Word: bones
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...Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) walks into what we take for his house late in the night and finds himself enmeshed in one of those late night drunken conversations with the woman there, who, though it's not important, we're led to believe is his wife or lover. What matters is the uneasy alliance. The conversation is half bullshit and half frustration. Maybe it's a breakthrough and maybe it's the Beam. It goes on just a little too long and it doesn't get anywhere. It's 2 a.m. life, and you realize that you've been here...
...story of Cutter's Way, as told by the press, is another one of those taken from Hollywood. Film (then titled Cutter and Bone) is released: film is panned by the incomparable Vincent Canby (who is to movie reviewing what the emperor's new clothes were to haute coterie): film is withdrawn only to be released later by the United Artists Classics division with a whole new ad campaign and is hailed as a nearly lost masterpiece. Art prevail over management, they would have it. And they're practically right...
...Vietnam, a man who's tongue is too quick--sometimes it's hilarious and sometimes he should just shut up. He has no social graces, but his venom is directed out there somewhere--a romantic who has retreased to snideness since romance died. Richard Bone is a lazy Ivy League, ostensibly working around a marina selling boats, but more often than not hopping from one matron's bed to another, a bored and listless stud. What little structure there is in their lives is provided at Cutter's house--a cramped, cozy bungalow on a suburban street in Santa Barbara...
...first remarkable thing about this film is it's air of lazy progress. Cutter and Bone know each other so well that very little is set up in the usual Hollywood ways. In some respects, they have no sacred cows--Cutter's cynicism gives him the leeway to breach any subject, from the sexual tension between him, a cripple, Bone, the stud, and Maureen, the long-suffering wife, and yet still stay within the realm of a "joke." Cutter is immensely likable, immensely smart, and you realize that what's different here is that very rarely have we seen characters...
...some ways, though, Passer ends up working against himself. For beneath the relationships between the three protagonists, the plot grinds on, involving a murder that Bone has been a partial witness to. Bone suspects that a wealthy oil man mighthave done the slaying, and Cutter--claiming the world is short on heroes and with the victims's sister as an accomplice--sets out to ensnare, via blackmail, the oil man. All of this is seen through Bone's eyes, and the uncertainty he has about his own testimony makes the who whodunit air tenuous. Maybe it's all just Cutter...