Odd Couple

By R.S.

CUTTER AND BONE

Directed by Ivan Passer

Screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin

Cutter (John Heard) is crazy angry and has every, right to be. He lost an eye, an arm and a leg in Viet Nam, and there are hints that a family fortune was somehow dissipated before that. He drinks, makes terrible scenes in public, and in private treats his wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn) shamefully. Bone (Jeff Bridges) is pathologically amiable, a gentle gigolo who would rather be out on his sailboat or, better still, indulging a dream of rescuing his buddy's lady from her slummy, captive misery. In short, Cutter and Bone are the oddest couple this side of, La Cage aux Folles. The notion of their apprehending a rich and powerful man for a sex murder of which Bone is suspected is surely the year's most dubious movie premise.

Yet somehow it works, despite the fact that the setting (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and the plot (which involves, among other factors, sins of an older generation) appear to be borrowed from Ross Macdonald. It works, in part, because Czech-born Director Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting) is a junk-ball twirler with an ability to put a loony backspin on bitterness. In his pictures people strike out laughing. More important, he finds a way to make one care about losers without imputing hidden heroic virtues to them. And Writer Fiskin knows how to construct revealing scenes economically, with characters talking truly tough instead of merely smart-mouth.

All the performances are good, and Eichhorn's is more than that, ranging from drunken despair to crisp reformation to, finally, gentle acquiescence in Bridges' fantasy. But the energy cell powering the whole works is Heard. Recent movies have been full of psychopaths, but this is the definitive statement on that snaky breed. The alternation of charm and rage, of bravado and self-pity--above all the watchful intelligence in the eyes, judging just how far he can go before people revolt against his manipulations--all this marks Heard's as a big but never too broad performance. That somehow one keeps liking him, laughing at him, worrying about him, speaks of a gift that goes beyond craft, just as Heard's portrayal of a wildly obsessed lover in 1979's Head over Heels did. He is one of the very few actors who can retain their humanity while tumbling over a psychological edge.

When the big bullies are dominating the movie playground, it can be tough for a small, canny film to survive: United Artists has, at least temporarily, pulled Cutter and Bone from release. One can only hope that this spirited original will be given another chance.

--R.S.

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