(dir: Ulu Grosbard, 1978)
March 3, 2008
Who would have guessed that Dustin Hoffman could be intimidating?
Ulu Grosbard’s uncompromising character study, “Straight Time,” is an extraordinarily sad little picture that came and went without much fanfare back in 1978, but now can be appreciated as a minor classic of the period. It’s perplexing that critics didn’t (and don’t) make a bigger deal out of this movie. Although it’s one of the quietist crime stories you’ll ever see, the main character’s mounting desperation is almost too much to bear, and Hoffman reveals it to you in precisely measured doses. From where I’m sitting, this is the best performance he’s ever given, and he didn’t even get an Oscar nomination for his trouble. Hell, the movie barely even appeared in theaters.
Hoffman is Max Dembo, a lifelong recidivist criminal who, when the picture opens, is being released from prison after doing six years on a burglary charge. Max has his prison-issue jacket, a 70s-style silk shirt, and not much else to his name when he walks through the front gates and hops a bus for Los Angeles. When he reaches L.A., he seems intent on finally finding a place for himself in society, but quickly realizes that his parole officer, Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh), isn’t going to let him accomplish that on his own.
Not even Max’s halting romance with a law-abiding girl (Theresa Russell, beautiful but listless) and a menial job at a canning factory convinces Frank that things are heading in the right direction for Max. When Max’s rather dimwitted buddy, Willy (Gary Busey), shoots heroin in Max’s flophouse room – an act that could get the now ex-con another three years in the slammer – the downward spiral begins anew.
There’s a palpable undercurrent to the narrative, a sense that Max couldn’t possibly break free of the pull, even if he honestly had the will to do it. Owen Roizman's grainy, gritty cinematography (he also shot "Network" and "The French Connection") does nothing to romanticize the situation in movie terms. The documentary texture of the images only heightens the reality.
One of the more fascinating things about Jeffrey Boam’s script is that Walsh’s character, on the surface, seems to be a straight-up asshole. But it’s only upon reflection that you realize he tries to cut Max some slack, and Max carelessly blows the chances he’s given.
Grosbard and Hoffman take you so far into a petty criminal’s mind, you actually empathize with him when he’s needlessly putting himself in danger. You wind up hating the parole officer, and Max’s sudden aggression toward him is a shocking mixture of brutality and prison-style humiliation. It’s an incredibly satisfying scene, even if your satisfaction as a viewer means that you’re now playing on the wrong side of the law.
Of course, once Max pulls a violent number on his parole officer, he has no choice but to re-enter a life of crime. So he quickly hooks up with a former accomplice named Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton) who’s pretending to go straight, but really longs to be a shotgun man on yet another armed robbery.
The initial scene between Max and Jerry, in which Jerry confides in his old friend that his married, middle-class existence is strangling the life out of him, is heartbreaking. Grosbard lets it unfold in a single take that moves between humor, compassion, and desperation without breaking a sweat. In a way, it stands as a microcosm for the rest of the film. You soon realize that, even when things seem to be operating on an even keel, these characters are destined to rock the boat until it tips. They can’t grasp any other way to live.
It’s not long before Max and Jerry move from waving guns and cleaning out tills at convenience stores to robbing banks. The hold-ups aren’t the usual Hollywood routine, either. You feel the adrenaline that’s driving the criminals, but also their anxiety. In the process, you discover that Max, who’s willing to retaliate against close friends who fail to accomplish their assigned tasks during a robbery, gets so jazzed by being in control of a situation, he can’t stick to a plan himself. He gets greedy for both money and thrills.
This is yet another way that Grosbard pulls you into the these people’s lives. There aren’t many crime movies in which you learn something about the criminals’ inner lives through their robbery technique. There's also a startling moment where Max steals a shotgun from a pawn shop and ends up quietly whimpering to himself as he holds the coveted weapon.
Ironically, “Straight Time” was dumped by Warner Bros. after Hoffman, who was originally directing as well as starring, handed the reins over to Grosbard, then sued the studio when they wouldn’t allow some scenes to be re-shot. Hoffman is famous for being a pain-in-the-ass perfectionist on the set, and this time his meddling hamstrung the movie’s release. God only knows which scenes so offended him. There’s not a single misstep in “Straight Time,” aside from an utterly inappropriate score by David Shire, who must have watched the wrong movie before he hired a soft-jazz soprano saxophonist. Luckily, the vast majority of the picture unfolds with no music at all.
There’s not a bit of flash in “Straight Time.” Instead, Hoffman and Grosbard trust the audience to connect with Max’s weaknesses, and see him not as a failed human being, but as a human being who was never meant to win. The only world Max has ever known is a world of loss, so he sticks a .45 in his pocket and embraces the inevitable.
Paul Tatara
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