Reader, you’ve gotten been lied to! Movie historical past is plagued by unfairly maligned classics, whether or not critics had been too desirous to evaluate the making of quite than the completed product, or they suffered from underwhelming advert campaigns or normal disinterest. Let’s revise our takes on a few of these movies from wrongheaded to the proper opinion.
When Paramount launched “We’re No Angels” as its 1989 Christmas film (and closing movie of the last decade), opinions had been blended and the field workplace weak. Laborious as it might be to consider within the post-“Fockers” period, audiences simply weren’t occupied with seeing Robert De Niro in a broad comedy, even (particularly?) one co-starring Sean Penn and written by David Mamet.
As years handed, the film’s popularity by no means actually improved, with even its makers acknowledging its flaws. In his 2023 Hollywood memoir, “In all places an Oink Oink,” Mamet blamed director Neil Jordan for ruining his script; in an interview with The Observer, Jordan appeared to agree, saying, “I shouldn’t be allowed to make comedies.”
Now, “We’re No Angels” is newly obtainable in a superbly assembled particular version Blu-ray bundle by boutique label Cinématographe. Watching the movie faraway from its time — and from the divorce proceedings of Penn and Madonna that vacuumed up no matter consideration the media was ready to allot the film — its middling popularity is baffling. Elegantly structured, gorgeously mounted, and anchored by De Niro and Penn’s hilarious performances, “We’re No Angels” comes near being a type of basic.
The film it remade, a 1955 comedy directed by ace craftsman Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca”), wasn’t precisely a basic regardless of the presence of Humphrey Bogart. Nonetheless, it had a premise Mamet might run with: Three jail escapees (shortly narrowed down to 2 in Mamet’s retelling as James Russo splits off from Penn and De Niro) discover themselves in a quaint village the place they pose as upstanding residents and progressively get absorbed into the area people.
That premise is just about the start and finish of the similarities between Curtiz’s movie and Jordan and Mamet’s, which introduces the ingenious thought of De Niro and Penn having to pose as touring clergymen to cover out from the legislation. A number of the comedy in “We’re No Angels” derives from the disconnect between a pair of Mamet robust guys (although Penn is extra of a hapless doofus) and a non secular atmosphere. Whether or not Mamet and Jordan would have gotten much more mileage out of this premise had Paramount not determined it needed to be a PG-13 launch late within the recreation, we’ll by no means know.
As humorous because the film is, Mamet doesn’t actually push for the laughs, typically veering away from the apparent comedian potentialities in favor of a real consideration of non secular questions. In its admittedly goofy means, “We’re No Angels” asks the identical query as Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mom Evening”: If you happen to spend all of your time pretending to be another person, are you in actual fact that particular person?
For De Niro’s Ned, the reply is fairly clearly no (although he does find yourself saving a life with some seemingly divine assist on the film’s climax), however Penn’s Jim is, in his means, a seeker. Even earlier than the jail break, he annoys Jim of their cell by pondering non secular points as Russo’s character is prepped for the electrical chair. Because the movie progresses, he turns into increasingly more comfy among the many different clergymen — resulting in some very humorous exchanges between him and De Niro, who simply desires to get out of city.
Regardless of his picture as one in every of movie and theater’s nice cynics, Mamet treats the spectrum of spiritual beliefs within the film — from John C. Reilly’s wide-eyed pious monk to intercourse employee Demi Moore’s well-earned atheism — with open-minded respect, honoring the contradictory viewpoints he weaves collectively in a development almost as meticulous as his way more lauded screenplay for “The Verdict.” This can be a foolish comedy that takes its characters severely, which makes all of them the funnier because the conditions grow to be absurd.
That stated, the most important laughs within the film don’t come from Mamet’s screenplay. They arrive from De Niro and Penn’s more-is-more method to bodily comedy, during which each actors swing for the fences with mugging that critics broadly derided upon the movie’s preliminary launch. Dismissing De Niro and Penn’s performances for being too hammy is like criticizing “The Crimson Footwear” for having an excessive amount of coloration, or “John Wick” for being violent; the surplus is the supply of the pleasure.
Fortunately for De Niro, the identical audiences that weren’t within the temper for his comedian mugging in 1989 ate it up 11 years later when he revived the method for “Meet the Mother and father.” However one doesn’t even have to suppose “We’re No Angels” is humorous to understand its different appreciable virtues; Jordan could not have thought he was superb at comedy, however he was inarguably the fitting man to play up the fable-like qualities of Mamet’s story.
Jordan superbly calibrates the non secular part of Mamet’s script, subtly heightening it to supply a way of Christmas magic with out ever making it too overt or express. The movie’s magnificence is unsurprising given collaborators like cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (“Harmful Liaisons,” “Interview with the Vampire”), composer George Fenton (a Jordan favourite), and manufacturing designer Wolf Kroeger (“Casualties of Conflict,” “Final of the Mohicans”).
Kroeger is especially necessary, and the creator of the one inarguably good thing in “We’re No Angels”: its location, a border city between America and Canada that Kroeger constructed from scratch. Kroeger was an ace at builds like this — his set for the city in Robert Altman’s “Popeye” is one other instance of a vivid fictional group absolutely realized on location.
The city in “We’re No Angels” remembers one other Altman movie, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” in its detailed, lived-in high quality, and it’s emblematic of the film’s total greatness. The filmmakers could have turned on their very own creation after it flopped, however there’s no query that each single actor and division head on “We’re No Angels” handled it with utmost dedication throughout manufacturing.
There’s not one of the slapdash filmmaking that so many comedies have, the place the filmmakers suppose (not totally inaccurately) that so long as they get the digital camera aimed within the normal path of one thing humorous, the viewers might be happy. From the frilly jail break set piece that opens the movie to its lyrical finale that expertly weaves the story’s strains of romance and cynicism collectively, “We’re No Angels” is a film of supreme artistry and craftsmanship.
Cinématographe’s Blu-ray, with its superbly assembled booklet (containing a number of considerate analyses of the movie) and illuminating particular options (together with a candid new interview with Jordan), is itself a finely crafted artifact — and a good way to come across a film that at all times deserved much better than it acquired.
Cinématographe Blu-ray of “We’re No Angels” is now obtainable on the label’s web site.