Review of Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) by Edith N — 17 Nov 2008

You know, this movie doesn't actually go with [i]High Fidelity[/i], the movie that's always paired with it. Heck, I seriously considered doing a double review myself. However, except for the coincidence of release date and star, they're not at all the same movie. [i]High Fidelity[/i] isn't half so dark a comedy. Further, we actually get more insight into the character of Rob in [i]High Fidelity[/i]. Martin is still pretty much a cipher at the end of the film. We see the point he reaches by the end of things, but I don't think we see how he got to the beginning. The Martin Blank described by various of the characters does not strike me as being the sort to have joined the military in the first place, much less do the other things we know Martin to have done.

Martin, you see, is a hitman. We see him doing his job during the opening creidts. While on the phone to his assistant (sister Joan), yet. Of course, he fails, because another assassin, Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), has been hired. I think the fact that he's being distracted by talk of his ten year high school reunion can't help. At any rate, he ends up getting sent to Detroit to do a job the same weekend, and he decides not only to take the job but to make amends with his life there--and the girl (Minnie Driver as Debi Newberry) he abandoned on prom night. All this is also at the advice of his therapist, Dr. Oatman, so skillfully played by Alan Arkin that he really steals his scenes away from John Cusack, not an easy thing to do.

In fact, the movie I am most inclined to pair this with is [i]Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion[/i]. They were also released very close to one another in time, both about the same theme. This was the darker of the pair, but I think both share the same fear. In both movies, the fear is being a different person than the one you wanted to be, a different person than who you were supposed to be, and the fact that those two people are never going to be the same. I think Martin Blank was expected to be on the road to some serious greatness, or at least influence. The thought of being that person, though, somehow drove Martin Blank out of his home and self. He invents a new person to become just as surely as Romy and Michelle do. (This is also the [i]better[/i] movie, but I don't think [i]Romy and Michelle[/i] is half so bad as others have tried to convince me.) Though he is curiously open about what he does, because he knows no one will believe him.

Debi is Martin's lodestone. He has been dreaming of her the entire ten years that he is gone, and the two things he most wants to see when he returns are his old home and his own girlfriend. Indeed, seeing his mother (Barbara Harris) only comes when everything else is falling apart and he needs his mommy. I think Martin thought certain things would always be the way that he wanted them to, and that is what enabled him to go running off in the first place. It was okay to abandon Debi on prom night ($700 dress and all), because she'd just be there whenever he got back and needed her. As, indeed, she seems to have been. Eventually.

I love this movie. It's got four Cusacks in it, not to mention Jenna Elfman in a neckbrace. It also features what I think to be the most telling summary of a character done without words in recent years. Martin's best friend, Paul Spericki (Jeremy Piven), shows Martin to his car. It's on a side street; no one else is parked there. There's one stretch of red zone on an otherwise empty street that is just the size of one car--and Paul's car is parked in it. Forget all the other injokes and Bond references. That one moment is enough to tell you, I think, that you are dealing with a film into which someone put more than the average amount of thought. Also, there is Hank Azaria as a goverment agent.