O Crime Que o Mundo Esqueceu

Everybody I know say that this is a horrible movie.I can´t understand why.Good story,good acting by Nick Nolte and Debra Winger.OK it is not a masterpiece exactly but you can watch the whole movie and afterwards think about it for 1 hour or so.

Oh, my goodness, this was quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen. At the end of the film, I found myself asking what the point of the whole thing was, and yet I couldn't come up with an answer. This movie has almost NO plot. The fact that it was filmed in my hometown couldn't even save it. Not that Nolte nor Winger did a bad job, but I definitely would not recommend this film to anyone who may be on the edge of whether to watch it or not... You'll find yourself, at the end, saying "Whatever..."

Sometimes movies work for a whole variety of reasons. It might simply be because there is a great director at the helm but then even great directors make bummers now and then. Sometimes the story is just so damned good it hardly matters who the director is and sometimes a movie works because one or more of the cast carries it. "Everybody Wins" works because it's got a fine director working at the top of his form, (Karl Reisz), a terrific original screenplay by the playwright Arthur Miller and probably career-best performances from leads Nick Nolte and Debra Winger.

Nolte is the celebrity investigator hired by a flaky 'do-gooder' to prove the innocence of a teenage boy she knows on a charge of murder. From the outset, you know this isn't going to be a conventional 'thriller'. You know instantly that Winger's character of the supposed 'do-gooder' is, shall we say, a little on the strange side; that her come-on to Nolte is so quick she may even be a nymphomaniac and that Nolte's investigation is going off in directions that conventional thrillers don't. You also know that Arthur Miller doesn't do 'conventional'.

Of course, the talent on the screen didn't translate into a commercial success. Even the critics, with the exception of Pauline Kael, who loved the film, were stand-offish. Here was a crime movie that no-one could understand or know what to make of but in its off-the-wall way it was trail-blazingly original and I still think it's one of the truly great American films of its decade. If you don't know it, seek it out and give yourself over to its sublime strangeness.

Modern noir, written by Arthur Miller, drowns in pretensions while pretending to be a murder mystery; the only mystery is how this murky, congested screenplay attracted stars Nick Nolte and Debra Winger (both treading water). After a New England doctor is murdered and a young suspect is named, a schizophrenic local woman, who believes the boy is innocent, hires an investigator from out-of-town to ferret out the facts. Winger's performance is like a high-wire act: she's fruity, irrational, always teetering on total collapse. Perhaps with handling that was more restrictive and writing that had more focus, this unbalanced character might have generated audience empathy (or at least made some sense). As it is, she's the wobbly centerpiece of an already-shaky melodrama, one that eventually crumbles around the actors like a house of cards. NO STARS from ****

In 1990, Nick Nolte made two films about large-scale corruption, in the police ("Q & A") and in public offices in general ("Everybody Wins"). One difference is that in the former he is the villain, in the latter he is the hero. Another difference is that in "Everybody Wins" the subject gets a decidedly uncommercial treatment. This movie has its own rhythm, its own personality, and you have to sink in to it. It's more of a subtle satire than the thriller suggested by the video cover / plot description / trailer. And it has a couple of great lines, too: "He's just a second-rate man in a position of power. It's the oldest story in the world!". At times the film is TOO slow and low-key, but I still recommend it to those seeking the offbeat. (**1/2)