Director: Harold Becker
Writer: Richard Price
Cinematography: Ronnie Taylor
Editor: David Bretherton
Music: Trevor Jones
Notable Cast: Al Pacino, John Goodman, Ellen Barkin, Richard Jenkins, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rooker, William Hickey, Paul Calderon, John Spencer, Patricia Barry, Luis Antonio Ramos, Larry Joshua, Christine Estabrook, Damien Leake
Much like dinosaurs and the dodo bird, the mid-budget adult thriller is extinct. Once a staple of cinema, now we only find tumbleweeds. America used to be a proper country, with flicks like Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, Presumed Innocent… but no more. So called “prestige” TV (give me a fucking break!) has replaced our cherished adult thrillers. And it’s a real shame, as those are some of my favorite movies from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s (and also some of the worst, let’s be honest, these types of movies were dime a dozen back then, dime a fucking dozen!). Some limited series bullshit, or worse, a multi-season trash heap of mostly filler can never compete with a lean, compact, 90-120 minute story with a beginning, middle and end.
And forget sex-tinged thrillers. No no no, those are much too politically incorrect these days. Can’t show sex on screen anymore, “it’s icky, there’s a power imbalance, it’s all from the male gaze.” Shit, even back then, Basic Instinct caused a stir when it DARED to feature bi-sexual characters that weren’t paragons of saintly virtue.
The scolds have won, my friends.
Sex has basically disappeared from cinemas, at least in America, which always had a prudish, née Puritanical, streak running through it. Europeans can still be counted on from time to time, like with the recent Pleasure by Ninja Thyberg, which was a fantastic, dark and extremely sobering look at the adult film industry in L.A.
But aside from these outliers, good luck getting turned on at the cinema these days. I mean, shit, when they put up chicks like Emma Stone and expect us to call them beautiful, what fucking Twilight Zone have we entered? Sydney Sweeney is bringing back some of that heat, but her acting ability is still in question, and to echo Matt Lillard in Scream, “she’s no Sharon Stone.” But the ever-changing standards of beauty in society is not what this post is about.
Let’s take a trip back in time, 35 years to be precise, to a movie about loneliness and longing, that dire ache for a human connection, masquerading as a lowly genre sex and crime thriller. Sea of Love is one of the best of a bygone era, make no mistake. Equal parts lurid, grimy, sexy… in other words, the whole package.
But, and this is a big one, how are the 1ST 5 Minutes?
1ST 5 MINUTES
Before we even see the Universal logo, we immediately hear the opening of Trevor Jones’ truly fantastic sax, guitar and synth fueled film noir style score. Listen to this!
I’m in. That’s it, that’s all I need. The dope old Universal logo and a score (how fucking hard does that saxophone go?) by one of the true greats of 80’s and 90’s cinema? We’re talking Angel Heart, The Last of the Mohicans, motherfucking Cliffhanger! With this, that’s FOUR of the best scores in cinematic history. Already we’re in good hands, cause anyone who picks Mr. Jones as their composer is a filmmaker with refined taste.
Really hard to overstate how bad film composing has gotten, along with everything else about cinema these days. Watered down crap. We have some shitty new superhero movie every week it seems, do you remember one goddamn theme for any of them the way you would, say, after walking out of Superman: The Movie, humming that amazing John Williams hotness?
No, you do not.
Music makes or breaks most cinematic endeavors. For the life of me, I can’t remember the movie, some 80’s drama I’d wanted to watch for forever. I popped it in and immediately the score smacked me in the face with how fucking terrible it was. Silly, generic slop. I knew right away the movie was going to suck just based on that music, and I was proven right later. Someday, I’ll remember that title. Someday.
Harold Becker’s name pops up. A journeyman director for hire if ever there was one. Solid filmmaker with no real standouts on his resume, in my opinion, save for this brilliant flick. Met him once at a screening for the Alec Baldwin starring Malice (his “I am God” speech is the only thing worth a shit in that film), seemed like a good guy.
Then the Al Pacino title card, followed by a shot of the NY harbor at night, Sea of Love, indeed! We see the names of the amazing cast Becker assembled here as we cut to various shots of Manhattan at night. What a glorious 1980’s time machine these shots are. Growing up in NYC in this time period, it hits different than maybe if you grew up somewhere else. But me? I really appreciate a movie that takes place in NYC and is actually shot in NYC. None of that Hollywood backlot or Prague or Toronto bullshit, give me the pure NYC grime and grit all day every day.
We see all the various “seas” of love in the city, from porn theaters (remember those?) to hookers on the street to singles bars to couples at dinner, until finally settling on one building out of the hundreds we’ve seen. I’m a sucker for these kinds of openings. A city of millions, all doing their own individual things, leading their own individual lives, and we’ll just push in on this one apartment here and peek in. Fatal Attraction starts this way as well. Reminds me of that classic line from the old TV show, Naked City, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”
One of my favorite pastimes when I was younger and living in Manhattan was going out and walking around at 3AM, dotted across the skyline was always randomly lit apartments, where the occupant was doing anything but sleeping. I dig the mystery of not knowing what’s going on in those rooms, using my imagination to fill in the blanks, usually with some dark, dramatic shit cause I’m always in movie mode. Such a great way to start a film.
As we pan up and push in to an apartment on one of the upper floors, we hear, for the first time, Sea of Love by Phil Phillips and the Twilights, an amazing song all on its own, but when paired with a mysterious, darkly lit scene of psychosexual torture and murder, becomes sublime. Really effective opening to the central mystery at play throughout the film, as we see a man face down on a bed, naked, distressed, then shot in the head from behind by an unknown assailant. The song ends, the record player (remember those??) needle lifts and goes back to the beginning and starts playing Sea of Love again. Good shit. The idea to structure the film around this song is genius, as the song itself does a lot of heavy lifting. A somber tune over an intense scene is like catnip for me.
Dissolve to daytime and we finally meet Al Pacino’s Detective Frank Keller and a bunch of other plainclothes cops, dressed in NY Yankee paraphernalia, among them the great Paul Calderón, who I was first introduced to way back when in Abel Ferrara’s seminal NY crime film, King of New York, though now that I write this, I realize Sea of Love came first. In any event, Calderón is a great, great, great New York actor, who I am glad to see still works consistently to this day. Always love when talent is recognized like that, when so often it is just discarded in a town like Hollywood.
It's a fun scene, setting up the cop banter, written by the legendary Richard Price, as well as the clever sting operation they set up, whereby inviting outstanding felons to a “Meet The Yankees” day, only to use the ruse (including Pacino pretending to be Phil Rizzuto , complete with obviously overdubbed “HOLY COW”) to make their arrests.
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We come to the conclusion of the 1ST 5 Minutes in the middle of this scene. As I said at the outset, once I hear the first notes of Trevor Jones’ Main Title Theme, I’m fucking sold. The rest of the 1ST 5 Minutes just makes me want to watch it even more. Everything here, especially the casting, is telling me I’m about to watch a great movie.
The rest of the flick
We’re introduced to Samuel L. Jackson, who is simply credited as “Black Guy” in this early career milestone for the legendary actor. Despite having no character name, he does have a great line reading that always gets a laugh, “Yo yo yo, fuck that, give up the bad news, homeboy.”
Once the cops have made their arrests, Pacino and a couple of other cops are the last to leave, but not before there’s a straggler felon, Ernest Lee, that shows up with his young son, both excited to meet The Yankees. This is such a great little moment in the film, the kind of shit they just don’t do in movies anymore. This is all character, nothing plot related. Sympathetic the guy’s there with his cute little son, once Pacino finds out the guy’s warrant is for two stolen cars, nothing violent, he tells the guy they’re all “booked up.” When the guy lightly protests, Pacino slyly flashes his badge. Ernest gets the hint, and thanks Pacino for letting him go. Beautiful little scene in a movie full of them.
Then we’re introduced to Frank’s partner, played by the great Richard Jenkins! Jenkins and Pacino as partners on the force is a show I would watch every fucking week. These guys are so good together. Even better, Jenkins is now hooked up with Pacino’s ex-wife! There’s great tension in all their scenes together, especially when they talk about their situation over a dead body they’re checking out. Richard Price’s dialogue throughout is next level.
And a word must be said about the ex-wife character. At no point do we ever see her. I love that! Again, they don’t make movies like this anymore. If they remade this, I guarantee she’d be a main character and involved in the plot in some substantial way or some shit. There’s no need to see her, just the thought of this crushing loss on Pacino, it’s all in his performance, all that weight he’s carrying. You don’t need to hold the audience’s hand, and thankfully, Becker and Price understood this (at least, at some point they did, as I just found out Lorraine Bracco actually filmed scenes as the ex-wife!).
Jenkins isn’t in a whole lot of this movie, but any scene he is in, it’s gold. I’ve never seen the guy give a bad performance, how many actors can you say that about? He has a toughness here that is tempered by a certain bare minimum emotional intelligence. You can see why perfs like this led to leading roles later on in his career. Mark of a great actor is you can’t take your eyes off of them. Jenkins has that quality in spades.
As does Pacino, obviously. You take for granted how good he is. Him sizing up the opening murder scene with his commanding officer, played by the great John Spencer, is such a perfect little scene. His banter with the Doorman. The grizzled, alcoholic, divorced cop is a well worn trope in crime cinema, and they play it to the hilt here. But the writing is so good, it transcends the genre. The realism really helps sell the whole thing. And it all goes back to Price’s script and the dialogue.
And what a script. The central conceit is brilliant. Some woman is going around, stalking the singles ads in newspapers (remember THOSE?!? Lot of that in this movie), making dates with men and then killing them, so Pacino and a detective from Forest Hills, John Goodman’s Detective Sherman (SO good here, no pun intended. Takes the thankless “fat partner” role and imbues it with soul, wit and real pathos. Not only that, he actually survives, which is kind of a twist, don’t they always kill the fat partner, or am I just too into Basic Instinct? Maybe it’s just George Dzundza, who died in that film and as Chris Noth’s partner on Law & Order) place their own singles ads to catch the killer. Brilliant. Amazed they haven’t remade this, what with all the singles apps and shit, seems ripe for it.
The sequence where Pacino (and Goodman, to a lesser extent) goes on the dates is a real standout, the casting of the single women is fantastic, all bring their own personality to their brief parts, which leads to my Favorite Scene, where one of the dates for Pacino is an older woman played by the great Patricia Barry.
The strain of loneliness and longing that’s weaved throughout the picture is fantastic, none more so than in this scene, and the fucking brutal payoff a few minutes later. Here’s this quite attractive older woman, desperate for some human connection, for a man to find her attractive and worth spending time with again, only to be crushed each and every time. The moment she realizes Pacino’s Keller won’t call her back, and says as much to his face, is devastating (one of those moments in film where my eyes well up with salt water from the pure emotional hit).
Most movies won’t find time for a moment like this, it has less than nothing to do with the central murder plot, yet here they devote screen time to it, give it the breathing room it deserves, and invest it with real emotion. After she leaves, and Pacino has his truly iconic first meeting with Ellen Barkin’s Helen, he turns and sees the older woman never left, she’s sitting at the bar, crying. They lock eyes briefly before she gathers herself and leaves. And Pacino really plays the weight of it. Not only do they not make movies like this anymore, they don’t even make small moments like this anymore! This film is a class apart.
Take the scene in the shoe store where Ellen Barkin’s character, Helen, works. Her and Pacino are flirting as she helps him try on shoes, when two wannabe mobsters walk in (fantastic casting here, as it is throughout, special mention needs to go to Casting Director Mary Colquhoun and her team for bringing in all the right actors for the director to peruse), throwing elbows and rudely demanding answers about a certain pair of shoes. Pacino does nothing but stand and stare at them, as the one tough becomes increasingly agitated, keeps mouthing off to Pacino, who again just stands there, silent. It is FUCKING AMAZING. Just a fantastic little moment, that actually reveals the fact he’s a cop to Barkin, who has been in the dark this whole time (she thinks he’s a printer). A million ways to get this reveal out, but here we get a real character moment in aid of it.
To top it off, we get my Favorite Line in a film absolutely chock full of them. Once Barkin confronts the fact Pacino’s a cop, he becomes defensive and angry, almost embarrassed, feeling the judgment from her, while feeling the judgment he’s faced no doubt countless times in the past, and knowing his being a cop is what is keeping him single… he lashes out: “All these people in here with their rocks and their furs, they got robbed, they get raped, I’m all of a sudden, their daddy. Come the wet ass hour, I’m everybody’s daddy!”
YES!!! How fucking great is that line? I have no goddamn idea what a “wet ass hour” is, but that’s what makes it so good. And Pacino’s delivery, man alive. He turns on a fucking dime in that scene. It’s glorious.
Another great little moment comes later in the film, when Pacino comes back to his apartment after staying with Barkin for weeks at this point (or is it days? Timeline is hazy here…). He walks in and catches his partner, played by John Goodman (who is married, btw), mid-coitus with one of the women they went on a fake date with. The shame and embarrassment from Goodman is palpable, and perfectly played by him, Pacino and Christine Estabrook, who plays Gina (stellar in her three brief scenes, “They’re the only things keeping me up”).
Pacino doesn’t really give a shit that someone is getting boned in his apartment, but you can tell Goodman never cheated before, and like a lot of men, it was a crime of opportunity. But for this murder case, he never would have thought of doing something like this, or even been in a position to.
But the sea of love that roils in us all was awoken, and he regrettably seized on it. Again, again, and again there are little scenes/moments like this peppered throughout the film that give it rich layering, a lived in feel, but at the same time always serving the main themes at play. Disguised as a pulpy genre thriller, it’s easily one of the sharpest and most well observed of that ilk.
Take the scene, scored brilliantly to Sade’s Siempre Hay Esperanza:
A wordless scene of seduction at local corner grocery, between Barkin’s Helen and Pacino’s Frank. They’re role playing. He’s acting like he’s looking for fruit, when she walks in, her hair all teased out in 80’s decadence, wearing nothing but a black trenchcoat and heels. The look on Pacino’s face when he sees her. Yes! And using Sade! The song is so hot and 80’s, and fits almost too perfectly with the score by Trevor Jones that surrounds it. When that saxophone hits at 90 seconds, holy fuck! Doesn’t get any better than that.
This is a sexy film. And I don’t mean that people have sex in it, which they do. It’s fucking sexy! The heat that radiates off Barkin, wow. Can’t remember who said it, but her face looks like a jigsaw puzzle put together slightly off, and she is gorgeous! Roger Ebert, God rest his eternal soul, mentions how in their first sex scene she is almost like an animal stalking her prey. Extremely apt description.
The sex, mixed with the did she or didn’t she aspect, really sends you on a rollercoaster of emotions. Put yourself in Barkin’s shoes. She’s divorced, with a child, had to escape an abusive husband, and is at the point where she’s answering singles ads from strange men in the newspaper. She meets some guy who seems nice and genuine, and but for the lie of him being a printer and not a cop, Pacino is very relaxed and comfortable with himself and the situation, and exudes a quiet confidence, free of arrogance or pretension, that she finds sexy. Decides to take the guy home and have sex, cause why the fuck not? She goes into the bathroom to change, and comes out to him attacking her and locking her in a closet! Barkin’s character goes through a lot of shit in this movie, and she knocks it out of the park.
Unfortunately, she never really attained the heights she should have after this flick. As usual, the material failed her. Or maybe her agent sucked. An actor is only as good as their roles and films offered to them. Though she was fantastic in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, I have to say.
Sea of Love is a movie that just works. At the time it may not have set off alarm bells, but Michael Rooker’s casting as the “innocent” cable repair man is an immediate tip off that he’s the killer. Fresh off Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Rooker is great in the thankless role of the absusive ex-husband killing the men his ex-wife dates. His end fight with Pacino is intense. Rooker brings the emotion and it’s really effective once you think he’s been subdued, and the fight is over, only for him to keep yammering until getting up, yelling and crying, making Pacino scream. It’s fucking tense!
And the end scene, where it appears Barkin and Pacino will give it an honest go, is genuinely played. These people feel real. You find yourself invested in their outcome. And when Pacino finally melts Barkin and makes her smile, you find yourself smiling as well.
It’s a great note to end the film on, only to be greeted by Tom fucking Waits doing a cover of Sea of Love. Holy shit!
This movie is fucking great. Easily in the top 50 films of all-time list, if not top 30. I’m fucking serious! Do you know how hard it is to take a well-worn and tired concept such as this and turn it on its head and deliver a timeless piece of pure entertainment? That is hard. And it all starts with Richard Price’s script. Then Becker’s direction, getting Pacino and Barkin and Goodman and Rooker and Jenkins.
I bet when they were making this, they had no idea how great it’d be. Maybe even now they don’t know.
But I do. And now, so do you.
Sea of Love is a fucking classic. Forever grateful to my buddy, Altos, who turned me on to this shit way back in high school.
The One Sheet
This first one sheet is not bad. I could see hanging this on my wall when I was younger. But only because of how much I love the movie. On its own, this is not great graphic design. And the tagline is a bit clunky, they’re telling us he may have found someone who is the end of his life? Doesn’t really work.
This second poster looks like an international version. If anything, it’s worse than the U.S. version. A weird, distorted image of Pacino and Barkin looking at the camera, with that same shitty tagline? I’ll pass.
This Asian poster isn’t terrible, but what is that abstract blue image in the back supposed to be? Water? The actual sea of love? I don’t know. Not a fan. Sorry.
And that does it for Harold Becker and Richard Price’s Sea of Love. What did you think? Are you like me, all it takes is a little Trevor Jones to get you in the mood?
Note: You’ll notice there’s no Favorite Shot in this entry, and that is for one simple reason, there is not one shot in this movie that I salivate over. Becker is a very nuts and bolts kind of guy, ergo, no fancy camera movements or dope push ins or crazy crane shots. The movie is well directed, don’t get me wrong. Direction is way more than just pretty shots. There’s just not one shot in this movie that grabs you by collar and slaps you across the face, searing itself into your cortex. If there’s one demerit I can give to this flick, it is that.
Looking up something for this article, I stumbled upon Vincent Canby’s review where he calls Sea of Love, “a really quite bad movie.” What a ridiculous, big girl’s blouse, to quote Johnny in Naked. This motherfucker got to see this movie, in the theater, first run, back in ‘89, and that’s his capsule summary? Anytime I think film criticism has gone to shit lately, I am reminded it was always shit, with just a few bright spots along the way.
When Sea of Love was released, Pacino was dating Diane Keaton, who I absolutely adore, and the two of them went to the premiere together. I just love this shot of the two of them. Keaton in her signature black hat, Pacino wearing a suit blazer with no shirt underneath and accountant glasses. Amazing. Shame it didn’t work out between them…
See you in two weeks!