Everybody Wins

The film's basic problem can be summed up in the script's most repeated verb: talk --as in too much. Responding to a phone request, private eye Tom O'Toole (Nolte) arrives in a small Connecticut town and talks to Angela Crispini (Winger), who wants him to investigate the case of Felix (Frank Military), who, she says, has been wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his pillar-of-the-community uncle. She sends O'Toole to talk to a simple-minded backwoods woman (Kathleen Wilhoite), who leads O'Toole to talk to Jerry (Will Patton), a deranged biker who worships a dead Civil War hero and who may or may not be the real killer. Not much comes of O'Toole and Jerry's conversation; instead of a tense, psychological cat-and-mouse game, their meeting digresses into rambling mumbo-jumbo. At home, O'Toole talks to his sister (Judith Ivey) and gets interrupted by phone calls urging him to talk to other people who may know something. As for the none-too-stable Crispini, she turns out to be a prostitute plagued by multiple personalities, ranging from a truck-stop whore to the classy mistress of the prosecutor (Frank Converse), an old nemesis of O'Toole's, who put away Felix. A gladhander readying for a run at the Senate, the prosecutor smacks Crispini around and wrecks her apartment looking for their old love letters after O'Toole serves notice that Crispini has convinced him to investigate the murder case.

There are so many unstable characters here that EVERYBODY WINS might have been better titled "Everybody's Insane." Actually, Miller's original title ("Two-Way Mirror") conveys all too well the film's lack of thematic subtlety. An innocent motivated by the idealistic pursuit of justice, O'Toole winds up being manipulated into setting right what seems to have been essentially a murder contract gone sour. Putting Felix behind bars wasn't supposed to have been part of the deal, so O'Toole is brought in to help force the hand of the powers that be (his investigation into a previous case led to a reversal of a verdict won by the prosecutor). But who killed whom and why is only hazily explained, and when it is, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense dramatically or logically. Miller has a higher purpose in mind than merely presenting a competently crafted story: he is bent on nothing less than exposing the casual corruption of our diseased modern age.

Rarely, however, has corruption been depicted as lifelessly as it is here. Rather than being propelled from one clue to the next, Nolte's O'Toole, smitten with Winger's Crispini, seems to wander around in a befuddled haze (shared by the audience) until someone pulls him aside and tells him to go talk to someone else. Missing is anything resembling dramatic conflict--an odd weakness in a script credited to one of the century's leading playwrights. The real villain, as it turns out, is dead before the action of the film even begins. O'Toole thus finds himself striking out at shadows with the vague objective of bringing down a corrupt state power structure and dealing another defeat to the despised prosecutor.

EVERYBODY WINS is finally a series of sketches for potentially intriguing characters and a potentially interesting plot that plays like an overwritten treatment. What little there is of interest comes from the efforts of Reisz and his cast to breathe life into Miller's DOA scenario. Notably, Reisz creates a nightmarish aura of dread and unease with a stark, elliptical narrative style accented by complex, deep-focus visual compositions. Nolte has little to do as the one-dimensional good guy; as always, however, he does what he does very well. Nevertheless, this is unquestionably Winger's show, and her performance is all the more persuasive because it is so artfully subdued. Changing personalities within a single scene just by a slight alteration in her line reading and body language, Winger makes herself at once irresistibly seductive and downright scary. It's easy to sympathize with O'Toole for thinking--as he puts it--"with his dingus." But the only real mystery in EVERYBODY WINS is, what was Miller thinking with when he wrote this windy, uncinematic screenplay? (Sexual situations, nudity, profanity, violence.) leave a comment