Cutter's Way

So, I've got this article in mind. This article about the films of 1981. I had a notion while watching Michael Mann's Thief, and then it blossomed into a full-fledged idea while watching this 1981 drama/thriller starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard. It's a cool little movie about two drifter buddies, one a Vietnam vet and the other a rather unskilled gigolo, who get mixed up in an ongoing murder investigation.

No, I'm not going to tell you the idea for the article. One of you would probably just rip it off, and I gots to get paid! But I will review these 1981 movies for you all as I watch them, starting right now. And that ought to be good enough. After all, Cutter's Way would make a good rental, as it's on DVD and it's obscure enough that there aren't even any useful images from it on the Internet.

So, I'll have to describe Bridges and Heard to you, so youc an picture what I'm talking about here. Bridges is, I swear I'm not making this up, a male prostitute named Richard Bone.

Yes, Dick Bone. That must be intentional, but if so, it's a really bad joke. And it kind of ruins some of the more serious scenes in the movie, in which people will intone to him in a deep, gruff voice, "I understand you're Richard Bone. Won't you come in?"

One night, walking to his car after leaving a client's motel room, he's nearly run off the road by an older man in sunglasses, driving some sort of Jeep. (Remember, this is a pre-SUV 1981 universe we're talking about here). The next day, he's called down to the police station - the guy in the Jeep might be involved in the murder of a young woman, found chopped up in a trash can.

So, Dick Bone mentions all this information to his best friend, the one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed Vietnam Vet Alex Cutter (John Heard, in his best, most physically challenging performance ever). Right away, Cutter's got a theory of his own - he thinks the murderer's none other than JJ Cord, wealthy industrialist and local legend in Santa Barbara, CA. And despite the protests of Bone and his long-suffered alcoholic wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn, beautiful and distant), Cutter's determined to get to the bottom of things.

If this sounds all vaguely familiar, it's probably because the Coen Brothers borrowed a large portion of this set-up for their now-classic 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. That film as well casts Bridges as a lazy drifter who, along with a Vietnam Vet friend, uncovers a bizarre plot involving a wealthy mogul and a young girl. But more than just plotlines, the Coen film borrows a breezy, LA noir style from Cutter's Way. Along with Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, these films offer a sort of laissez-faire version of the mystery genre. They offer a hero more interested in self-preservation and taking it easy than solving the big crime. Clues drift in and out of the frame as we focus instead of the lifestyles and behaviors of a few quirky central characters.

But while the Coen film uses Vietnam as mainly a side joke, a personality quirk for John Goodman's delightful Walter Sobchek character, the crisis of the shattered veteran stands front and center in Cutter's Way. Alex hasn't been able to readjust to society following his horrific battle injuries and trauma. He fixates on Cord and the mystery of the deal girl as a way to exorcize these demons, to make the world make sense for him again. If evil can be punished, just once, if the little guys can bring down the captain of industry, then maybe the whole world isn't rigged against him. Maybe there's a chance for anyone.

It's really a fascinating character, at turns off-putting and supremely charming. Heard manages to convincingly inhabit the physicality of a body ravaged by war, and even if he's a bit too effusive occasionally when playing drunk, it never takes away from the realism of his portrayal. Alex Cutter's a wacky, over-the-top kind of character, and Heard could have easily taken it way too far, moving the entire film off the rails, but he reigns everything in just enough to keep the film going and retain its bittersweet tone.

By the end, Cutter's Way began to remind me of yet another Bridges film - The Fisher King. There, as in Cutter's Way, he's similarly the sane guide for an unstable companion, Robin Williams' schizophrenic, homeless Perry. As well, both films share the notion that the central quest or mystery, either Cutter's paranoid conspiracy theories or Perry's search for the Holy Grail, may be imaginary. And they both share the same thematic conclusion, that the search that takes up most of the movie's running time isn't what matters, and that the solution will only create more questions.

Whether Cutter figures out how all the pieces fit together hardly matters Bone, or even to himself. What matters is what that information could mean to him, and why he wants it in the first place, and whether or not he'll be okay after he figures out the solution. If a solution even exists.

So, anyway, it's a great overlooked movie, at times strange, dark, wrenching and funny. One of the ideas behind my proposed article is how this era of filmmaking, 1978-1981 or so, is often unfairly ignored when discussing recent film history. Movies like Thief and Cutter's Way provide an interesting look at some really terrific transitional films that came from this time period.