be friends do crime: Tequila Sunrise (1988)
A really fun thing about Tequila Sunrise is how the basic structure of the movie — crime thriller about drug smuggling — is totally drowned in the personalities, idiosyncrasies, and tangled relationships of its protagonists. I didn't find the film hard to follow, but plenty of people did, and it's not hard to see why when the normal direction of events like "cop spies on drug dealer" and "drug dealer plans for incoming shipment" and "love interest chooses between cop and drug dealer" is skewed to such a serious degree by like, whims, and degrees of affection, and who's been talking to who with what degree of sincerity. It's both funny and absurd how little anyone in this movie gives a shit about drugs or money or hierarchy or the adrenaline rush of crime, even when the amount of drugs is a lot and the amount of money is totally fucking ridiculous. It should have been set in St. Louis; it's all just about who you went to high school with.
Look at Kurt Russell's character, cop Nick Frescia. He's good at his job, it seems; at least he's slick. He's also totally baffling to his coworkers, as his soft spot for drug dealer Dale McKussic (aka "Mac," aka Mel Gibson) means that he's working with a hand tied behind his back. His colleagues know he can't be trusted to stick to the script when Mac is involved, which is significant because Mac is a big deal. Or was a big deal? Mac's going straight, trying to get his life together for his kid and the pretty restauranteuse he's crushing on, and the fact that Nick caught him at that drug deal with his lawyer and a totally normal really reasonable amount of cocaine actually helps his argument in that direction because [looks at smudged writing on hand] said guy was also the lawyer of the pretty restauranteuse, and the lawyer's gotta tell her that Mac's a legitimate businessman now and not a drug dealer, and how's he going to do that if he's in jail for drug dealing? Mac was just trying to help the guy out. "That was awful dumb," says the pretty restauranteuse when she finds out — Jo Ann Vallenari, played by Michelle Pfeiffer — but she says it with this struck expression on her face, confused and amazed. You can see her taking it in, in an excellent scene where the sunlight plays across their mirrored vulnerable faces, as she realizes that yeah, it was stupid, but he did it because he likes her.
The whole movie's like this. No one's got motivations of greed or ambition. Everyone's just trying to get a smile from the right person, keep themselves in the right place, keep their friend in the right place. There's a lot of "okay, man, I made a mistake, I fucked up, I'm sorry" and "wow, dude, no, you're right, I didn't mean it like that, my bad" and it's all being said over plastic-wrapped cash bricks instead of a half-empty beer at the bar. It's really funny! Nick ties himself in knots over and over in his place of employment because he bullishly refuses to arrest a guy he went to high school with. Mac stutters himself into the world's stupidest situations because he wants a lady he knows to like him. Mexican coke kingpin and old prison buddy Carlos breaks into Mac's house in the middle of an active stakeout because he wants to play ping-pong. The climactic confrontation between Mac and Carlos contains like, four separate instances of Mac committing to what would be the intelligent move for a drug smuggler at cross-purposes with a crime lord and then backtracking because he likes the guy and doesn't want to hurt him. Even when he literally shoots him Carlos is still like okay that sucked but also come back don't leave before I eat it let me tell you about all this weed I got coming in and you really genuinely do get the impression that this character is spending what he knows to be the last few moments of his life giving his friend shit because it makes him happy. No one acts particularly intelligent in this movie, by which I mean none of these characters are good at being mercenary, but they are acting in a way that makes quite a lot of sense when you consider the amount of hoops human beings jump through every day to keep the people they like around them and on their side.
It's fun, too, how the movie's focus on the emotional makes the normal tension of a crime flick seem petty and secondary. It would be really easy to look at Mac's honest criminal and Nick's slimy cop and say this is a movie about how the lines between good and bad are blurred, but that doesn't really end up having anything to do with it. The emphasis is on the likability of the characters more than anything. This is how I can see why people would find it confusing — the plot, all that structure, is kicked to the side in scene after scene in order to spend time with the people in the plot, who are inevitably more interested in each other than in where the drug money is going. It's not just the love triangle, either! Mac's emotional attachment to Carlos and inability to say no to him forwards most of the story. Jo Ann's responsibility to and fondness of the workers at her restaurant becomes Nick's in with her. Nick's open disdain for his DEA colleagues feeds his irreverent protection of Mac. Everyone's just looking in disbelief at where their love led them.
There's a scene about forty minutes in where Mac and Nick sit on a swingset, silhouetted into black shadows by the setting sun behind them, and hash out what's happened so far. It's a very Tony Scott moment, visually striking over the line into melodramatic, but it works. You can't tell who's closer to the camera and who's farther away; sometimes their bodies cross, or blur into each other; if an actor turns towards or away from the frame they become entirely expressionless. It serves to plunge the characters back in time, to the childhood they shared that the film only alludes to, that thing that connects them so strongly and that they're incapable of breaking away from. A lot of the film is like that. The focus is on that focus, two people holding something between them that others can't entirely understand. The rest is all background.
