Bandits
Northwest Passage
I wasn’t going to make a big deal of this, at least not until Bruce Willis mentioned it towards the end of the movie, but there’s something about Bandits that reminded me a little bit of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Stay with me here.
First, and most obvious, is the location. Bandits spends all but a little bit of time in Oregon, taking advantage of the beautiful Pacific Coast scenery. (Bandits seems to find every cheap motel and watering hole on the West Coast, including one joint that offers “Music - Mussels”.) Secondly, Bandits is about an effective partnership between two talented, but dissimilar individuals. Like William Clark, Joe Blake (Bruce Willis) is stolid and fearless, strong and decisive. Like Meriwether Lewis, Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thornton) is… well, something of a mess. Terry is easily as neurotic as Lewis was but is much showier about it. Yet, the two men work well together and complement each other’s weaknesses. (”Together,” Cate Blanchett tells them, “you’re the perfect man.”) There are other similarities; like Lewis and Clark, Terry and Joe split up from time to time and rendezvous later. And both the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Blake and Collins bank-robbing crime spree become dependent on assistance from a woman; our Sacagawea here is Kate Wheeler (Blanchett), who starts out as something of a hostage and becomes something of an accomplice.
There’s something circumstantial about that, I admit. You could just as easily say, for example, that Bandits borrows (actually, “steals” would be a better word here) from Of Mice and Men. However, I think the Lewis and Clark parallel holds up here. The Corps of Discovery was searching for the mythical Northwest Passage, but what they found instead was danger, intrigue, fame, and a vast wilderness. Joe and Terry are searching for something just as mythical; the One Big Score, which will set them up in a comfortable retirement running a nightclub in Mexico. (”You’ll run the front, I’ll run the kitchen,” says Terry, which does make him sound an awful lot like Lennie asking George about the rabbits, come to think of it.) But like Lewis and Clark, what they find along the way to that mythical destination is far more interesting.
In a year where most of the best movies seem to be about clever heists, Bandits wisely chooses to have more fun with the spaces between the heists than with the robberies themselves. Bandits is much less interested in the technical details of the bank-robbing game than it is with things like hitchhikers in pink cowboy boots or old Bonnie Tyler songs or Thornton’s imaginary brain tumor. Other films may obsess over security cameras or silent alarms; Bandits is more interested in plaid shirts and Mary Kay conventions and Dutch stewardesses and bad tabloid television and the world’s coolest set of Venetian blinds. In doing so, it manages to trump each of the other good heist movies of the year.
The Score is largely about whether Robert DeNiro can trust Ed Norton, the talented new guy, in stealing a valuable scepter. Bandits has Joe and Terry trusting a new guy, Joe’s cousin Harvey (Troy Garity), whose talent is setting himself on fire. (If that doesn’t sound like a terribly useful talent, just watch.) It’s also about whether they can trust Kate, which sets up a love triangle that’s much more complicated than any robbery could be.
Heist is largely about disguise, with Gene Hackman and his crew wearing all manner of blue-collar disguises to pull off a daring airplane robbery. Bandits is about disguises as sight gags, and features the funniest clothes this side of Bjork’s closet. The clothes in the movie are so outlandish that we’re not shocked when Harvey shows up at one cheap hotel wearing a genuine Hank Williams sequins-and-fringes getup, causing Terry to ask, “Remember what I told you about lying low?” Bandits even features that necessary staple of Bruce Willis movies, the bad toupee, to hilarious effect, even upstaging that horrible Joan Jett haircut that Rebecca Pidgeon sports in Heist. (That’s three reviews this month where that haircut’s come up.)
Ocean’s Eleven is all about wit and style and savoir-faire. Bandits features a scene where Billy Bob Thornton has a spell of psychosomatic paralysis while on the dance floor with Cate Blanchett that’s funny enough to make a cat laugh. Ocean’s Eleven had exactly one good belly laugh (”They oughta call it whitejack!”), while Bandits has dozens. Willis and Thornton are both underrated comic actors, and they work together like they’ve done it all their lives.
However, Blanchett upstages both of them, turning in the best comic performance by an actress this year, just a bit in front of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Blanchett is the love-starved wife of the most self-centered man on earth; she runs away with Willis and Thornton mostly because she has nowhere else to go and the circus isn’t in town. She is at her best when she teeters on the edge of desperation, at once reckless and bold while lost and vulnerable. It’s outstanding work, and might be enough to earn her a Best Supporting Actress nod.
The third car that Willis and Thornton steal in the movie (the first is a cement truck) is a Chrysler PT Cruiser, and when I saw it, I was worried that the car would reflect the movie; that it would be cute and cool but with not much under the hood. By the end of the movie, they’re driving a vintage GTO, which is a more apt metaphor. Bandits is a sleek, stylish movie with comic horsepower to spare. It’s the perfect vehicle for a mythic journey through the modern Northwest Passage.