STATE OF GRACE (1990)
I'm neither a churchgoer nor a gambler. According to Phil Joanou's 1990 neo-noir crime thriller STATE OF GRACE, there doesn't seem to be much difference…if I understand them correctly.
As I revisit the film, I'm faced with the realization that I might not understand these specific elements of the world—praying to God or simply putting it all on the line in a last-minute bid to win a hand in poker—but I understand how this movie confronts the challenging relationship between family and flight. Compelled as you may be to flee the world from which you've come, family brings you back to roost, sometimes with dangerous consequences, almost none of which you can escape. And a state of grace can have a number of definitions. I'm trying to reconcile this great crime noir film that addresses mortality and one's duty to family, one's duty to self. I hadn't seen them as intertwined, for so long. Once again: if I understand them correctly.
In the film, it's been ten years since Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) left Hell's Kitchen, a crime-riddled spider web of New York streets where you're either tough or you're dead. Now he's back, and he's got some stories to tell about what he's been up to since he left. He did his time in the Corps. He worked on an oil rig as well. He's been a cog in the wheel of heavy machinery. These are all falsehoods, of course. Neither his best friend Jackie (Gary Oldman) nor his old flame Kathleen (Robin Wright) nor even newly-inducted Irish gang boss—and Jackie's brother—Frankie (Ed Harris) know that Terry is working deep undercover as a cop to bring everyone down, to bring all of it down: a marker that must be paid so that Terry can finally leave the Kitchen in his rearview. But Terry may not be going anywhere. He's playing a very dangerous game, one that will see him doing his job as it was assigned to him or getting caught in the inevitable crossfire.
One of the film's greatest ingredients remains the cast itself. Harris is quietly composed at all times, always feigning control over a group of street punks that is an illusion at best. Frankie somehow imagines himself as being able to live above his station, in order to prove that he's much more than the Irish street thug that he's always been. But he's not. As much a product of the streets as he's likely consigned to die there, Frankie would prefer to trade in the traditions of loyalty that have bonded his crew for so long for a world of high class criminality with his Italian cohorts across town. But you can take the kid out of the streets—you can't take the streets out of the kid. Oldman, meanwhile, as Frankie's younger brother, is as reckless as they come, more content to burn the house down around him rather than subscribe to any notions that would threaten to tell him what to do. If there are rules to be followed, they were written by Jackie alone, perhaps to his detriment. Jackie is the terrier that simply won't stop barking, won't stop biting. It's both his strength and his weakness.
And then there's Terry. Raised on the streets of Hell's Kitchen (itself as much as a character in the film captured by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth as any of the living, breathing actors who populate it), Terry would abandon that violent, transient background in order to show that you can leave your past behind, but you can't. You can't.
Terry has returned to Hell's Kitchen with a seemingly new identity, that of an officer of the law rather than that of the dangerous thug that once left the Kitchen. And he's back in service of a responsibility that completely contradicts the brotherhood that he'd once forged there. And he'll pull poor Kathleen back into the streets as well.
She had remained as long gone from the Kitchen as she could make it over the course of the past ten years, but she has a Homecoming awaiting her as well. If Joanou's film teaches the viewer anything, it's that no one can be reinvented. Even Hell's Kitchen—now called Clinton—cannot abandon its violent past. Trying to do so is that moment of grace that gives the film its title, that moment that demands that a debt finally be repaid.
And the engineer of this high stakes game is composer Ennio Morricone himself. His haunting score rarely deviates in its tones, which makes the visual deviations throughout the film all the more compelling, as if a ballad plays as the backdrop of a violent death. Whether scoring the funeral of a friend or one final gunfight for one's life, Morricone's plaintive score highlights the sorrowful nature of Joanou's tragedy. A tragedy demands that a noble figure was brought down due to his own ego. STATE OF GRACE isn't concerned with figures possessed with hubris, but it's ultimately concerned with fate, and Morricone understands what Fate sounds like.
If you can't leave your debts behind you forever, then you can't leave your past in the past. Your past tends to catch up to you, to find you precisely where you thought you left it. This is the rake that guides much of the conflict in STATE OF GRACE, that moment that comes immediately after the deadline for a debt has passed. And it's now time to pay. What makes Joanou's film so effective is that it leads the viewer to that moment and has been leading the viewer to that moment from its first moments—in the slow motion movements of a St. Patrick's Day parade as the opening credits roll. And that parade is precisely where the film concludes—bookending this criminally underseen motion picture—as Kathleen watches on, trying to imagine a conclusion to this story that was not as bloody as this one. But the bloody violence of Joanou's movie is the debt to be paid, and the house always wins, whether you're a praying person or not. STATE OF GRACE ends precisely where it began, demonstrating that its characters can no more escape the nature of their past any more than they can escape the fate that was always waiting for them.
The two seem inextricably linked, if I understand them correctly.
