rated R for language and brief nudity). It’s a tasty but hors d’oeuvre-size role for Sarandon, making her character the second one we leave wanting to know more about.

“The January Man” is nothing to seek out if you want airtight logic. What it offers is charm, blather, the dazzlement of writing and performance that wear thin well before the final, credulity-straining quarter. Kline, Mastrantonio, Sarandon and Rickman carry its charm most effectively; although the Kline-Mastrantonio affair begins precipitously, it is amplified in a way to sweep you away, too. But you know what county you’re in when one of the young under-detectives calls Kline admiringly, “a shamus”; it’s far closer to Glocca Morra than the County of New York.