I've let $3,50 keep me from discovering amazing things for the major part of my life. It's what rental use to cost at the video store near my childhood home. Doesn't matter how many times you went there, it's crazy how many films you missed when you had to invest your $3,50 in something you needed to like in order not to feel ripped off. Of course, Netflix has annihilated that problem, but one movie I don't regret not seeing earlier is 1997's Grosse Point Blank. I was not ready for such a deadpan and sophisticated comedy. No way. Seeing this movie in 2016 only makes me appreciate my own evolution since the dreaded teenage years.
The very idea of Grosse Pointe Blank is brilliant. Martin Blank (John Cusack), an elite hitman, is suffering from unwarranted anxiety, so his shrink advises him to go to his high school reunion in order to get some closure with a long lost romance that's been haunting him for the last decade. Technically, Blank only accepts this frivolous suggestion because he has a job nearby the same weekend, but he underestimated the pull Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver) still has on him and soon he becomes so entangled with his own life, his current assignment is starting to threaten it. But you know how the saying goes: everything happens for a reason.
I think Grosse Pointe Blank is the most Coen Brothers-like movie that wasn't actually written and directed by the Coen Brothers. It was written by a guy named Tom Jankiewicz, who never wrote anything else and died young, and directed by semi-legendary Hollywood recluse George Armitage, who directs one cult movie every decade or so. In order words, Grosse Pointe Blank is a happy accident. Not to mention the movie can count on Alan Arkin, kickboxing legend Benny Urquidez and Archgod of the nineties Dan Aykroyd in the support cast. It's the kind of perfect storm that doesn't happen all that often in Hollywood.
My favorite scene of the movie.
The thing I preferred about Grosse Pointe Blank is that it featured a classic romantic setup between Cusack and Driver's character, but everything in the setting is contradicting it. My favorite scene of the movie features Martin Blank walking in an empty hallway of his old high school plastered with banners sporting positive messages about the future, only to end up killing someone right there, rolling him up in these banner and throwing the body in the school furnace. The sheer symbolism almost slayed me right on the spot. It's the kind of detail that would've eluded the hell out of me fifteen years ago, but that Grosse Pointe Blank is filled with.
The title Grosse Pointe Blank is rather abstract and this detail alone blissfully kept me from watching the movie until I was ready to do so. Since you're reading this blog, you're probably ready for it though, so here's what you need to know about the film in a nutshell: it is a romantic comedy. it is pretty dark. it is filled with bodies, explosions and symbolism about the disenchantment of becoming an adult, and it is so wonderfully dated it will make you think that true love is something that ceased to exist at the turn of the millennium. Point is, Grosse Pointe Blank is an experience as pertinent in 2016 as it was in 1997. Perhaps for different reasons, but it's as pertinent nonetheless.