Word: passer
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STILL, it's obvious that Passer could have made a thriller. He clearly has the talent. It's clear too, that he could have made a "relationship" piece about Cutter and Bone and Mo. When Bone and Mo finally do sleep together while Cutter's off playing detective, the entire scene is filled with such delicacy--never in a film has there been a better exploration of unfaithfulness with all its anticlimactic manifestations--that it's clear Passer is something of a visionary. Or more importantly, he's a visionary without epic pretensions. Perhaps it's his intent all along...
...master. It always seems to be late afternoon in the film, that lazy peculiarly Southern California lighting, or else it is a misty night. The surfaces are always reflected in some gas-lit glow--a shadow of the "real" California of travel posters and television shows. Director Ivan Passer has given his characters enough personalities to be interesting (Cutter is constantly mimicking Ahab), but more often than not he resists making them fit together too neatly...
...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...
...Swedes or Scorcese's narcoticized totems--that makes Cutter's Way so extraordinary. Not since Taxi Driver has an American film been so successful at showing us American in a whole new light, and hever has one managed it with such control of its self-conscious and cinematic form. Passer has come closer to making a masterpiece than anyone in the past few years...
...somehow it works, despite the fact that the setting (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and the plot (which involves, among other factors, sins of an older generation) appear to be borrowed from Ross Macdonald. It works, in part, because Czech-born Director Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting) is a junk-ball twirler with an ability to put a loony backspin on bitterness. In his pictures people strike out laughing. More important, he finds a way to make one care about losers without imputing hidden heroic virtues to them. And Writer Fiskin knows how to construct revealing scenes economically, with characters talking truly tough...