Cast: Robert De Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Miller, Wanda De Jesus, Skipp Sudduth, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia
Director: Joel Schumacher
Producers: Jane Rosenthal, Joel Schumacher
Screenplay: Joel Schumacher
Cinematography: Declan Quinn
Music: Bruce Roberts
U.S. Distributor: MGM
Flawless is about as inappropriate a title for this film as one could generate. The pleasure of watching an actor of Robert De Niro's consummate skill is overwhelmed by the pain of enduring Joel Schumacher's contrived, flat, and insulting story about the improbable relationship between a bigot and a drag queen. Any humanity in the script is diluted to the point of nonexistence by Schumacher's refusal to allow any of his characters to develop beyond the stereotype stage. Furthermore, the inclusion of numerous bizarre, pointless secondary characters and distracting subplots turns a tedious experience into an almost unbearable one.
De Niro plays ex-cop Walt Koontz, who lives alone in a dingy room in a fleabag dive. He carries on a daily shouting match with a group of cross-dressers, led by female impersonator Busty Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who live one floor up. Walt, a confirmed homophobe, has no time or patience for these gay men or their catty attitudes. For fun, he occasionally goes to poker games with his old buddies from the department or visits a dance club, where an attractive woman (Wanda De Jesus), takes him back to her place for the evening. Despite his assertion that he doesn't consort with hookers, Walt nevertheless hands over a hefty sum of greenbacks to the woman. One night, a group of drug dealers break into a room in Walt's building. Gun in hand, he goes to help, but suffers a stroke before he can accomplish anything. (Slow motion, warped camera work is supposed to give us insight into what it's like to be in De Niro's shoes during these agonizing moments.) In the aftermath, Walt experiences some paralysis on his right side and has difficulty speaking. His doctor suggests learning to sing as a form of speech therapy, and, reluctantly, Walt approaches Rusty and offers to pay him for lessons.
Although there is no sexual tension between the main characters, the story follows the familiar pattern of a traditional romantic comedy: two mismatched individuals meet and initially dislike each other, but that all changes once circumstances force them to spend time together. Eventually, complications arise to split them apart, followed by a glorious reunion at the end. Even in the best of cases, this can be tiresome, but, in a movie with so little innovation or interest, it's deadly. And, possibly assuming that his audience is comprised of people who are as homophobic as Walt, Schumacher climbs up on the pulpit and uses a pedantic approach to emphasize the life lesson that drag queens can be good people, too. Rarely has a movie with a message seemed as obvious and condescending as Flawless.
Perhaps because the film features Robert De Niro, Schumacher feels compelled to include a subplot featuring criminals, drugs, stolen money, and violence. Not only is this dumb, but it steals time from the underdeveloped relationship between Rusty and Walt, which should be the picture's centerpiece. To further widen the film's focus, there's a "hooker with a heart of gold" subplot thrown in for good measure.
De Niro's performance as a stroke victim is adequate, but it's easily one of the actor's least impressive turns in recent years. Maybe it's a function of Schumacher's direction, but he seems to be going through the motions. As the far more flamboyant Rusty, Philip Seymour Hoffman (Boogie Nights, Happiness, and the upcoming Magnolia) gets all the best lines and has the most interesting wardrobe, but his performance falls short of the level achieved by such recent film drag queens as Nathan Lane (The Birdcage) and the trio of Terrence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). The on-screen relationship between De Niro and Hoffman is tepid at best, making me appreciate how much better Jack Nicholson and Greg Kinnear approached similar material in the Oscar-nominated As Good as It Gets.
For most of its length, Flawless is as dark and unappealing as it is banal and formulaic. Schumacher apparently felt that by adding an element of grit to Flawless, viewers might mistake it for a movie of substance. Of course, he cheats by including an audience-pandering happy ending, which is at odds with the grimness of everything that comes before it. Those who thought the director's single-handed destruction of the Batman series was a fluke may want to reconsider that opinion. The only thing flawless about this motion picture is its inability to do much right.
© 1999 James Berardinelli