Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
Director: George Armitage

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High-tech phone systems now enable Martin Blank (John Cusack) to talk to his secretary Marcella (Joan Cusack) while carrying out a job that requires both hands: assassination with a high-powered rifle. Marcella is teasing her boss today by reading him the invitation to his ten-year high school reunion in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the wealthy Detroit suburb he fled ten years ago without a word then or since. He took off because he realized that he felt like killing someone. So he joined the army, which, because of a certain "moral flexibility" in his psychological profile, fed him to the CIA, working for which made him so jaded that he simply set up as an independent, for-profit maker of efficient mayhem. He's beyond political loyalty to governments and nations, which his experience has convinced him are a matter of "public relations theory at this point," and most of his problems now stem from his refusal to join a guild of hitmen being set up by Grocer (Dan Aykroyd). Grocer wants to reduce the competition that leads to such embarrassing complications as the finale of the opening scene in which he and Blank are on opposite sides of what degenerates into a turkey shoot. Killing for hire is a crowded field in this new, small world, which is why even a lone gunman like Blank needs a secretary like Marcella to feed him information night and day by phone and computer.

Marcella also likes to get under her boss's skin, just because his surface is so immaculately unreadable. So she keeps recurring to the reunion, at one point reading out the high school's pitch to the alums and savoring both the idiotic fatuity and its particular irony for her boss: "As a graduate of the class of 1986 you are someone special," she begins. Blank asks why she keeps after him about this, and she says, "I just find it amusing that you came from somewhere." Later, when he's off for another job, she reminds him, "Don't forget your identity," and then snickers softly. Marcella makes up his entire, enthusiastic support network and so is more aware than anyone that he's perfectly named. He's a Blank man, cut off from his past and present equally. As he says of the reunion, "I just honestly don't know what I have in common with those people anymore--or with anyone, really."

He has no way to connect with other humans, but because his alienation stems from his illegal work he can't even successfully see a therapist about it. Dr. Oatman (Alan Arkin) keeps trying to sever their relationship now that Blank has told him what he does, but Blank keeps him in line by salting his honest self-searching with threats: "I know the law, okay, but I don't want to be withholding; I'm very serious about this process ... and I know where you live." So the surname Blank does more than pun on John Boorman's ultracool, head-on revenge classic Point Blank about a man who ends up with nothing but his redeemed manhood. The name is the starting point for the comic redemption of a man whose moral flexibility has stripped away all the normal ties that he finds he can't help but care about. The movie uses comedy as the process by which Martin fills in his Blank.

The idea of a hit man seeing a therapist is likewise more than a one-scene joke. The movie is a stepped-up version of the kind of identity crisis undergone during the transition from adolescence to adulthood (as is Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson's wonderful Rushmore). Blank made the transition from an adolescent personality to an adult personality in a warped way by emptying himself of character, becoming a reliably anonymous actor on the stage of international intrigue. Back in Grosse Pointe for the reunion, he runs into a guy he vaguely remembers from school and stammers his way to recognition, "You were always the guy who was ... yeah! I remember you!" That's the movie's summary of the kind of identity kids are able to forge--a crude but consistent pattern of activities, habits, mannerisms, as rigidly distinctive as a vaudevillian's specialty. Blank's situation is the inverse. But while his specialized profession as an adult is not prospective or clownish as most people's activities in high school are, neither does it bear any relation to what he feels himself to be. When a victim begs for mercy, as if Blank were personally interested in the killing, Blank offers the disclaimer, "It's not me." This means oddly that he feels the same detachment that his old best friend Paul (Jeremy Piven) feels about his work as a real estate salesman. In other words, he has more in common with the rest of us than he had thought. And this homecoming also makes him realize he now wants to grow up in a way that allows him history, identity, responses, connections.

Admittedly the movie is built on an easily statable gimmick--hit man goes to his tenth high school reunion--which suggests the movie pitches satirized in the opening of Robert Altman's movie version of The Player. But Joan Cusack's reading of the invitation indicates a more rooted sarcasm under the deadpan, as if the motive were to outrage the bland, upbeat outlook such chatter insistently, though dully, radiates. The Cusacks grew up in Evanston with left-leaning parents (their father is a documentary screenwriter) whose guests included Daniel and Philip Berrigan. 1   I don't imagine that audiences will, or need to, pick up on all of the sociopolitical critique that John intended (the script began as a story by Tom Jankiewicz which was further worked on by Cusack along with D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink, high school buddies with whom he studied at the Piven Theatre Workshop and founded the Chicago-based New Crime Productions theater company 2  ), but the Cusacks' remoteness from relatively ordinary American way of life is genuine, purposeful even.

So there's a certain power behind the gimmick, and yet part of what makes the movie so explosively berserk is the lightness of tone. Marcella underlines for us the peculiarity of a hit man's going to his tenth reunion, but the jokes cut the other way as well. Joan Cusack exaggerates her Great Lakes accent, her mouth squirming on her face to get those vowels out, which gives a wiggily homey tone to her role. The reunion invitation may sound insanely dorky when read aloud to an assassin, but Marcella's euphemisms have their own demented inanity. For instance, after the debacle of the first hit, she announces to Blank, "I just got off the phone with a very unsatisfied customer." The scriptwriters don't let a good thing off easy; they give her a call-waiting monologue in which she goes from arguing with a friend about a soup recipe to hollering at a supplier about a delayed order of ammo. And Grocer speaks in a hardboiled idiom that curls back on itself in near-parody. When he wants Blank to shut up, he snaps, "Wo-wo-wo-wo, Chatty Cathy, clip your string!" letting Aykroyd use his Saturday Night Live TV-announcer delivery, just as the hitman-at-his-therapist set-up enables Arkin to use his past in '60s improv comedy. The movie's tone is thus casually reversible, so that the normal people seem square but grounded and the circle of killers seem sophisticated but vacuum-packed.

This doubling of tone might seem like Tarantino shtick--the op effect of juxtaposing banality and fatality. But the movie avoids smug hipness as well as political smugness, probably because Cusack plays a guy on the other side of the rad-lib line and so isn't able to identify with him too easily. There's always a puff of atomized acid in the air. And Cusack further ensures that the comedy arises from authentic stirrings. The script starts from an awareness that his rejection of the conventional wife-job-kids-house suburban life has trapped Blank in a life more varied and exotic but less fulfilling. Then when he returns to Grosse Pointe he finds that his childhood home has been turned into a convenience mart and that his mother (the great Barbara Harris) is an addled, insititutionalized wreck. Nevertheless, his inauspicious return marks an opening-up process that Cusack makes plangent and plausible.

Grosse Pointe Blank's script is perfect for an already-well-known actor of Cusack's age (just over thirty at the time). Before he was twenty, in The Sure Thing (1985), he was able not merely to imitate older comedians but to imitate them in the character of an adolescent trying to find his style (trying to be "always the guy who was ... "). And in his amazing performance in Say Anything... (1989) he quietly suffused his teenaged character with the expressive awkwardness of a boy remaining defiantly open to experience despite the unfortunately twinned natural disadvantages of goallessness and male pride, timidity and garrulousness. Cusack was able to show how the character controlled his expressions while indicating every emotion that was being checked. It was a precociously mature portrait of adolescent optimism despite a total lack of any reasonable basis for hope.

Altogether, Cusack had a broader naturalistic base as an actor than the other prodigious young comedy specialists of the '80s, Anthony Michael Hall, with his mysterious sensibility under the antics, and Robert Downey, Jr., with his glimmering, on-his-toes responsiveness. Only Matthew Broderick has had almost as broad a range as Cusack, but he's had trouble because he lacks Cusack's romantic aura--people still think of him as that nice, funny boy. Cusack had a porcelain harlequin mask and a rosebud mouth which allowed him his reserve (because we could always just stare at him), but he was never just a poser, never truly blank.

Now, over ten years later, that mask has gained flesh, on which we can read the signs of exhausting experience. In The Sure Thing and Say Anything... we could see Cusack's characters locked inside their attempts to connect, watching their own efforts fizzle. Martin Blank, a dangerously dangling man, gave up on connecting long ago, and Cusack's black-Irish good looks and his almost sodden brooding deepen the hue of the romantic comedy. Pouring a bottle of whisky on his father's grave, or practicing lies in his hotel room mirror for his former schoolmates ("I'm a, uh, pet psychiatrist ... yeah, yeah ... I, I sell couch insurance ... mm-hmnh, mm-hmnh ... and I, and I, and I test market positive thinking ...") Cusack as Blank offers a dazzling array of depressed expressions, of dead and dying pans.

He's a scrupulously original emotional actor. He didn't develop a signature comedy style, as you might have expected from his early pictures, he developed an acting style that incorporates the precision of revue-style comic inventiveness. (Remember what he got out of the single-word deliveries of "Wow!" and "Mom!" in 1990's tough-nut film noir The Grifters?) The makers of Grosse Pointe Blank take advantage of this by structuring the movie as a linked series of vaudeville two-acts between Blank and the other characters who enter and exit, either in person or electronically. They had the good sense to get Cusack into nearly every frame. Stylistically, Cusack unifies all Blank's interactions with the other characters, which are full of surprising tonal and rhythmic jogs. You never quite know how people are going to react to him, and neither does he.

Blank's wariness is expressed by turns in verbal exchanges that retain an improvisational waggle and in physical uncertainty, for instance, when he first sees Debi (Minnie Driver), the girl he left behind. When Blank walks into the radio station where she's now the town's cynical alternative rock DJ, they stand and don't know how to approach each other--shake? hug? kiss? Her confusion is great, but she takes it as a challenge and puts Martin on the air, asking callers to tell her what to do about him.

Driver is in a difficult position because the romantic comedy doesn't require her to be anything but "nice" in a way perilously close to the suburban values the movie is in conflict over. So at times the movie makes her almost too kicky (she makes Blank give her an acrobatic "airplane" ride before she'll respond to his invitation to the reunion) to compensate for the fact that she has to represent the moral register Blank has lost touch with. But the director George Armitage has a super-alert sense of timing and gives space to Driver's readings, enabling them to catch you off-guard, for instance when she calls Blank "broken." Even the exposition has punch, as in Martin and Debi's opening lines to each other: "How long has it been?" "Since you stood me up on prom night and vanished without a word?" "Yeah--ten years, I think." And the dialogue, with abrupt transitions from jousting to emotional probing, seems natural for clever kids with a real bond.

Other actors have the luck of fundamentally screwy parts, and so Arkin as the whinily frightened shrink trying to dispense advice that will satisfy his client without getting himself killed, Aykroyd turning his high-gear sketch-actor urgency into menace, Piven as the boyish man who is more ordinarily disappointed with himself and is still trying to get the high school beauty to acknowledge him in what he calls a "festival of pain," along with Joan as Marcella, all seem to have bitten right into the cream centers of their roles. Even brief encounters, with Belita Moreno as Blank's former English teacher, or with Duffy Taylor as a kid working in the Ultimart on the site of Blank's old house, or with Michael Cudlitz as a drunken bully whom Blank talks down from a confrontation only to inspire to share his original poetry, are memorable. (A scene with a diner waitress is the only dud.) And the variety of encounters also elicit from Cusack different sides of his own style. Audrey Kissel as Arlene, the undying enthusiast handing out high school reunion badges, for instance, brings out a hysterical jitteriness in Cusack only a few whinnies shy of Eddie Bracken's peak moments in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

There are also variations on the two-act formula: Marcella and call-waiting; Cusack in the mirror; two NSA operatives tailing Blank, played by K. Todd Freeman and the always-inventive, bright-eyed Hank Azaria, who at one point comment on Debi's hair and whether Blank is using her or really loves her, as if they were watching a soap opera. All the same the movie centers on Cusack playing off a parade of people in highly volatile situations. (He clearly values working with other actors and the Cusack siblings especially are sneakily wicked collaborators as actors as well as assassins. John has said, "You couldn't find more twisted improvisers than Jeremy and my sister." 3  ) Cusack is a star, but his mirror scene shouldn't mislead you, he's no narcissist. He carries the picture but makes all the actors he's partnered with seem like they're carrying it, too.

Perhaps the best teaming in the picture, and arguably the highlight, occurs at the reunion when Blank runs into K.K. Dodds as Tracy, who in the same ten years has married, had children, and is, strangest of all to him, completely satisfied with her life. 4   She's brought her infant son to the shindig, and when Martin is called on to hold him he and the baby lock eyes. While Bowie and Queen sing, "And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves," Martin is transformed, as if he'd finally found the wall switch in the dark. Which shows a perfect sense of the romantic-comic genre: "the world must be peopled," after all. Cusack's melancholy feels genuine without violating our sense of the movie as a slapstick romantic comedy--he's a more fully formed actor in a Buster Keaton role. During the reunion weekend everything is momentous for Martin, but he doesn't know what to do. It seems clear to him that his training and experience certainly won't help (though that turns out not to be the case). That edginess is the opening for Cusack's comic timing, and his baby-holding, a cameo of this confused young man's search for meaning, is ineffably pleasurable. When Debi joins them and takes the baby from him, Martin can't resist snapping a shot of her with his Minox, the 15-mm. German spy camera.

What gives this comedy its aerobic drive is that it simultaneously makes clear that the hero is gaining in clarity while the chaos resulting from the violent life he is trying to escape continues to gain on him. This is standard for farce, in which things have to fall apart completely just before they're resolved. But the resolution here involves Blank engaging in a gun battle at the same time that he explains his missing decade and makes a credible proposal to Debi. The political cynicism Martin expresses to Debi in his big speech on the subject may recall Graham Greene, but the possibility nonetheless of comic redemption is very American. (It's probably also very American of us to accept the way the movie both applies and scrapes through the whitewash Blank has been laying on his work by saying that if he knocks on your door you've probably done something to bring him there.) The action-picture skill of the finale ties Grosse Pointe Blank to the director George Armitage's harder-edged previous movie Miami Blues (1990), a jaunty, character-driven crime comedy whose central character is destroyed by his own deliriously ballsy confidence games. But here Cusack has entranced us enough that we're willing to let the bloodshed lead to romantic fulfillment. At the peak of the proposal Cusack looks at Debi with a pleading look so sincere he looks exactly like he did when he found an epiphany in that infant's eyes.

1. Berrigan: Chang. (return to text)
2. D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink: Butters. (return to text)
3. twisted improvisers: Beale. (return to text)
4. This episode is based on Cusack's own tenth year high school reunion, which he attended as a result of a deal he had with Pink and DeVincentis to go if they got the money to make Grosse Pointe Blank (Frankel). (return to text)