Dennis Hopper (1988)
Colors’ ostensible subject is gang life and violence in Los Angeles and the city’s police department’s unavailing attempts to grapple with gang crime. Introductory legends compare the many thousands of gang members with the relatively small LAPD units dedicated to anti-gang policing. According to both the Wikipedia article on the film and Pauline Kael’s review of it, Colors was successful in provoking public discussion of gang crime and ruffling institutional feathers. The look of Dennis Hopper’s film, photographed by Haskell Wexler, is darkly impressive and several individual scenes are well developed and executed. But they don’t cohere. The weak screenplay, by Michael Schiffer and Robert Di Lello, is the undoing of Colors: Hopper’s evident ambition to create an important social document is always at odds with the tired police procedural side of the story. A funeral service for a black gang member is startlingly interrupted by a gun attack on the church by members of a rival gang; Hopper immediately shifts into the ensuing car chase, which is excitingly staged but still only a car chase. A later sequence, when the two main cops of the story pursue a gang member into a restaurant, is frighteningly dynamic but its human interest doesn’t extend beyond the woman diner who is briefly taken hostage by the hoodlum (the woman hasn’t appeared before and doesn’t appear again). The huge cast includes some actual gang members and many able actors but, although Colors feels (at two hours) overlong, Hopper doesn’t seem to have the time to penetrate the surface of the criminal culture that he describes. Among the many black and Hispanic gangsters, only the ‘Crips’ leader Rocket emerges as an individual presence and this is probably because he’s played by a young Don Cheadle, with his (by now) distinctive quality of anxious melancholy.
In contrast, there’s too much time available to focus on the clichéd partnership of the two LAPD principals, veteran Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall) and rookie Danny McGavin (Sean Penn). Hodges is measured and dependable, a family man (wife and three kids); McGavin is a hothead, prone to handing out violence as well as bringing violent men to book. The early tensions between the pair are par for the course and although their work is highly dangerous it’s obvious, with the two big names playing them, that both men will survive most of the film. Even more obvious, though, is that Hodges won’t make it to the closing credits – largely because the arrogant loose cannon McGavin is the one who needs to learn a moral lesson. That he does so is underlined in a hopelessly pat postscript that sees the newly matured McGavin with a fresh LAPD partner who’s the mouthy smart-aleck that McGavin has grown up from being. The pairing of Duvall and Penn is interesting, not least because each needs the other in order to be effective. Robert Duvall’s characterisation is meticulous but, in a role as poor as this one, he’s unexciting. At this point in his career (he was still in his twenties), Sean Penn was almost too well cast as the preening, callow, aggressive Danny McGavin but, perhaps because of this, he’s able to make McGavin’s immaturity thoroughgoing. He has some impressive moments, for example when McGavin is taken by surprise by one of Hodges’s rare displays of anger. Penn’s least impressive moment is what’s no doubt meant to be his biggest one: McGavin’s yell of furious anguish as Hodges dies of gunshot wounds. The early scenes between Penn and Maria Conchita Alonso as his girlfriend, a Hispanic waitress called Louisa, have a spark but it’s soon clear that this short-lived affair is merely a mechanism to illustrate Louisa’s being torn between attraction to McGavin and family loyalties (she has close relatives who are gang members). It seems doubtful that McGavin, with his self-regard and attitudes that suggest racism, would form a relationship with a Hispanic waitress in the first place.
29 July 2014
