Word: niro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film's heart is the forced relationship between two dramatically different residents of the same New York apartment complex. Robert De Niro is Walt Koontz, a bigoted former cop, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is Rusty, a drag queen desperate for a sex change. When Walt suffers a stroke while trying to foil a robbery, he reluctantly turns to Rusty for singing lessons as therapy. Needless to say, the one-time enemies learn there's more to each other than meets...
...York, but as writer he should have spent more time exploring the down-and-dirty grit of his protagonists. The screenplay itself does precious little to expand upon the two stereotypes of a bigot and a drag queen. That task falls into the actors hands. Fortunately, De Niro and Hoffman have very capable hands indeed, and they almost manage to elevate the script in spite of itself not quite, but almost...
...Hoffman, who follows up on his fine work in Happiness and Boogie Nights. With his undulating voice and quick reversals of emotion, he nicely portrays Rusty's painful limbo between lonely man and gaudy transvestite. Reading in between his frequently trite lines, Hoffman exposes Rusty's inner vulnerability. De Niro, too, raises his Walt above mere caricature. His subtle expressions reveal the pain of an independent man losing his mobility while his cautious moves towards Rusty make the burgeoning friendship relatively believable...
...Ultimately, however, Hoffman and De Niro are stymied by the limitations of the film's concept. Flawless just doesn't have enough to say. Because it never ventures beyond the audiences expectations, it fails to challenge. And so it fails to truly entertain. Flawless preaches that we should look beneath the surface. Too bad the film didn't take its own advice...
...focuses on the boringly brutal criminals who keep looking for their lost loot, on the cute vagaries of drag-queen life, on Koontz's messed-up romantic and buddy relationships. All this points to the preordained ending, in which everyone learns to get along with everyone else. De Niro's is a carefully studied performance, which pretty much concedes the screen to Hoffman's showy mix of transgression and tenderness. He's fine, but Flawless is a cause lost to feel-good cliches...