"Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the
rent." —Pavement, "Range Life"
Troy Duffy had reason to feel confident. Miramax
honcho Harvey Weinstein, the famed kingmaker of independent icons like Quentin
Tarantino and Kevin Smith, read Duffy's script for The Boondock Saints and seemed intent on
making him the next big thing. And Duffy cut a Smith-like figure: He was a
blue-collar bruiser from far outside the system, given to chain-smoking,
colorful language, and wearing overalls without a shirt, like Larry The Cable
Guy. Weinstein offered Duffy a sweetheart deal that included $300,000 upfront
for the script, a $15 million production budget, and a record contract for
Duffy's band, The Brood. And to consummate the marriage, Weinstein even agreed
to buy a stake in Duffy's Hollywood bar.
To say that Duffy allowed all these developments
to go to his head doesn't begin to describe the colossal arrogance and hubris
that would eventually lead to his ruination. In Overnight—a
documentary/hit-job about the Boondock fiasco, directed by two of his former
creative associates—Duffy declares himself "Hollywood's newest hard-on"
and seems to believe that he's got all kinds of leverage, even though he's never
made a movie. Skip to virtually any scene in the documentary, and there's
Duffy, bloviating at length about the unprecedented genius of himself and his
dead-eyed cohorts ("We have a deep cesspool of creativity here") while burning
every bridge and scorching every patch of earth he comes across. Here's but one
brief montage of disses:
Based on what we see of him in Overnight, I have no problem
joining in the schadenfreude that greeted Duffy's fall from grace. As the
Pavement line above suggests, unproven commodities like Duffy are nothing until
they've put their heads down and actually produced something of value, and hearing
this egomaniac hold court about his brilliance makes people rightfully root for
him to fail. Among the many Duffy highlights: Calling Meryl Poster (Weinstein's
right-hand woman at Miramax and one of Hollywood's most powerful women) a
"cunt" in the same sentence he blasts her for considering him a womanizer and a
drunk, referring to Boondock as "one of the greatest independent films ever
made" as he awaits an offer that never comes at Cannes, and fantasizing bitterly
about making Weinstein pay through the nose to pick up the film once it triumphantly
makes it to the screen.
And yet with all that said, I'm going to float
this radical idea out there: Troy Duffy kinda got screwed.
In the end, Weinstein dropped Duffy, who wound up
shooting The Boondock Saints for half the budget with another production
company. And guess what? Irony of ironies, the kid actually made a movie that a
lot of people wanted to see. When every distributor passed on the film at
Cannes, the rights finally fell to Indican Pictures, a speck of an independent
label even in the world of speck-like independent labels. Duffy blames the
film's failure on unfortunate timing, and that's somewhat understandable, given
that Columbine happened a month before the film's Cannes première. Still, it's
hard to believe that the Boondock Saints Duffy finally completed is anything other
than exactly the movie that Miramax expected and wanted from him. And it's
harder still to believe that the film could have slipped so deep into indie-distribution
hell were he not such a pariah in Hollywood. Duffy only has himself to blame
for scotching the sweetest deal a first-time filmmaker could ever hope to get,
but he ultimately delivered on his end of the bargain. The fact that he hasn't
seen a dime from the film's runaway success on DVD—thanks to a deal inked
by an agency (William Morris) that he never felt represented his
interests—isn't really just. It's more like just deserts.
As for The Boondock Saints itself, well, there's
certainly a cesspool of creativity at work here. Watching it for the first time
this week, I was curious to find out why a cult rallied around a film that was
neither commercially nor critically successful, and on that level at least, I
can understand why it has as following. To put it diplomatically, Duffy paints
in very bold strokes: There's hardly a moment that passes without something
"cool" from the florid dialogue, the cartoonish performances, and the hey-look-ma
flurry of slo-motion shots, freeze-frames, and unmotivated fades to black. It's
all very stylish and badass until you realize, within a few minutes, what
you're watching: Martin Scorsese, as re-imagined by a vulgar, precocious,
ADD-afflicted 13-year-old boy.
The opening scene says it all. It's St. Patrick's
Day in Boston, and parishioners are packed into a Catholic church for Mass. In
the middle of the homily, a pair of fraternal twins (played by Sean Patrick
Flanery and Norman Reedus) stroll purposefully down the aisle, donning
identical dark coats, rosaries, and mirthless glowers. They quietly slip past
the priest, kneel before a large crucifix, and say a solemn prayer as an
angelic chorus swells on the soundtrack. Meanwhile, the priest sermonizes about
some lurid murder that took place in view of an uncaring audience. "We must all
fear evil," he says. "But there's another kind of evil which we must fear most,
and that's the indifference of good men." And on that note, the sunglasses come
out, the cigarettes are lit, and the brothers are ready to cleanse the city in
blood.
Having the boys pray before going vigilante reminded
me of the crude, abbreviated second act in the notorious cult horror film I
Spit On Your Grave,
in which a young woman is gang-raped and left for dead by four
men—including the village idiot, for that added touch of class. But before
she seeks vengeance via castration and other grisly acts, she asks God for
forgiveness for the sins she's about to commit. And that's really the purpose
of the first scene in Boondock: These brothers feel they must commit evil in
order to thwart a greater evil, and by taking such drastic measures, they're
doing the Lord's work. (Incidentally, this is how terrorists think, too.) If I
had any sense that either I Spit On Your Grave or The Boondock Saints took their themes of
religion and vigilantism at all seriously, then they might be more forgivable.
But the church scenes are just empty posturing, a way of justifying the
bloodbath to come while giving their heroes some moral cover.