The Usual Suspects is a movie that has exciting action sequences, dialogue that recalls David Mamet's hard-boiled staccato verbiage, acting that is almost uniformly excellent--heck, even Steven fucking Baldwin delivers a solid performance--and, of course, a famous twist that is, as a matter of fact, as surprising and jarring and just flat-out brilliant as has been advertised. It also has no soul. The movie is an exercise in cynicism of the highest order. None of the relationships between the characters are particularly compelling, none of the characters has too much in terms of subtlety or nuance, and while these decisions can be justified by the film's denouement, the rationalizations actually solidify the point that the movie is hollow. Kevin Spacey's character quotes Baudelaire during the course of the movie, to the effect that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. The greatest trick that Chris McQuarrie and Bryan Singer ever pulled, on the other hand, was convincing the audience that The Usual Suspects is a movie.
Perhaps that sounds harsh, but it is true. These, ladies and gentlemen, are the facts of life (as pertain to movies):
- Movies are fictitious accounts of events, usually from the point of view of one of the characters or from the "eye of God."
- Movies contain characters who typically undergo struggles and have complex interactions with one another.
The finale of Suspects involves the audience learning that the entire events of the film, as narrated by Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) are almost certainly invalidated. Kint is an unreliable narrator who dissembles enough to fool a Customs agent (Chazz Palmintieri) into letting him go, right before he realizes (along with the audience) that it's Kint who is the notorious Keyser Soze, a supercriminal whose identity had heretofore been unknown. It is a brilliant twist, largely thanks to the use of techniques like false foreshadowing and juxtaposition that makes the culprit seem to be another character, Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). In fact, virtually the entire film builds up to what appears to be the unveiling of Keaton as Soze, when it's actually Kint, the supposedly trustworthy narrator. The film also provides the brilliant touch of making Kint a cripple, and thus naturally virtuous and trustworthy in the eyes of the audience, since disabled people are always slow and stupid, right? Everyone underestimates Kint, and that age-old assumption--that handicapped people must naturally be virtuous and good--is deployed to great effect. It's actually a fairly progressive message in terms of knocking down stereotypes, though the filmmakers RUIN EVERYTHING at the end when we learn that Kint was faking being a cripple the whole time. They couldn't commit to a crippled supercriminal because there was another commitment in play--the commitment to removing any doubt as to the identity of Keyser Soze, which is hammered home here with all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone film.
This is why we are here. The filmmakers can't follow through on such a promising idea because making Kint turn out not to be a cripple is essential in unveiling him as Soze. But it's not the only problem associated with the twist. The central relationships of the film are those between Kint and Keaton, and between Keaton and his lover, Edie, who has supposedly reformed Keaton. Neither relationship is especially convincing on its face. Kint and Keaton were supposedly friends, but there's hardly a moment of warmth between them. Keaton and Edie appear together in about two scenes, and there is never a moment when that relationship becomes real to the viewers. And this is not by incompetence, but rather because of the twist ending that necessitates the poverty of these relationships. Keaton has to be a dick to Verbal so that people will better swallow the idea that he's Soze, a man without friends who just used people for his own purposes. And the Keaton/Edie relationship is weak because it must be--the notion that Edie had really reformed Keaton undermines the false twist before the real end, because people will be more reluctant to think that he's all bad.
So, the relationships Keaton experiences are deliberately stripped down and unconvincing so that people will more readily buy it when the final shoe drops, but what does this tell us about the movie? The characters and their relationships are deliberately shallow, and there's just nothing much to recommend if you're a fan of characters, plus there's the little thing about most of this stuff probably never having happened, and almost certainly never having happened the way Verbal is telling it. There's nothing to latch onto in this film--there's no anchor. Everything is a lie. Which might be fine if there was some emotional import of all this sturm und drang, but there really isn't. The movie provides little feeling and has no heart, and repeat viewings, while perhaps providing more clues to the finale that had earlier been missed, only serve to underline the emptiness at the core of the film. People don't really matter in Suspects, relationships don't matter, what really happened doesn't matter. All that matters is setting up that big twist, which is so uninvested in the characters' motives and feelings that the impact is entirely cerebral. It certainly blows the mind, so much so that people will probably watch it and think it's a good movie because they were so entirely fooled by the twist. They don't know how right they are.
I suppose that one could dissent from this logic to say that I'm not being charitable to the movie. After all, entertainment is entertainment, right? The movie provides a little bit of a mindfuck to people without making them feel stupid for not having guessed it in the first place. It's a watchable enough movie, no?
Buying into this sentiment, though, requires that one concede that a movie that is little but a glorified con job, a masturbatory picture that exists merely for that mindfuck and that eschews the messiness that comes from accurately and honestly depicting human beings--that a movie that so readily brushes aside those things that constitute art can still have value. And I'm not saying that it doesn't have some value, because it is a movie that contains a number of interesting ideas. Technically speaking, it's virtuosic at every level. But the larger problem is not that the movie doesn't care about telling a story about people. The problem isn't so much that it's not art, but rather that it claims to be artistic. It's full of literary references, it takes itself completely seriously, and it's simply too well thought-out and meticulously planned to be anything else than a cynical con on anyone who watches it. The joke is on us, the audience. It's a "serious" film that has no interest in artfully showing humanity at it's best (or worst). It's the worst kind of con, too: we thank the filmmakers at the end for pulling the wool over our eyes. The rush that the ending provides feels similar to the sort of emotional resonance that one might get from watching a heartfelt film like, I don't know, The Elephant Man. Only The Elephant Man isn't trying to fool us into thinking that the reaction that a film provides is anything other than at face value. There's something deeply insidious going on in Suspects, and the con is executed so perfectly that one doesn't even realize it until much later, if ever.
I generally consider myself a cynical person, but this movie is a few steps too far for me: the film is hollow and manipulative in the extreme, with nothing at the core. The twist is well-executed, although the necessary precursors to make it work weaken the film to such an extent that it barely works as a genre piece. If one were to take The Usual Suspects, cut out the last five minutes, and show it to an audience of people, it is hard to see more than a few people enjoying the film. Despite some intriguing ideas, I must condemn Suspects as perhaps the most cynical enterprise upon which Hollywood has ever embarked. And that is saying something.
