In the past few months, we’ve discussed (at length!) some pretty heady and heavy stuff—deeply nuanced, important films with penetrating insights about the human condition. So this month, I wanted to take a bit of a break, and take look at a straightforwardly enjoyable, recent movie that may have slipped beneath many people’s radar. As you’ll know if you’ve seen it, The Nice Guys is not a capital-G Great movie. It doesn’t have stunning stylistic masterstrokes, brilliant performances that shake you to the emotional core, or anything especially profound to say about the world. It’s just fun, well made, and appealingly retro—as Justin Chang writes, “a cheerfully aimless plunge into the scuzzy noir soul of 1970s Los Angeles.”[i] It’s also a loving homage to the ‘buddy cop’ subgenre that thrived in that flashy, rather ridiculous decade: set in the same time period and featuring the same sorts of sleazy locales and characters, while also managing to be, in some ways, better and more interesting than many of those movies it’s paying homage to.
Right from the get-go, it’s clear what kind of movie this is going to be. We open drifting over a Southern California nightscape of yesteryear—wrecked Hollywood sign, darkened hills and glistening urban sprawl—with a soundtrack of smoothly twanging guitars and bass. Our title, The Nice Guys, appears in the rounded, triple-bar font particular to the era, and as we zoom in on one of the houses in the hills, a subtitle informs us, almost unnecessarily, that we’re in Los Angeles, 1977. And man, are we ever in Los Angeles, 1977. In the house, a meandering glass box full of sickly color tones, a shaggy-haired boy swipes a porn magazine from beneath his parents’ bed. As he admires a full-page spread of an actress named Misty Mountains, a car careens off the road behind him, bounces down the hillside, and crashes spectacularly through the house. It’s a slapstick sort of moment, but the immediate aftermath doesn’t play for laughs: the kid hurries down to the wreck, only to find the selfsame actress, Misty Mountains, bloodied, topless and splayed out on a rock in a queasy echo of the magazine photo. She speaks some enigmatic dying words, and in a tender moment, the shaken kid pulls off his shirt and covers her exposed chest. It’s a solid setup for a noir-ish mystery, and one that succinctly captures what the movie is all about: cars and porn, defining features of the setting that will figure prominently in the plot; pitch-black comedy that’s effective in both traditional and unconventional ways; and a distinctive portrayal of violence that’s entertaining, but also more self-aware and, in its own way, more honest than we normally see onscreen.
At this point, it might help to know a bit about the artist behind all this, the director and co-writer of The Nice Guys: an interesting, offbeat, cleverly irreverent dude named Shane Black. He’s had an unusual career, floating between the periphery and the center of mainstream American cinema for the past thirty years, and even if you don’t know the name, chances are you’re more familiar with Black’s work than you realize. He first rose to prominence in 1987 as the writer of Lethal Weapon, the hit action-comedy that begat a hugely successful franchise. (He co-wrote Lethal Weapon 2 as well, but left the series when the studio demanded significant changes, ending up with only a story credit.) An occasional actor, he also had his most substantial onscreen role around this time—as the bespectacled, most quickly expendable member of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s squad in the original, so-bad-it’s-kind-of-awesome Predator. He went on to write The Last Boy Scout (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), all of which, however they’ve come to be judged since, flopped hard enough at the time to remove him from Hollywood’s good graces. But he found his way back in 2005, directing his own script for the fist time with the excellent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and joined the endless Marvel extravaganza with Iron Man 3 in 2013. The subject matter is varied, but there are common elements running through Black’s best work: clever subversions of genre tropes; colorful characters spouting rich, witty dialogue; and (superhero trappings of Iron Man 3 notwithstanding) the kind of seedy settings that often attract such people.
Which leads us to 2016 and The Nice Guys, a movie that leans heavily into these defining elements of Black’s aesthetic, especially the inspiration he takes from classic film noir. The same can also be said of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, another zany, infectiously entertaining quasi-detective story. I’m writing about The Nice Guys because I think it’s slightly more accessible, while still being, as Mike Ryan writes, “probably the Shane Black-est of all the Shane Black movies.”[ii] I think it makes a good introduction to Black for those not familiar with his work—it did for me, anyway.
In typical noir fashion, that cryptic opening scene is our gateway into a mystery of sorts, involving anti-pollution activists, quirky mobsters, imposing government officials, and shady pornographers. Apparently the major car companies are trying to suppress new technology that would reduce emissions, everyone connected to a mysterious film is dying, no one is on the side we think they are… it’s hard to keep track of, but even that is, in a way, faithful to Black’s film-noir inspirations. After watching Chinatown, do we remember every detail of the conspiracy that Jack Nicholson uncovers? Probably not—I certainly don’t—but the fundamentals stick with you: large-scale corruption, and the twisted family dynamics at the heart of it. Same deal here; we get the general idea. The big corporations are getting away with some harmful shenanigans, the powers that be may be in on it, and everyone’s looking for a missing young woman who knows the truth. Black has fun building his elaborate tangle of twists, turns and double-crosses, but crucially, The Nice Guys doesn’t subscribe to the brutally bleak worldview that defines many classics like Chinatown. Because Black isn’t just making a noir mystery; he’s also making a comedy, and the convoluted plot plays into that, with many of the twists more likely to provoke an amused chuckle than a shocked gasp. Not to mention the fact that it often veers into the ridiculous; this is a mystery in which a major revelation is a scheme to hide damning evidence inside an ‘experimental’ art film—which the makers have to keep insisting is not a porno.
In any case, the details of the plot don’t matter that much in the end. The Nice Guys is a mystery and a comedy, but more than anything else, it’s a so-called ‘buddy cop’ story. And as is often the case in these movies, be they serious thrillers or comedies like this one, the main pleasure lies not so much in solving the mystery as in spending time with the colorful personalities who accompany us on the journey. And Black nails this aspect of it; no character is entirely original, but they’re all engaging and, for the most part, fun to be around despite the litany of violence, stupidity, and general recklessness on display.
The most important characters, obviously, are our two protagonists, the mismatched investigators whom fate brings together to solve the mystery. As in many buddy cop comedies, neither is an actual cop, and both are pretty miserable—one drifting numbly through life and one in the process of spectacularly flaming out. The straight man of the duo, to the extent that we have one, is Jackson Healy, an impassive local tough guy who will beat up anybody for the right price. He’s good at it, capable of deft bits of violent athleticism when he needs to be, but every other aspect of his life is in shambles. Still reeling from a romantic betrayal so outrageous that it slides into hilarity, he now lives with a few pet fish in a dingy bachelor pad, going aimlessly through the motions of day-to-day life, resigned to the fact that there’s no real way to be a good person using his particular skill set. He makes a good foil for Holland March, a small-time private investigator who’s been a bumbling, booze-addled mess since his wife died, and wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed to begin with (though he’d be the last to recognize that). March does show occasional flashes of real acuity, but they’re few and far between; we get the sense that he could probably be a decent investigator if only he could pull himself together, making his teenage daughter’s frustration all the more relatable.
It’s a familiar sort of pairing for a buddy cop movie, in more ways than one: we have the jaded, highly competent veteran with a lonely home life, awkwardly matched with an overconfident younger partner; and we also have two guys whom most of polite society would view as scumbags, teaming up to try and do the right thing. But Black is a skilled enough storyteller to know that solid, efficient characterization can more than make up for a lack of originality. He got to this point as a writer first and foremost, and he and his co-writer, Anthony Bagarozzi, have a knack for finding simple phrases and scenes that concisely tell us a great deal about a character. When we first meet Healy, he tells us, “I was in love once. Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate,” and we see him interrupt a scared young woman’s expressions of gratitude to inform her that she’s seven dollars short on her payment. Meanwhile, our first glimpse of March finds him in a bathtub… still wearing a full suit. He stumbles out of it too late to answer a phone call, finds a message written on his hand (‘You will never be happy’), and muses in voice-over: “I wish I wished for things, man.” So within a few minutes of meeting both these guys, we already have a basic sense of what they’re about. A few scenes further along, we’ve seen the lonely tedium of Healy’s daily routine, witnessed March’s lack of scruples about bilking clueless clients, learned the relevant bits of their respective back-stories. It all feels like standard, easygoing setup, but a lesser filmmaker would have needed a lot more time to give us this basic sense of the misery and ennui defining these characters. Black ensures that before the first twenty-odd minutes are up, we have a pretty clear understanding of who our protagonists are and how they came to be such screw-ups—setting us up to get the most out of the interplay between them and their exploits in the caper to follow.
A not-insignificant part of the protagonists’ appeal also has to do with the actors portraying them. Both are well-known stars, but mostly for more serious roles; they aren’t necessarily the first ones you’d think of as comic leads, and there’s a nice undercurrent of novelty in watching them venture a bit outside their normal wheelhouses. The role of Healy is only mildly against type for Russell Crowe; at this point in his long career, he’s played plenty of characters with a comic side to them in movies that wouldn’t classify as comedies—and Healy, with his existential melancholy, levelheaded competence and generally deadpan delivery, isn’t too different from them. Still, Crowe delivers those laugh lines like a pro, and when called upon, he displays a sharp sense of comic timing that I didn’t know he had.[iii]
As March, Ryan Gosling is more of a revelation; the character is inherently amusing, and there’s added fun in seeing him played by someone we know mostly from such wildly different roles. This is really the same guy we saw as a serious romantic lead—passionate heartthrob in The Notebook (2004), tragically self-destructive in Blue Valentine (2010)—or as a teacher barely keeping it together in Half Nelson (2006), or as the epitome of taciturn cool in Drive (2011) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)? He’s been in more lighthearted movies (one was actually called La La Land) and even an all-out comedy: The Big Short in 2015—but that was a very different sort of movie, a satirical take on real events full of sharp, hyper-articulate characters. So it’s refreshing to see him play a character who’s kind of an idiot, who’s a train wreck at the outset and never really gets his act together, succeeding mostly through dumb luck. But it’s not just about novelty; Gosling turns out to be a genuinely adept physical comedian, most notably in a routine with a gun, a toilet stall door, and a strategically placed magazine, but also in the way he mines his character’s frequent drunkenness for laughs without ever quite overdoing it. He also has the rare ability to make a relatively normal line—one that doesn’t contain a clear joke—funny simply through inflection, as when he snaps at a cocky kid on a bike, “Nobody wants to see your dick, dude!” (In fact, one of the lines that made me laugh the hardest, for whatever reason, was just him drunkenly humming, “March, March, he’s our man; if he can’t do it, no one can!”)
Moreover, as well as Crowe and Gosling hit their comedic marks, they’re also accomplished dramatic actors, able to make the most of the movie’s few moments of real sincerity and tenderness. When March hugs his daughter after she’s been in danger, Gosling makes it a touching reminder of the depth of his love for her, despite his myriad failings. And when Healy recalls the day he impulsively stopped a robbery, Crowe’s pitch-perfect delivery of the final line (“Just for a moment, I felt useful…”) is a poignant glimpse into the despondency at the heart of the character. These are fleeting moments, but important ones, encouraging us to care about these characters more than we typically might in a silly comedy like this.
This creative generosity extends to the minor characters as well; they aren’t as fully developed as the protagonists, but Black and Bagarozzi take care to make them more colorful and interesting than run-of-the-mill supporting players in the genres they’re riffing on. The clearest example is March’s daughter Holly, who seems on paper like a cliché. In a movie like this, a teenage daughter is usually a cheap and easy way to accomplish two things: a) to engender sympathy for an otherwise unlikable protagonist, or b) to embody innocence and goodness, helping us keep our moral bearings. But Holly is more three-dimensional than that: smart and resourceful, still dealing (in more mature fashion) with the same tragedy that’s sent her father spiraling, and eagerly inserting herself into his work until she becomes a sort of third partner in the investigation, steering March towards his better detective instincts and making a few valuable contributions of her own. It all works because of a winning performance by the young actress Angourie Rice, who captures these many facets of the character while still making Holly a recognizable 13-year-old—precocious but not unrealistically so. (In a rare instance of Hollywood authenticity, Rice was actually somewhat close to her character’s age at the time, making her performance all the more impressive.) Meanwhile, the character still fulfills those standard thematic functions, just not in a way that feels forced or unnatural. She does engender sympathy for the hapless March, but she also makes mistakes of her own, sometimes acting nearly as reckless as he does. She provides a moral check on our protagonists, but doesn’t come across as naive or preachy because she isn’t demanding sainthood, just basic decency: don’t break bones for money, don’t be shitfaced all the time, don’t profit off of senile old ladies, don’t kill people in cold blood, etc.
Even the lower-tier supporting players are more memorable than such characters typically are, the actors clearly enjoying the chance to bring some color to what would normally be filler roles. The missing young woman, Amelia, spends most of the movie off-screen as an elusive person of interest, but when we finally do meet her, Margaret Qualley gets to play more than a helpless damsel in distress. She’s afraid of the danger she’s in and correct about the conspiracy she’s trying to expose, but in a nice comic twist, she’s also pretty insufferable about it, self-righteous as only a rich kid in rebellion can be, at one point exclaiming to her rescuers, “God, have you been living under a rock?!” Keith David and Beau Knapp, playing your standard henchmen, get to swing from comically blundering to genuinely threatening and back again. Same for Yaya DaCosta as the executive assistant Tally, who goes from an innocent bureaucrat in over her head to a stone-cold killer completely at home in this amoral world. Even Matt Bomer, whose role as the dangerous John Boy consists mostly of fighting and shooting people, manages to convey some real menace in his character’s few lines. (The exception, oddly enough, is Kim Basinger, the most famous face in the cast after the two leads, who doesn’t get to be much more than a blandly corrupt government higher-up, her dialogue limited mostly to narrative exposition.)
Still, it takes more than colorful characters to make a movie funny, and however you feel about the particular jokes and gags, it’s worth looking at Black’s approach to comedy, which is inventive and wide-ranging—a clever mix traditional elements and upended expectations. Over the course of the movie, we come across many classic comedy tropes. In a brief flashback, Crowe does one of the better spit takes I’ve ever seen. An invasion of his apartment is interrupted by a well-timed encounter with a booby-trapped bag, leaving one goon with a blue face for the rest of the movie. When Healy and March throw a dead body over a fence, it lands, predictably but still hilariously, in the middle of a dinner party. We’ve already mentioned Gosling’s bathroom stall routine; he also does an excellent, drawn-out double take upon discovering the corpse in the dark—which, in turn, leads into another good mini-routine, as he tries to scream while still too horrified to catch his breath. There are conventional jokes that wouldn’t be out of place in most comedies—“You know who else was just following orders? Hitler!”—and a few amusing, slightly meta side conversations, like when a smitten March refuses to accept that the gorgeous Tally is working with the bad guys (“You don’t know her upbringing!” he protests, as Healy gently tries to point out the obvious).
At the same time, though, Black gets just as much, if not more, comedic value from non-traditional gags—the blindsiding curveballs and the genre conventions cleverly turned on their heads. This is a defining element of Black’s aesthetic: his unique ability to create comedy in surprising ways, at unexpected moments. When Healy breaks March’s arm, an act of clinical cruelty turns comical with the high-pitched wail Gosling lets out in response. A fight breaks out at a party and an innocent bystander gets shot, but the guy turns out to be situated atop a ridiculous tree costume. When Amelia is explaining the big conspiracy, she melodramatically sighs and falls back on the bed, only to whack her head on the headboard. An early scene of March punching through a window to break into a bar plays at first as a demonstration of cool competence—until he slices his wrist and winds up in the hospital. Black even slips in a random, far-out hallucination, when March falls asleep at the wheel and finds himself talking to an enormous bee (voiced by the peerless comedian Hannibal Buress, of all people!) before crashing the car. It’s hilariously bizarre, and it serves a narrative purpose, revealing that Tally has given them a briefcase full of fake money. That last one, in particular, is classic Shane Black; he likes to arrive at important or predictable plot points, but in strange, roundabout ways that the even the characters seem somewhat bewildered by. It’s not too shocking for Healy and March to find a person of interest dead at a party, but they only do so because March takes a surprise drunken tumble off a balcony. In the shootout at March’s house, John Boy doesn’t manage to kill Amelia, only to have her flag him down as she tries to escape. When Tally is holding Healy and March at gunpoint, Holly attempts a classic surprise attack by throwing coffee on her, and it fails because the coffee is cold, then ends up working after all when Tally slips and knocks herself out.
Moments like these also exemplify another defining aspect of Black’s work: his distinctive portrayal of violence. Action, and the violence that comes with it, have been staples of cinema since the beginning, but even when they’re done well, there’s a certain flavor of realism that’s often missing. A fight or a shootout might be incredible, and yet a small part of us that might reasonably think: This is all too neat. All that kinetic mayhem, and somehow nobody runs into anything, nobody fumbles their gun, nobody trips or twists their ankle or stubs their toe. ‘Clean’ action like that, well put together, is a beautiful thing to behold—I’ll surely write in the future about movies that do exactly that—but it’s not the only way to make violence entertaining; a significant source of humor in The Nice Guys is the way the conventions of standard, graceful movie violence are tweaked and subverted. Black has a unique talent for this; who else would think to have Tally neutralized in such a bizarre way? Who else would have March try and toss a gun to Healy in the middle of a shootout and flub it, hurling the gun through a window instead? Who else would have Healy awkwardly whack his foot on a table after leaping athletically into the room?[iv]
That’s not to say the action in The Nice Guys is realistic; what we see is still the stuff of a wild caper, taking place firmly in a fictional movie world. But it does feel more honest than most movie violence in the sense that it’s realistically messy and awkward, and that makes it distinctive in its impact. It’s funny, as we’ve seen, but I think Black is also trying to capture what real-life violence might feel like, especially for those of us who don’t encounter it much or at all—chaotic and arbitrary, a bizarre, inelegant rupture in normal life.
That’s a minor but relatively profound message in a silly comedy, and the ending demonstrates further that Black wants to leave us with a bit to think about. The conspiracy is exposed, a corrupt official goes to jail, and things are looking up for our protagonists. But all those people still died, the big corporate villains got off scot-free, and the broader antagonistic forces at work in the story keep on rolling with only the mildest of blows having been struck against them. They’re still rolling today; misogyny is still very much a thing, large-scale corruption still goes mostly unpunished, and as anyone who’s been to Los Angeles knows, that smog is definitely still a problem—with a whole lot more at stake these days than a few choking birds. When all is said and done, our heroes’ exploits didn’t make that much difference.
At least they had a good time doing it, and we had a good time watching. ◊
© Harrison Swan, 2019
[i] For the rest of this very good review: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-nice-guys-review-20160515-snap-story.html
[ii] Another fun and insightful review: https://uproxx.com/movies/the-nice-guys-review/
[iii] For an entertaining discussion of this and other comedic elements in the movie by Bill Burr and Joe DeRosa—actual comedians who really know what they’re talking about—check out this podcast clip (from about 1:42 onwards): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDvDa0smIMQ
[iv] This excellent video essay by Evan Puschak—whose ‘Nerdwriter’ channel is one of the best things on YouTube—goes into even more engrossing detail about Shane Black and his approach to movie violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKiQs1dE0Tc
ReWatch List 