THE NICE GUYS: Distinct Originality & Sophisticated Escapism

Shane Black’s The Nice Guys couldn’t come at a better time. Actually, strike that. If it had come out just a few months later after the slog of the summer movie season of blockbuster remakes, sequels, reboots, and rehashes had polluted our minds, then perhaps it would be received all the more with acclaim. It’s a movie of certain detective story tropes and clichés, yet is able to transcend the limitations of such fictional conventions by fleshing out unique turns with established formalisms.  See, Hollywood, you can follow traditional models and structures without merely replicating the formula that ultimately adds nothing to the existing genre (here’s looking at you, Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

Not that The Nice Guys is any sort of remake but is, of course, a Ramon Chandler, seedy underbelly, type of whodunnit with a postmodern twist. There are a dozen callbacks to the modern detective story concept developed in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “Murder of the Rue Morgue”, which was then basically stolen and made popular in Agatha Christie mysteries and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s infamous Sherlock Holmes stories. The Nice Guys certainly takes a lot of its cues from classic noir films such as The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, but retains enough distinct originality that it never once feels inauthentic, nor like a copy-cat being churned out of an industrial complex merely to feed the masses a familiar comfort.

Class In a Dirty Time

Set in the smoggy-haze of Los Angeles circa 1977, the plot follows private investigators Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling) as they try to find a missing porn star. As one could expect from this type of genre film, the duo uncover a is a vast conspiracy that puts them right in the middle of dangerous thrills. Intrigue and missing persons are immensely entertaining Macguffins, and it peaks the interest of the child inside us.

This whimsical desire to tag along with Marsh and Healy is placed in Holly March (Angourie Rice), Holland’s thirteen-year-old daughter who winds up playing a large part in the film. Let it be known how wonderful Holly is, and that’s credit to Black’s direction of the character and Rice’s stellar performance. That isn’t to say that Gosling and Crowe aren’t absolute dynamite together and on their own in the movie, too. The Nice Guys really is a triangle narrative, each complementing the other and exposing the inner desires and flaws of fully rounded characters.

This is the success of Black and co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi’s thoughtful script. In a narrative film, or story, the equation of set-up and pay-offs are key to fulfillment and they nailed it here. Black’s gifted usage of the camera and all the set-ups by director of photography Philippe Rousselotare have an old school charm and a pulp sensibility about them. Same as the editing, which Joel Negron meticulously spliced in tandem. And who could forget the magical sound design and rhythmic music by David Buckley and John Ottman, who evoke the perfect nostalgia of the 70s, including the grimy parts.

The result of letting an auteur like Black let loose to capture a storied past and time-specific mentality about the world that has long since faded from nearly all corners of culture, makes cinema truly the magical element of glowing particles. Can you dig?

Killer Bees, Man

As the film unfolds and Healy and March continue to get in way over their heads with crime and sex and drugs, the movie moves towards a full realization of pastiche and self-awareness, which mirrors the enlightenment that accompanies detective stories. But before really addressing the larger themes and whatnot, I call attention to the exquisite post-modernism of the film.

The first film that The Nice Guys reminded me of was a handful of Abbott and Costello movies. It has the feel as if it should be retitled, “Abbott and Costello and the Case of the Missing Harlot”. The relationship of Healy and March places Healy as Bud Abbott’s straight man to Lou Costello’s bumbling sidekick. Spoilers must be avoided, but there’s a scene in The Nice Guys where March literally falls into a piece of the puzzle and because he is heavily inebriated, pants out to Healy the exact same way that Costello would to Abbot when he would get in over his head. It’s comedic genius, and other times in the movie March ends up playing the buffoon to Healy’s serious dude, and the chemistry undeniably references to two comedic iconic wordplay and slapstick.

Towards the last half, the movie becomes about finding a film and preserving it because it is the key to the whole mystery. Almost immediately this signified Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which too became a love-letter to cinema and the entire plot point of the movie. The Nice Guys took a page out of the filmic bible that is Tarantino and just like that master, Black took something that came before and deconstructed it to his own fashion.

There’s a pervasive foggy air that looms over the entire film, much like the nasty haze in L.A. It’s gross and stains the view of the city, which is a brilliant motif and metaphor for and about the film. The two PI’s are in a daze, March is literally because of his constant drunkenness, and have unclear perspectives in what they are trying to solve, like all the detective stories before them. The idea of death is lingering over their shoulders and becomes a running gag portrayed by the threat of the killer Mexican bees that were a huge scare in the late 70s.

At one point a talking killer bee becomes a reality for March, and it causes him to crash and burn and subsequently reveals a portion of the truth unbeknownst at the time. But therein lies the biggest conceit of the movie, and Black’s brilliant esoteric tale about pulling back the veil hidden to people: it’s about interpreting time. And nothing like a film can conjure the actual past and show us that which is right in front of our eyes, or has been moved from sight by nefarious parties. The act of film is the art of replaying and recasting a shape of the familiar, but with greater clarity and perception.

Summation

The Nice Guys is one of the best films of 2016. Completed by an incredible cast and a story of smart dips and dives in bell-bottoms over shag carpet and groovy lava lamps, The Nice Guys is sure to be one that will go down in history as sophisticated escapism.

Do you prefer your Gosling and Crowe as brooding antiheroes, or as quirky mishaps?

The Nice Guys is playing nationwide in the US, it opens in the UK on June 3.