Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration: that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice. In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.
As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition. The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do: A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths. It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable. It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age. A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.
Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.
Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity. No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.
Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”
My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen. For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.
State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school. The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life. But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.
Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…
A SORT OF HOMECOMING
Shot entirely on location in New York City in 1989, State of Grace tells the story of Terry Noonan (Penn), who returns to his hometown after a ten-year absence (for reasons he’d rather not make known) and resumes his relationship—both personal and professional—with the Flannerys: Frankie (Harris), the ambitious capo of a half-assed gang modeled after the real-life Westies; Jackie (Oldman), Frankie’s loose-cannon younger brother and henchman; and their sister Kathleen (Wright), the girl who got out and made good—and Terry’s first love. Being a mob movie, though, what starts as a happy reunion eventually spirals into a vortex of bloodletting and betrayal. The narrative is what Save the Cat! would classify as Institutionalized—a “Family Institution” tale about incompatible loyalties (as are GoodFellas and The Godfather).
It’s always a little tricky going back to a movie (or a book) you loved as a kid but haven’t seen since, because you run the very real risk of discovering it isn’t as good or as meaningful or as powerful as it seemed at the time. Sometimes these things, I’ve discovered, are better left remembered than revisited. Another 1990 bomb that nobody recollects, Christian Slater’s pirate-radio drama Pump Up the Volume, is a movie that resonated so intensely with me at that unhappy time in my life, I have by choice not looked at it again in a quarter century. However, I decided to take a chance on State of Grace.
Weirdly, I recalled many passages of dialogue in Grace nearly verbatim, yet couldn’t predict as I watched it where each scene was going, or where the plot led next. Like memories of life itself, I remembered the moments with such vivid—almost tactile—clarity, but not necessarily their contextual place in the Big Picture. And I was delighted to discover, appraising it now as a storyteller myself, that the plot is elegantly simple, allowing all those small details—from the dive bars in the Kitchen to the vacant lots of the South Bronx—to live and breathe, to seep under your skin.
Everything about this movie—from its unhurried pace, to its character-driven script, to its restrained performances (Oldman’s unhinged hooligan notwithstanding), to Ennio Morricone’s melancholic score—is hauntingly elegiac. State of Grace (purposefully) lacks GoodFellas wind-you-up kinetic energy. It’s wistful; it’s a lamentation for a doomed way of life: the period in which organized crime got chased out of New York (by then–District Attorney Rudy Giuliani) and corporate gentrification moved in (its own form of organized crime, in a way).
Joe Pesci (as Tommy DeVito) and Ray Liotta (as Henry Hill) in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas”
Christ, these guys aren’t even hip mobsters, like the GoodFellas troika, at least having themselves a wee old time of livin’ on the edge; they’re wannabes (Frankie), or losers (Jackie), or victims of incurable self-torment (Terry). They don’t have prestige, or respect, or money; they’re just vermin, feeding off gutter scraps, yearning either for times gone by or times never to come. As remarkable and suspenseful and enthrallingly dramatic as Grace is, even all these years later, it isn’t hard to understand why it got whacked at the box office by GoodFellas: Scorsese’s saga seduces you into its decadent world, incrementally, then grabs you by the fuckin’ throat, whereas with State of Grace, director Phil Joanou peels back the tattered curtain on an already moribund way of life just in time for its pitiful death-croak. It’s less a morality play, like GoodFellas, than it is a bagpiped funeral dirge.
STATE OF MIND
What is hard to fathom, looking back on the movie with middle-aged eyes, is precisely what I found so hypnotically relatable about it at fourteen, fifteen years old! Penn’s Terry Noonan, after all, was probably the first fictional antihero I ever empathized with. Prior to Terry, I’d exclusively admired unambiguous “white hats”: John McClane and Tango & Cash and all that early-era Steven Seagal shit, and one-note TV sleuths like Michael Knight and Thomas Magnum and Dennis Booker. Good guys were, above all, good—and psychologically uncomplicated. And then came State of Grace in all of its emotional intricacy and moral ambiguity, challenging my naïve perspective. That obviously made a bigger impression on me than I’d previously acknowledged.
It’s certainly had an influence on my writing in ways unexamined up till now, directly (if unconsciously) serving as an inspiration for my forthcoming novel Escape from Rikers Island. One of the key characters in the book, Dennis, who plays a small but crucial role, was himself a lowlife rent-a-thug for the Westies in the seventies and eighties. Is it possible I unknowingly named him for State of Grace screenwriter Dennis McIntyre?
Also like Grace, EFRI takes place on the mean streets of New York, and features as its heroes men who operate in its underworld—the real city behind the Disneyfied veneer. That world’s morals exist in a nebulous, gray-shaded territory that EFRI’s policeman protagonist is very much trying—with dubious success—to navigate: He’s a man who longs to be a white hat, but questions how realistic such fanciful Hollywood idealism is. He and the novel’s antihero, the shot caller of a violent street gang based out of Brooklyn, are themselves grappling with feelings of displacement in a gentrified city that no longer resembles the working-class bastion in which they came of age—the very culture Gary Oldman’s Jackie sees slipping away during the events of his story.
Hell, if all that weren’t enough, according to Joanou’s audio commentary, McIntyre’s original script for State of Grace even opened with an unfilmed action sequence depicting—wait for it—an escape from Rikers Island. How ‘bout that?
Oldman, Robin Wright (as Kathleen Flannery), and Penn on location in the Lower East Side
But none of that really explains why Grace seeded itself so prominently in my receptive imagination. Why did a kid who’d only a year earlier think the coiffed detectives of Miami Vice and 21 Jump Street emblemized the pinnacle of moral complexity suddenly find himself so taken with the tenebrous ethos of State of Grace? Terry and Jackie, et al., were men coming to grips—or, more accurately, not coming to grips—with disillusionment, with disenfranchisement. Their story was a requiem for the end of their particular era. In stark contrast, I was a student in his first year of high school!
But maybe, in retrospect, I was feeling a little elegiac myself at the time. The emotional simplicity of boyhood had given way to the hormonal complexity of adolescence. My parents had just divorced; I barely saw my father after that till his funeral a decade later. (It should say something that I was appalled by the copious alcohol consumption in State of Grace when I recently rewatched it, but thought absolutely nothing of it at fourteen.) As all that was underway, my best friend left the neighborhood, suddenly and painfully, to live with the other of his divorced parents, and for many years thereafter I thought he’d intentionally moved away from me (because, like a true egocentric thirteen-year-old, it never for a moment crossed my mind that what happened to him was in no way about me).
And still reeling from all that, I found myself displaced from the familiar comfort of the halls of public school, where I’d enjoyed tremendous freedom with minimal oversight or accountability, and thrust into the regimented, buttoned-down structure of Jesuit prep school. Overnight, nothing in my life was the same as it had so reliably been. Only a year earlier, I’d had a very clear vision of where everything was headed—an idiotic John Hughes–inspired fantasy of infinite free-range teenage adventures with me and my little gang on the streets of the Bronx, just as life had always been.
“But it was only an idea. Had nothin’ to do with the truth, it’s just… a fuckin’ idea, like… you believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace. And you believe it. But it’s got nothin’ to do with reality. It’s just an idea. I mean, you got your ideas and you got reality. They’re all… they’re all fucked up.”—Terry Noonan in State of Grace
And so perhaps it was that State of Grace spoke to the first bout of crushing disillusionment I’d ever experienced—the gap between how things are and how they ought to be; the reality that times change, unexpectedly and unceremoniously, and they never go back to how they were no matter how badly you wish otherwise. It was the right movie at the right time in my life. That no one saw it back in 1990 isn’t at all true; I saw it—and it affected me.
It gave me a healthy, private outlet to mourn what had been lost in my own life at that exact moment—to cope with the trauma and anger over the ground falling out—and it didn’t pull any punches or promise some happy ending, some deus ex machina resolution, that wasn’t coming for me. That it was so different from anything I’d ever seen up till that point probably accounts for how forcibly it imprinted its message on me; it stayed with me long after I lost touch with it. I see that now. The proof is in my own works of fiction.
TERRY I HARDLY KNEW YE
So, that’s what the movie is to me: an elegy. And it works as such on so many thought-provoking levels. It grieves the loss of plebeian New York and its ethnic traditions, when the Irish-American district of Hell’s Kitchen, imperfect though it may’ve been, was rechristened by the incoming yuppies as “Clinton.” (I wonder what Oldman’s Jackie would think of the asshole hipsters who’ve since reinstated the neighborhood’s old sobriquet for its authenticity, man. I have no doubt he’d gleefully give them an authentic Hell’s Kitchen experience.) It certainly eulogizes (but in no way romanticizes) the Irish Mob, exterminated as it was by Giuliani’s RICO indictments.
It also, as Joanou points out in his commentary, was part of an inadvertent last hurrah for old-school mobster movies. That autumn, the genre essentially performed its swan song with five successive releases: First Grace, then GoodFellas, followed by Abel Ferrara’s King of New York, the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, and, in a fitting, full-circle coda, The Godfather, Part III (which Coppola had hoped to title, quite aptly, The Death of Michael Corleone).
The end of the Corleone saga served as a postlude for the era of the operatic gangster movie
Even Hollywood itself was on the cusp of tectonic change, with the unprecedented opening-weekend grosses of 1989’s Batman begetting a new industrial model of all-in, big-budget tentpoles, their size and noise—on the subject of corporate homogenization—slowly but surely crowding out smaller, more thoughtful, more dramatic films. Those kinds of stories, like the mafia of our pop culture itself (The Sopranos), quietly migrated to the untamed, inconspicuous underground of cable television.
And I guess, in a very personal way, Grace now operates as a kind of elegy for that transitional, pubescent period of my own youth. In my mid-thirties, I had a chance to chat with my aforementioned best friend—the one who moved away in eighth grade—about what he was going through at that time, and what I was feeling, and how the friendship of two emotionally whiplashed thirteen-year-olds became frayed by a series of misunderstandings and external circumstances neither one had any control over or comprehension of. All that bullshit’s in the rearview now, but our relationship, almost thirty years hence, motors on through the changing seasons, only improving with age.
Terry Noonan went back to Hell’s Kitchen with the best of intentions: to look the past in the eye and come to terms with it. His efforts were met, if you’ll permit the spoiler-free understatement, with mixed results. But I know from his experiences—and mine, too—that reconnecting with old faces, whether we’re talking flesh-and-blood friends or fictional characters, can offer enlightenment and, if you’re open to it, catharsis. I’m sure my old pal Terry would agree it can even be fun—at least for a little while.
It’s interesting how a film can have such impact on one’s life. It seems that ‘State of Grace’ came along at a time when your own life was going through significant upheavals and in it you saw something you identified with and which appealed to your sense, even in your early teens, that your life was changing irrevocably and that nothing would ever be the same again.
I recall a similar experience when watching ‘Seize the Day’, a little-known film starring Robin Williams about a forty-something whose life is in shambles trying to get some degree of normalcy from his life, success in his chosen career, and acknowledgement from his father. The story is cynical and pessimistic, and doesn’t end well for its hapless protagonist, but there was a lot I found myself identifying with. ‘Seize the Day’ was released the same year as ‘Club Paradise’, a comedy with a much happier tone, and I think the latter release with its more optimistic attitude and ending is what led to the former being largely ignored at the time.
Hey, Michael! Thanks for reading and commenting!
Stories are like friends, I guess: Most are part of our lives for only a short time, impacting us meaningfully but briefly, while a rarefied few beat the odds to become lifelong relationships. A few years ago, I commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the first date I had with my wife in this post, in which I talked about how the movie we saw that day, Michael Mann’s Heat, has stood the test of time alongside our own romance. I thought there was something kind of poetic about that.
For me, State of Grace is something of an anomaly: a box-office bomb that was nonetheless very important to me at a particular time in my life, but that I eventually moved on from and forgot about. Rediscovering it a few weeks ago was such a rich experience because I was able, with age and perspective, to recognize it for the truly stellar (if sadly overlooked) movie it was and is, but at the same time it transported me, in a very immediate way, right back to the days in which I first saw it, and let me look them in the eye, you know? Back then, Grace offered the solace I needed to get through a tumultuous period of my life; all these years later, it gave me that gift anew, providing a level of insight — and even catharsis — on those days gone by that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s the kind of power good storytelling has, and why we need more skilled storytellers and honest stories.
A movie’s box office, and even its cultural legacy, should in no way be a metric of its artistic and emotional value. Like State of Grace, Seize the Day boasted an impressive pedigree of talent — a Robin Williams movie based on a classic Saul Bellow novel — that nonetheless has, unlike Heat and GoodFellas and Dead Poets Society, receded from public consciousness in the intervening years. But if a story has meaning to even one person, it has value. State of Grace, for instance, lives on through the works it has inspired, which in my view is a much preferable and culturally healthy mode of athanasia than a movie subjected to an endless series of direct sequels or remakes, à la Star Wars and superheroes. And revisiting State of Grace brought that point home — the very one we’ve been discussing here so passionately in 2018 — with stark immediacy.
Thanks, as always, for joining the conversation! Hope your own writing has been inspired and productive!
I’ve never heard of the movie, Sean, but that was probably expected based on the start of your post. It was interesting to hear about how the movie resonated with your fourteen year old self, the themes meshing and what the film means now, decades later. So funny that it might have started with an escape from Rikers Island! I can’t think of a movie that had that kind of impact on me, but I can think of books, certainly. Fascinating post, my friend.
Thanks, Diana! I imagine every one of us was affected in some way, at some formative moment, by a story, be it a movie, a novel, a musical, an episode of The Twilight Zone, what have you. I’m sure there are many other books and movies besides State of Grace I’ve long since lost conscious touch with, but that nonetheless inform my worldview and artistic sensibilities outside my intellectual awareness. After doing an entire post on how our influences eventually become impossible to identify in our own work, it was a special (and entirely unexpected) thrill to be reminded so directly of a piece of fiction that’s had greater consequence on my emotional and creative evolution than I’d ever previously considered. Those little moments of self-discovery are some of the best experiences life has to offer — and the reason I chose to devote my time on this earth to the art and craft of writing.
There were lots of movies in the 80s that I saw and that either stuck with me long after (some for a lifetime) or that I believe contributed to how I processed life back then or even who I was to become. And many of them were also never well known. Without giving reasons, here are a few:
Mask (Cher, Eric Stoltz; 1985)
Adventures in Babysitting
The Beastmaster
St. Elmo’s Fire
Better Off Dead
Sometime, we’ll have to shoot the breeze over those reasons.
What stood out to me most from this post was the perception you had of why your friend moved away. While we often do gain clarity with time, we also have this tendency to always interpret our previous “selves” from any age through the lens of our current-self. We berate ourselves for things we did when we were kids, thinking we should have known better; or we give our child-self too much credit, as if he/she knew things then that weren’t actually understood for many years later. At any stage in life, we can only be who we were, only know what we knew—in terms of both experience and cognitive ability. Many times, people wind up carrying guilt for a lifetime over why their then-self did such-and-such or didn’t see such-and-such, etc. But we truly weren’t ourselves.
I think we’d all do well to have more empathy for our past-selves.
But it sure is fascinating to look back at all the strange pieces that contributed to our becoming.
I saw all those movies back in the day, Erik, and loved them! The only one I’ve seen recently is Adventures in Babysitting; I was sitting around the living room one night a few months ago with nothing to do, and it was on Netflix, and it occurred to me that damn movie was now thirty years old — yeesh! — so I watched it for no particular reason and was delighted to rediscover its charms. I recall seeing it for the first time down in Kingsbridge at my best friend’s house — the very friend mentioned so prominently in this post.
What happened to him over Christmas vacation of ’89/’90 is a complicated story that I myself didn’t fully understand until just a few years ago, and that I obviously didn’t recount here in any contextual detail for myriad reasons. Funny enough, I was chatting with him on the phone last week, and he recalled a time my father gave him a comforting piece of advice after he and I got in some pretty serious trouble: We’d played a birthday prank on his younger brother that wound up really hurting the kid’s feelings. It wasn’t done malignantly — it was simply a case of two twelve-year-olds talking themselves into an ill-conceived idea — but nonetheless the damage was done. And when I was relaying the content of that phone conversation to my wife over dinner that night, she said (in her wisdom) that we all did stupid and regrettable things at that age simply because we didn’t know any better, and that’s how we learned. We need to understand, she added, what was done is in no way a reflection of the person we are now, and that we ultimately have to forgive our then-selves for it. I mention that because it goes to exactly what you said about having empathy for who you were, in all of his in-progress imperfection.
To echo your closing sentiment, the opportunities life sometimes presents to draw connections between seemingly disparate events in your past and to achieve deeper understanding of precisely how they informed one another (often outside your conscious awareness at the time), and how they played their part in shaping the person you’ve become (for good or for ill) are, as I noted in my reply to Diana above, the moments that make life worth living. Discussing the emotionally painful events of that Christmas vacation of 1989 with my friend seven years ago was one such moment; watching State of Grace earlier this month, and submitting to its time warp, was another. (The death of my high-school dean last year provoked one such episode of self-discovery.) They are certainly not the kind of experiences you’d want to have every day — they’re too poignant — but when they come around, they are sacramental reminders that our lives have their own kind of narrative arc: that we are the heroes of our own stories, and those stories aren’t without design or meaning, no matter how random or inconsequential they can sometimes seem. That’s what I call a state of grace.
Way to bring it around: “That’s what I call a state of grace.” True.
Now, regarding Adventures in Babysitting, to this day, I still often say (much to the confusion of those around me):
“*gasp* Sesame Plexer! That SLUT!”
-and-
“Ain’t nobody leaves without singing’ the blues.”
Strangely enough, I see a common thread among the various movies I listed as having been meaningful to me is:
I felt for Chris, at how she’d been misled and mistreated. I thought, “I would be a better boyfriend to you.”
I wanted to be Rocky’s friend.
Heck, I even had empathy for the beastmaster when his ferret died.
And that thread is empathy—which was part of me then, but which was ever in the process of becoming something bigger. I didn’t know that many people when I was younger; but I got to practice my empathy through the people I “met” and “friends I made” through movies and books.
The trick to good writing is to get the reader/viewer to empathize with the protagonist. One of the (more idiotic) notes you get all the time as a screenwriter is That character isn’t likable. They don’t have to be likable; you just need to empathize with them. We don’t particularly like Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), but we empathize with his profound loneliness. We don’t admire Tony Soprano, but we empathize with his panic disorder (and the courage it took to seek treatment for it). Consider even Christian Bale’s scuzzy con artist in American Hustle: That guy is such a loathsome bottom feeder, and yet there’s a scene early in the movie where Bradley Cooper embarrasses him by tousling his comb over; that, along with the love Bale shows his adoptive son, helps us empathize with him. Sometimes a character gets dumped (like Chris), or is born disfigured (like Rocky), or loses a pet (Dar), and those are perfectly legitimate ways to engender empathy, but there are a lot of subtle techniques masterful writers use to get you to empathize with a character you might not be predisposed to liking.
Studies suggest reading fiction in particular is a great exercise for developing empathy, because most novels put you squarely inside the head of a protagonist, forcing you to see the world through her eyes in a way that can’t be replicated on stage or screen. I think we’ve all experienced the feeling that comes from empathizing with a fictional character and wanting to apply that sensitivity in our social interactions. Stories have the power to make us want to be better, more sympathetic, more engaged people. That’s a point I guess I was getting at in the intro to this post, and it’s something I plan on talking about at greater length in the months to come: the power of narrative, and the often overlooked obligation storytellers have to use it responsibly as well as artfully.
I still say Adventures in Babysitting is Thor’s best movie
In the late eighties, NBC produced a trilogy of made-for-TV reunion movies to the earlier Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk series. What was kind of crazy about those movies was that they were maybe Marvel’s first attempt in earnest at a “shared cinematic universe,” because they featured other superheroes like Thor and Daredevil:
The funny thing is, I always thought Vincent D’Onofrio’s Thor from Adventures in Babysitting was way more convincing! You know? He had the look… without resorting to the cheap Halloween costume.
Excellent, as always. You write about experiences and feelings in a way that draws in your readers, causing us to reflect on similar times and experiences in our own lives. I think that I connect with so many of your stories because we are roughly from the same coming-of-age timeline, a shared but not shared history, if you will. Your point about almost not looking forward to or being somewhat hesitant to revisit such an important shaping element of your youth for fear it’s not as good as you KNOW IT IS (as you hope it is, remember it as having been) resonates with me too. But a good story is a good story, sometimes augmented by your personal experience of having heard/read/seen it, sure, and good stories (and songs) stand the test of time. This one has clearly and indelibly made its mark on you!
Aw, thanks, Wendy — thanks for saying that! That feedback is very meaningful to me, I promise you. As I was discussing with Erik in the comments section of last month’s post, I really feel over the last year this blog has finally found its identity. When I first started blogging, before I was completely comfortable with the form, most of my early posts were analytical pieces on craft (many of which I’m still very proud of, like the study of Rambo’s characterization that First Blood author David Morrell himself endorsed). But as my own personality started to assert itself over time — as I grew more inclined to share personal experiences — I think a style emerged that is in some respects epitomized by this particular post: I’ve tried to share a nonlinear narrative of my own life, broken down into episodes, and to talk about how certain movies/stories either influenced or reflected what was going on in my life at that time. (That approach is evident in posts like “A Los Angeles Crime Saga/A New York Love Story,” “This Is 40,” “‘I Heard You Were Dead,'” “Ghosts of October,” “Spring Fever,” “Goodbye, Mr. Bott,” “Different Stages,” and “Home for Christmas,” among others.) And I think over the last three posts, I’ve really begun to view this blog as a place where we can discuss the power stories have to put us in touch with where we’ve come from, where we are, and/or where we’re going; that narrativity gives life its sense of meaning. Stories put us in touch with ourselves, and can make us fuller, better, more self-actualized people. That realization is the gift this blog has given me, and it’s a theme I plan on exploring in greater depth in the months to come.
And on the subject of creative inspiration, the stylistic evolution of this blog is owed in no small part to Greater Than Gravity. I mean that sincerely. Every time I read one of your posts, I invariably wind up discussing it with my wife at dinner later that night. I’m taken with the way you have a consistent brand (or, at very least, a leitmotif), but that it’s flexible enough to allow you to showcase your personality by depicting episodes from your everyday life that sometimes have nothing whatsoever to do with your son’s MD. Consequently, some of your posts are quite funny, some whimsical, some sad — some even all of the above — but every single one of them is unmistakably you. It’s truly one of my favorite blogs, and I’ve unquestionably been inspired by your courage and your candor to put more of myself into my own posts. (And the only reason I’ve been absent from your last few posts is because I like to take my time when I read and comment on them, and I haven’t had much spare time this past winter. But I expect that to change within the next few weeks…)
All of that is to say that your blog resonates with me as much as mine resonates with you. And I think that’s because the more honest specificity we put into our writing, the more universally relatable it — and we — become. So that you of all people would stop to say how much you connect with some of these essays is just about the highest compliment I could receive! Thank you — and likewise.
And to echo your closing point: Yes — a good story (or song!) has a way of speaking to us through all the different stages of our life, taking on new and more complex meaning with time/age/experience. It can even serve as an emotional marker, of sorts — a reminder of who we once were, the trials through which we’ve persevered, and how far we’ve come. Revisiting State of Grace last month was a stark and welcome reminder of that, and this little tribute to it should also serve as a wish of sorts: that everyone is as blessed to have such a meaningful relationship with at least one work of fiction out there, however popular or obscure it may be.
I never know what point to touch on because you bring up so many intriguing ones. Movies that resonate with us as young adults…appear to us at a time when we need to know we belong in a world we haven’t figured out how to navigate, but believe we have the secret password to. Since I too grew up in the eighties it had seemed to me back then that John Hughes understood me in a way no one else did. And when I get the chance to revisit The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, or any of his other wonderful films, I still feel like he and I would’ve hung out after school together. I’m grateful for finding a place to fit in for a few hours during a time when I didn’t know if I fit in from one minute to the next.
It’s funny you bring this up, Stacey, because just last week, a comment on one of my very early posts, “Monster Mash,” prompted a discussion on teen movies — that they typically fall under the “Adolescent Passage” subgenre of Rites of Passage, per the genre classifications of Save the Cat! That would include movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Can’t Hardly Wait, American Pie, License to Drive, Porky’s, American Graffiti, and so on, because all those stories are about characters on the precipice of a life-changing, one-time-only event, be it high-school graduation (Ferris Bueller, Can’t Hardly Wait, American Graffiti), losing one’s virginity (American Pie, Porky’s), or even earning the newfound freedom and responsibility that comes with a driver’s license (License to Drive). “Adolescent Passage” stories address the excitement and anxiety that those rites of passage produce in us.
But the other central preoccupation of teen-themed movies, it seems to me, is fitting in. I’m talking about stories in which the protagonist is struggling to determine and/or establish his social identity, which is really more of an Institutionalized story model, hence the subgenre I call “High School Institution.” Movies in this category would include The Breakfast Club, Clueless, Mean Girls, Can’t Buy Me Love, Cruel Intentions, etc. And I think what those stories do — and John Hughes, the bard of eighties teen angst, was a master of the form — is give us a framework to understand that everyone in high school is hiding behind an identity that is, to one degree or another, contrived, be it consciously or unconsciously. We need that mask we adopt — that false front — to protect us while we figure out who we really are.
God knows I did. When, in eighth grade, the ground beneath me dropped out overnight, and there I was a (floundering) fish out of water at parochial school with kids who grew up in that culture and were very comfortable in it, I determined I had a binary choice to make: to try to fit in… or to proudly and stubbornly rebel against the whole thing. I calculated (probably accurately) I had no shot at the former, so I opted for the latter. If I couldn’t fit in, then I would simply revel in being the unwanted outsider.
But when I reflect now on the pain I was in at that time — and revisiting State of Grace gave me an opportunity to look that in the eye somewhat objectively and dispassionately — I can see that “identity” for the protective artifice it was. And it’s probably no accident that I knew by high school I wanted to forge a career as a writer, because I already understood the way stories can give us context, and give us hope, and offer an outlet to cope with pain. Stories are magical things, something I’d unquestionably lost sight of over the past decade, beaten down as I’d become by the grind of Hollywood. Over the last few years, however, I’ve gotten back in touch with what I once loved about fiction — through my manuscript, through this blog, and even through the rediscovery of formative movies like Grace — and that’s reinvigorated me; it’s made me excited once again to experience and to create new stories. I haven’t felt this passionately about writing since college — only now, in addition to passion, I have a few essentials I didn’t have then: perspective, experience, and something to say. We need to learn to embrace the shitty things that happen to us, because what would we have to write about without them?
I feel the same, this movie always stuck with me and I always tell people about it, no one saw it. I am watching the twilight blue ray copy of it right now and it looks fantastic
Thank you, Bekim, for taking the time to share your enthusiasm for State of Grace with me! I tell you what: I meet more and more people all the time who are in our Stately club! It took awhile, but audiences did discover State of Grace. I think the movie has only gotten better with age, frankly, and it’s the perfect film to watch — especially that magnificent Blu-ray edition — this time of year in observance of Saint Patrick’s Day. Perhaps I should try to reach out to director Phil Joanou or (uncredited) screenwriter David Rabe to see if either would be amenable to an interview about the film here on the blog…?
Happy St. Paddy’s, Bekim! I’ll see you around the “streets of Hell’s Kitchen,” pal!
That would be a great idea! let’s continue to get the word out about this amazing film that captures “the end of old NYC” every time I walk by Fanelli Cafe I think of State of Grace, Because of this film I became a huge fan of Gary Oldman who for years no one knew as well, thanks for the reply have a great day
My first job out of college was down in SoHo, and I used to walk by Fanelli’s all the time! Another great location from the movie is the Old Town Bar, recently used in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I grew up in New York during the exact era depicted in State of Grace — an experience I just wrote about, in fact — and Joanou really did capture that time and place so brilliantly, particularly through his keen choice of filming locations. Let’s keep spreading the good word, Bekim!
Hi Sean. I can give you some background on STATE OF GRACE, since I produced it. The genesis of the project was simple. My late friend, Stuart Kleinman, called me one Sunday to ask if I’d read our high school classmate James Traub’s article in the Times Magazine, The Lords of Hell’s Kitchen. I had lunch with Jimmy and arranged to option the article for a possible movie. (I was in the courtroom the day Mickey Featherstone testified against his partner in crime Jimmy Coonan.) At the time, I had one project already in development (LET IT RIDE), and through my producing partner Ned Dowd, I began working for Michael Hausman as Chicago location manager on David Mamet’s THINGS CHANGE. Mike was starting to develop his own projects, and my article was chosen as the first project we presented to Mike’s friends at Orion. We had a development deal based on a single meeting. The first director we hired was an Irishman, Pat O’Connor, who disappeared the moment we told him that the studio executive wanted to meet him. Our second director was Dennis Hopper, who came to New York to scout with a Hell’s Kitchen NYPD homicide detective. We had a start date when we read in Variety that Dennis had taken an acting job that would conflict with our production, and Dennis, being insane, not only told us he expected us to delay production, but that he expected to be payed his full directing fee if we went ahead without him. When we met Phil Joanou, we were relieved to find him energetic and dedicated to the project. Phil worked with Dennis McIntyre revising the script.(Dennis was dying of cancer throughout the process. We were able to show him a rough cut in the hospital shortly before his death.)
Production, and the problems we faced as a direct result of the disruptive and destructive behavior of Sean Penn, is a subject that may someday fill a book, but I will mention one problem Sean caused. He brought in David Rabe to rewrite sections of the script. Rabe would take a three-page scene, and return to us a 15-page scene. In other words, the practical usefulness of his work was nil, and his participation caused more problems than it could ever have solved if he’d had the slightest understanding of how a script is turned into a film. Rabe appealed to the WGA for a screen credit, which was properly denied.
A few years later, working again with Gary Oldman on BASQUIAT, I made reference to Sean’s disruptive behavior, and he had no idea what I was talking about. That’s how a truly gifted actor who is not also a malevolent scumbag behaves: Gary concentrated on his performance. Nothing else mattered to him.
The mishaps caused by Sean Penn, and Phil’s decision to side with Sean (in many ways a wise decision, since Sean used various power-moves to establish himself as “the tiger in the room,” and the studio just wanted to get out of the room alive) when we, as producers, were fully prepared to support him as director, resulted in the picture going five weeks over schedule and $5 million over budget, so that the film’s failure at the box office became a major factor in Orion’s bankruptcy.
Your response to our movie is not unique in my experience, and is greatly appreciated.
There is far too much more to tell than can be told here.
Cheers.
Randy Ostrow
Randy!
My goodness, sir, I cannot adequately express how delighted I am that you found this post and shared these magnificent behind-the-scenes insights! There really isn’t a lot of information on the production available (most of what I know comes straight from Joanou’s Blu-ray commentary), so this is a treasure trove indeed. I’d love to sit down with you sometime and hear more war stories from the production. (Are you still based in New York? I recently moved back to my hometown of the Bronx after twenty years in Los Angeles.) I have so many questions about the project, and I’d be curious to read and compare the McIntyre and Rabe drafts of the script, if copies of them even still exist?
I can certainly appreciate the frustrations you experienced on the production. I worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for over a decade — I was never produced, though I developed projects for actor/producer Ice Cube and Lights Out producer Lawrence Grey, among others — but ultimately grew battle-weary from all the capricious egos that so often stood in the way of anything getting done in that town. (All the “rules” changed after the 2008 WGA strike, and selling specs and setting up features, as I’m sure you’re aware, became infinitely more challenging.) I don’t mind creative collaboration and compromise — I welcome it — but not at the expense of eventually getting something produced. So, I’ve transitioned from screenwriter to author/blogger, and I am enjoying the creative freedom and fulfillment that’s afforded me.
The anecdotes about Hopper, Penn, and Rabe are dispiriting but not altogether surprising. I’ve never met Gary Oldman, but I’ve had occasion to lunch with his manager, Douglas Urbanski, and I understand from Doug that Gary is a stand-up guy. (I in no way agree with Doug’s conservative politics, I should note, but he has always been gracious to me.) It’s certainly a testament to you and your producing partner, Mr. Dowd, that none of the production tension in any way diminished the sublime quality of the film itself — a movie that only seems to get better with age.
I hope this post, and all the many comments that have been left underneath it in the three years since it was first published, stand as testament to the enduring status State of Grace enjoys as a cult classic. You made a hell of a film that may not have lit up the box office in 1990, but it has, three decades hence, stood the test of time. (There’s even a bar up in Rockland County named for Terry Noonan!) How fortuitous that you optioned your classmate’s article, and that you got the project set up at Orion. As a screenwriter/storyteller, I would absolutely love to hear more about how you found Dennis McIntyre, and how he approached the adaptation of James Traub’s Times piece; I study the creative process here on my blog (you can find my best essays on the Start Here page), and would so appreciate a chance to get your recollections and insights on the development of the SoG screenplay. Please feel welcome to reach out to me directly, if you’re inclined: seancarlinhq@gmail.com
Thank you, Randy, for sharing these stories with us. Your response to this humble blog post is greatly appreciated, sir. I hope someday you do indeed publish a full behind-the-scenes account of the production of the film and how it dovetailed into the bankruptcy of Orion; I imagine, based on the teaser you provided above, it’s a story worth telling.
Wishing you the best of health and creativity as we emerge from the trials of pandemia, Randy.
Sean
Sean, I had the same type of love for this film, and have watched it practically every St. Patrick’s day Guinness in hand. Good to know there are other people out there who have it in high regard.
Patrick, I can’t adequately express how delighted I am that not only State of Grace itself has been (re)discovered, but that this humble panegyric I wrote to it has, as well! It means a lot to me to know there are other (active) fans of the film, and that they would take the time to stop by this blog post and share their ardor for it. Thank you. Like the Westies themselves, I guess, our club is small but celebrated!
To that end, one of the many reasons I love State of Grace is that there are just so few cinematic depictions of the Irish Mob; I think this movie makes a wonderful double bill with Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, which can in some respects be considered a “spiritual prequel” to Grace. I’ll certainly be watching them both next weekend; I’ve already got a fridge stocked with Guinness for the occasion! (It was either that or “stewed tomatoes from a can,” a reference I know you get!)
Happy St. Paddy’s to you, Patrick. See ya around the Kitchen some time!
I worked in a video store from 1988-1992 where my like of movies bloomed into a full blown love affair of film. Phil Joanou was already on my radar as one of Spielberg’s protégés, plus I had liked his direction in the silly but fun, Three O’Clock High, and the music doc, Rattle and Hum. By the time State of Grace finally rolled around to video (it stood no chance of coming to my local cineplex), I couldn’t watch it fast enough. I thought it was brilliant at 19, I think it’s messy and flawed and still brilliant at 47. There’s just something about the way it looks and makes me feel that is priceless. The cast is sterling (Oldman at his finest and rawest), the writing is crisp, the score is perfectly suited to the material and the direction is stylish as hell.
Side note: I’ve never seen a movie that captures gun play better than State of Grace. I don’t know if it’s in the direction, cinematography, sound design or all of the above. Whatever the case, it ain’t CGI, and you could teach a master class on the film’s climax alone. Action directors everywhere should take note.
Anyway, I randomly came across your post this morning whereas one of my friends is watching State of Grace for the first time ever today. He’s actually a film director, so I’m super intrigued to hear his take. Whether he likes it or not, I’ll sleep better tonight knowing there are others out there who appreciate this little known uncut gem as much as I do. Great post.
Cooper!
Thanks so much for finding the post, reading it, leaving such a thoughtful comment, and sharing your own fondness for State of Grace! When I revisited Grace two years ago after a quarter-century interim, I was so affected by the experience — and so starkly reminded of how important the film had been to me back in the day — and it seemed like a blog post would be a healthy way to process all that. I wrote the piece for myself, thinking no one would be interested in a dissertation on a thirty-year-old movie no one saw and no one remembers…
How wrong I was — about all those assumptions. One of the great (continued) surprises of this post is how, much like State of Grace itself, folks have continued to discover it, and how they’ve taken the opportunity to express their own affection for Phil Joanou’s underrated masterpiece here in the comments. (God, how I would love to interview Joanou or uncredited screenwriter David Rabe about the film!)
I can’t say much more about State of Grace than I’ve already expressed in the essay above, but I absolutely second your assessment: I thought it was brilliant at 14, I think it’s messy and flawed and still brilliant at 43. State of Grace didn’t have the brand-name recognition of The Godfather, Part III or the visceral kineticism of GoodFellas, but it has so much going for it to appreciate in its own right: pitch-perfect performances from an all-star cast; great New York locations (impeccably captured on celluloid by Jordan Cronenweth); Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score; and a story about a criminal subculture — the Westies — that is endlessly fascinating and, strangely, has been largely underrepresented in favor of its Italian counterpart.
I’ve written extensively on this blog about how 21st-century storytelling has become increasingly more complex (the expansive worldbuilding of sprawling multiplot epics like Game of Thrones and our “shared cinematic universes”) and yet commensurately less meaningful — stories aren’t about anything anymore. Grace, by contrast, is old-school: It’s a simple story about complex characters. It’s about friendship, and loyalty, and how those are the only virtues that truly matter amongst people with a shared past and no future. (Or as Julie Kirgo succinctly put it in the Blu-ray liner notes: “how does a man rise to a state of grace when he is pulled in the opposite direction by old loyalties, by tribal camaraderie, even by love?”)
Stories today, on the other hand, are all about “spoilers” — keeping you watching by doling out revelations like breadcrumbs. The only “spoiler” in Grace isn’t much of a surprise, and, besides which, the movie’s value lies in the philosophical questions it provokes rather than shock of any plot revelations or the assurance of pat answers.
The climax of the film is indeed a master class in its own right, for all the reasons you cite. What’s funny is that the movie mostly eschews action and melodrama for its first two hours in favor of a kind of kitchen-sink realism… only to go balls-out Wild Bunch in the finale! I love the conscious melodrama of the gunfight in the saloon, juxtaposed with the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The gunplay manages to be stylish and yet somehow not sensationalistic: Unlike Die Hard and Predator and other action movies of the era, you feel the impact of every bullet as it tears through flesh and triggers a gushing eruption of blood. It’s not a happy or cathartic ending… but it was the only one those guys were ever gonna get. By applying a little judicious theatricality in the film’s final moments — which feels earned after two hours of admirable restraint — Joanou concludes his morality play on a note of resounding emotional honesty.
I will be very interested to hear your director friend’s take on the film, as well, so please encourage him to post a response here! (I’ll also be curious to know if he saw the movie’s midpoint “twist” coming; I didn’t at fourteen but suspect I might’ve had I first seen SoG as a grown adult.) I think State of Grace makes a terrific double bill with Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, the latter of which arguably serves as a spiritual prequel to the former. It’s even fun to imagine Happy Jack Mulraney as a forefather to Stevie McGuire!
Thanks, Cooper, from one former video-store clerk to another, for sharing your insights on and enthusiasm for SoG. Like the Westies themselves, we are a small but loyal tribe!
Sean
Hey Sean, I loved your homage to State of Grace.
I think this movie’s themes are comparable to those of The Falcon And The Snowman;
Both movies have an overriding theme of loyalty to your friend(s) no matter how horrible or incompetent they are, tied with goals or missions motivated by good intentions. Both movies create the oppressive atmosphere and tension of living on the razor’s edge and end with climax where the consequences of your actions destroy your life.
Terry Noonan wanted to do good but, in order to achieve that, he would have to betray his best friend, Jackie. What initially seem like a true and just mission degraded in his mind to a loathsome betrayal, leading to a tortured soul and lack of commitment to his mission. I loved the final shootout because it showed him breaking from the side of good (the police and ordered society), leaving him in morally ambiguous territory where only the betrayal of his best friend mattered and his penance required vengeance.
In The Falcon And The Snowman (a true story), two lifelong friends, actual altar boys no less, ended-up becoming spies who stole cryptography codes and frequency schedules from TRW and sold them to the USSR. Chris Boyce (The Falcon) was a idealistic ex-seminarian who and taken a job at defense contractor TRW, where he inadvertently intercepted a CIA message one day that indicated that they were going to interfere in the Australian elections to prevent a socialist from becoming prime minister. Boyce was morally offended that the US would betray an ally like that and wanted to give the story to someone who would bring this offense to light. He discussed giving it to the Russians with Daulton Lee (The Snowman), his best friend, who had degenerated into a life of drug dealing and hedonism. Lee, having drug contacts in Mexico, thought that he might be able to sell the CIA messages to the Russians for money. Reluctantly, Boyce went along with the scheme until finally, due to Lee’s incompetence and drug use, the whole thing fell apart.
Just like Terry, Chris wanted to do good with his life. He wanted to hold those who committed injustices (in his case, the CIA) to account. He unfortunately took the wrong path and relied on very flawed agent, his best friend, Daulton. Throughout the movie, the tension builds ominously but subtly and, when I first saw it, I kept thinking to myself, “How could these guys stand the pressure?” Chris didn’t want to damage his country and never cared about money, yet his good intentions were subverted and he became a de-facto spy, facilitated by the actions of his friend, Daulton, who cared only about money and fancied himself a successful and experienced “player”. In the end, their lives were destroyed and their families shamed.
Sean Penn gave a great performance in this movie as well, playing Daulton.
Thanks for dredging up a fond memory.
John!
As I said to Cooper directly above, I’m delighted you discovered this post, read it, and took time from your day to share your insights on and enthusiasm for State of Grace! For years I thought I was the only one who gave a damn about the movie, but this post has connected me to all manner of cinephiles who remember it, appreciate it, and proudly call themselves fans of Joanou’s underrated masterpiece.
You know, John, I am deeply embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually seen The Falcon and the Snowman! (An oversight I will be rectifying immediately.) I’m taken with your analysis of Falcon, though, which is precisely the kind of scholarly appraisal this blog puts a premium on. Not only are the thematic similarities and the Sean Penn connection noteworthy, but Falcon was scripted by Steven Zaillian, who wrote Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, which, as I noted in my comment to Cooper, acts as a sort-of spiritual prequel to SoG… and in both cases co-stars John C. Reilly as a hapless Irish thug who doesn’t make it to the end of the movie!
As I wrote about in the post above, State of Grace was a movie I first saw when my boyhood friendships were faltering from the seismic tectonic shifts of adolescence. As fate would have it, my three best friends from when I was 12 years old are still my three best mates today — we’re tighter than ever — and it’s for those reasons that the friendship of Terry and Jackie took on new, deeply relevant significance for me when I revisited SoG after a quarter-century interim. When I was a kid, SoG resonated as a lamentation for a lost way of life — and, to be sure, it still does — but its complicated exploration of male friendship, about what it means to have a longstanding shared history with another adult man, speaks to me at 43 years old in a way it couldn’t have at fourteen. I look at the movies I loved when I was a kid, from actioners like The Last Boy Scout to comedies like The Secret of My Success, and I’m mostly just appalled by their wanton violence and moral bankruptcy, but not so with State of Grace: The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to both intellectually appreciate its dramaturgy as well as respond emotionally to its dramatics. Precious few works of fiction continue to pay dividends throughout the different seasons of one’s life.
I recently read a different sort of Irish crime story: Tana French’s The Trespasser (which I reviewed here). I mention it because it is also a story about friendship, and about how the people who come into our orbit, whether by deliberate invitation or circumstantial happenstance, shape our very life experience: They create our reality — sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently; sometimes malignantly, sometimes benignly; sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, often a good bit of both — regardless of the fanciful notions we harbor about who we are and how things will be, much the same as Terry Noonan’s quixotic belief “in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace.” Anyway, it’s a book worth reading, and I think you would appreciate its thematic preoccupations.
John, my thanks to you for sharing your fondness and your memories of State of Grace, and for turning me on to The Falcon and the Snowman; it’s never too late, after all, to experience an overlooked classic.
Stay healthy.
Sean
I’m about 10+ years younger than you are but it seems that we share a few similarities, especially with regard to how much this film affected us in more ways than one.
I watched it last night for the first time in maybe 4 years, but it was most likely the 52nd time I’ve viewed it since it was suggested to me by my dad in 1996.
My father was a Jersey City cop for over 25 years. I was an only child but I was spoiled in a much different way: I was given unlimited access to great films, music & books, via suggestions usually coming from him, that were WAY out of my age group.
I was reading The Westies and Wiseguy when everyone else in my class was reading Goosebumps novels.
Looking back now it’s a lot easier to see how my generation was one of the very last to catch obvious glimpses of “the Old New York”, or at least it’s last few death rattles, before the casket of gentrification was permanently sealed. I remember walking around Hell’s Kitchen as a teen looking up all the old haunts of The Westies, most of which then were still standing if only branded with a different name by a much different owner.
Today you’d have to live on another planet in order to find a town or city NOT touched negatively in some way by gentrification. In the past 15 years I’ve lived all over the NYC area, which includes Jersey City where I’m living at the moment, and one of the biggest drawbacks of any touch from gentrification is the lack of any feeling of Community.
You might know your neighbors name if you live here, or your wife may have friends in the community garden but there is very little left of any roots, ethnic tradition, or the “Cheers” factor at local businesses, when maybe 20 or so years ago a corner bar or store still felt like an extention of home.
I don’t mean any racist overtone when I say this: but I really miss Puerto Ricans.
I’m mentioning all this because any time I feel like being nostalgic for “the Old New York” from my youth I usually pop on movies of varying quality that have always been in my list of Guilty Pleasures: King of New York, KIDS, Hackers, State of Grace.
As a Writer/Filmmaker I can’t say that State of Grace is a better film than Goodfellas, because it’s not, but I’d much rather watch it over Goodfellas any day.
PS. You’d be surprised how many people & families who were connected to the real Westies are STILL living in Hell’s Kitchen. I’m not sure if the natives did the smart thing and bought their buildings sometime in the 90’s but there a surprising amount of older people & offspring still living in the area (and drinking at local bars) who have very familiar surnames to someone who knows their local history.
Thank you for the great read,
Jules
Jules!
Thanks so much for reading the piece and contributing to the (happily ongoing) conversation about State of Grace! Of the 89 posts on this blog, this is one of the few that keeps paying dividends: Grace fans like yourself find it, read it, and then share their own appreciation for Phil Joanou’s criminally overlooked classic. I’ll occasionally skim old essays on this blog and wince a little at either their style or content — I wouldn’t mind rewriting or outright deleting a bunch of them (though I resist the impulse to do either) — but this one holds up pretty well, I think.
It’s tempting — even easy — for native New Yorkers like ourselves to wax nostalgic for “the way things were.” Oldman has a great line in the movie where he says something to the effect of, “It used to be you could drop an ice-cream cone on the sidewalk around here and then pick it up and finish it.” Meaning: When the people who lived in working-class neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen were vested in them, they cared about them — about the condition of the streets, and the welfare of their neighbors; these places were their homes, after all, imperfect though they might’ve been. The same can’t be said for a generation of Carrie Bradshaw wannabes who regarded living in the Kitchen or Park Slope or Washington Heights the same way they viewed owning a Louis Vuitton bag: It was a status symbol. People like those, unlike the real-life Jackie Flannerys of the city (and it’s weirdly comforting to know there are a few of them still around!), didn’t earn the right to live in those communities. And by moving into them, they changed the character of them, and in many instances stamped the character out of them altogether — the ethnic culture that made those areas so special and appealing in the first place.
The above passage is excerpted from a novel I wrote two years ago, and I cite it here because the sentiment it expresses, I believe, is true. But what’s also true is there’s no such thing as “Old New York,” or “the way it used to be.” When has the city ever been in stasis? Admittedly, some changes are welcome, some otherwise, but all of them inevitable. I think in many respects the scene of complete self-destruction that closes State of Grace serves as both an acknowledgment of that truth by the characters and their final expression of blaze-of-glory defiance: They saw their very way of life evanescing, and knew there was no place for them in the next phase of the city’s metamorphosis. Going out in a gunfight — in a dive bar on St. Patrick’s Day, at that — at least afforded them the chance to die the way they’d lived. All of them — Terry, Jackie, Frankie — knew in their hearts they would be unable to adapt to the changes around the corner…
Seeing what’s become of New York over the last three decades, it’s hard to blame them. But on the eve of the film’s thirtieth anniversary — it was released on September 14, 1990 — I don’t share their pessimism, their hopelessness, about the city where we all came of age. I’m a climate activist, trained by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who has spent the past few years fighting for a Green New Deal — trying, often with little success and great frustration, to inspire folks to embrace the Green New Deal’s vision a cleaner, fairer, more just, and more sustainable world. There’s been, alas, little appetite for the sweeping systemic changes it calls for…
… and then COVID-19 happened. Now there’s growing support for policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, affordable housing, universal basic income, and criminal-justice reform. (Even Joe Biden, who previously ran on Obama-era nostalgia, has since rebranded his campaign as “Build Back Better,” embracing a great many progressive agenda items.) And I genuinely believe that by 2030, New York City is going to be transformed from the open-air gated community for the super-rich that it’s become to a functional working-class bastion once again. We’re going to reverse some of the racist policies that got instituted (like Broken Windows and corporate gentrification) and the urban-planning mistakes that got made (for instance: surrendering so much real estate to automobiles) and make the city work again. No, it won’t be like it was before; ideally it will be better. Like democracy itself, the city was designed to be a perennial work-in-progress.
I am an optimist. But optimism requires both activism and a healthy disdain for nostalgia (a worldview I’ve expressed in posts like “Oh, Snap!” and “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse”). For me, State of Grace is a tragic cautionary tale about a lack of vision, and a lack of adaptability — about being emotionally and intellectually unable to bridge that gap between the idea you had about something and the reality of the situation. It’s a different kind of cautionary tale than GoodFellas. I agree: GoodFellas is a superior movie — a once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece on every level. But just as the Westies itself was sort of the scrappy, overlooked Irish counterpart to the flashy, celebrated Italian mafia — disorganized crime, you might describe the former — so is State of Grace to GoodFellas. It’s a true New York story — one that Joanou and company managed to preserve for posterity right before it was gone forever. Sometimes our role as storytellers is to shine a light on the past; sometimes it’s to offer a vision of the future; and sometimes it’s merely to capture a moment before, like a dandelion head, it blossoms and dissipates. State of Grace falls into the third category; it’s an elegy — one that’s had surprising resonance throughout the ever-changing cultural landscapes of Hollywood, New York, and America. Good for Joanou.
Jules, I am absolutely delighted you stopped by the blog to share your thoughts on State of Grace; I hope this won’t be your last visit. Most of my posts are about either filmmaking/storytelling or my New York upbringing — my most recent essay, “The Lost Boys of the Bronx: A Tribute to Joel Schumacher,” is about both — and as a fellow New Yorker/filmmaker, I think you’d bring a lot to the conversations around here! It’s admittedly not as good as sharing war stories over a Guinness at the Landmark, but you’re nonetheless welcome to pull up a chair and join me here any time!
Sean
This was a really good post. I really enjoyed reading through your perspective about the movie. After the first paragraph (very well written) I saved your post and finally revisted your site to finish reading it.
I just watched State of Grace for the very first time this past Sunday. Recommended by my friend a movie buff, after I mentioned to him I finished The Irishman and need more mob films to watch. He and I were born in 1997 and 1993, respectively, but we enjoy digging for good films regardless of its year. I still think about the movie, state of grace and it is becoming to be one of my favorite films. It has its share of criticism, but I think overall it is a great film/great story telling.
Just wanted to drop a comment and show my appreciation for the film and your post. Cheers
Hey, thanks so much, E Mann — welcome to our small-but-growing club of State of Grace fans!
It’s true: The Irish Mob isn’t nearly as well-represented cinematically as its Italian counterparts. It’s sort of perplexing that the Westies didn’t get the kind of prodigious screen treatment afforded to the Mafia, which makes State of Grace all the more canonically essential. As I’ve noted in responses to prior comments, Scorsese himself later made a terrific movie about the origins of the Irish Mob called Gangs of New York, which can be viewed as a “spiritual prequel” to Grace. In fact, the closing shot of Gangs is nearly identical to the opening shot of Grace: Both look southwest toward the old Trade Center from the other side of the East River — Gangs from Brooklyn and Grace from Queens.
So, if you watch the movies in chronological order, the last image of Gangs segues near-perfectly into the first (post-credits) image of Grace — a visual bridge (symbolized by the literal bridges that appear in both shots) between the two movies. Alternatively, if you watch the movies in the order they were produced, the adventitious saga closes on a shot virtually identical to the one that opened it five hours earlier. The point is, there is a satisfying kinship between the films, however unintended, that makes them a great double-bill experience! (And, of course, both movies feature John C. Reilly in a key supporting role. It’s fun to imagine that Stevie McGuire is a descendant of Happy Jack Mulraney.)
The summer Joanou shot State of Grace on location in New York City, I was a thirteen-year-old boy living in the Bronx. For me — in addition to its many other pleasures — Grace is like a photo album of what the city looked and felt like at that very special time in my life (something I wrote about here). To echo Jules’ comment directly above, New York doesn’t look like that or fully feel like that anymore, and I’m grateful to Joanou for preserving that ephemeral moment on film. So many of the movies set in New York during that era presented a gloriously romantic vision of the city — The Secret of My Success (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989) — but Grace, along with Do the Right Thing (1989), wasn’t afraid to shoot New York in all of its “imperfect,” blue-collar beauty. So, if someone like yourself, nearly two decades my junior, were to ask me what New York was like at that time, I’d refer them to State of Grace.
So grateful, E Mann, for your comment and your shared interest in this “lost” classic. Please come back again…
Sean
Hi Sean,
I had a similar experience as you with this film,except I saw it later in the decade when I recorded it off the tv onto vhs.Still love watching the film on bluray regularly to this day.I personally prefer it over Goodfellas.
You should definitely reach out to Phil.I did at the beginning of last year.Never thought he would get back to me but he did,and was very happy to have a quick email exchange.
Thanks
Marty
P.s I have one of the beautiful denim crew jackets.Purchased it off ebay a few years back.
Marty!
Thanks so much for taking the time to read the post and leave a comment! I gotta tell you, I am perennially surprised and delighted by how many SoG fans discover this modest tribute to that cult crime classic and take the initiative to express their appreciation for it here. I watched it once again over St. Paddy’s three months ago, and my admiration for it only deepens with each successive viewing.
GoodFellas also holds a very special place in my heart, for reasons I wrote about this past winter. The difference between the films, I think, is this: GoodFellas is about a lifestyle that was unsustainable, whereas SoG is about a way of life that was coming to an end. Terry, Jackie, and Frankie (who were never at any point in their criminal careers nearly as successful as Henry Hill, Jimmy Conway, and Tommy DeVito) saw their world — that of the Kitchen as a bastion for working-class Irish — changing with the times, and sensed there wouldn’t be a place for them in it moving forward. (Frankie’s ultimate plan, you’ll recall, was to relocate to Arizona — not San Diego or Cabo San Lucas or Turks and Caicos — which really underscores his lack of ambition and/or imagination.)
State of Grace is a lament for a dying way of life, and everything about the production — from the seedy dive bars to the mumbled dialogue to Morricone’s score — reflects and emphasizes that cultural moribundity, whereas GoodFellas‘ cinematic kinetics are intended to simulate the different phases of mob life, from the initial excitement and romance to the decadence and violence to the eventual coke-fueled paranoia and betrayal. It’s Henry’s lack of loyalty in the end that spares him from life in prison or death, whereas Terry is so loyal to his one true love (Jackie), he’s willing in the end to die in order to avenge his best friend’s murder. (Whether or not Terry does in fact perish on the blood-soaked floor of that pub on 50th and Ninth is left wonderfully ambiguous, and I applaud Joanou for leaving Terry’s fate uncertain.)
I was raised in the Bronx and have lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years, but was quite recently presented with my own unexpected opportunity — just like Terry Noonan — to go back home for good. And as I was wrestling with the decision, it was Terry’s voice I kept hearing in my head: “I thought some things… that I could come back.” Could I go back, after a two-decade absence, to New York? Would it be the same? I certainly had my ideas about what being back home would be like… but as Terry learned the hard way, “you got your ideas and you got reality.” Could I go home again… or was I just allowing myself to subscribe to a fantasy, like the way we believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace? That’s what’s been on my mind as I’ve been considering my next big life move!
All of that is to say State of Grace remains, over three decades since I first experienced it, a story that resonates with me very profoundly. Thank you, Marty, for taking the time to share what it means to you; I’ll raise a Guinness to your very good health later this evening. And I’m envious of that denim jacket!
Sean
I loved your posts. It always amazes me when movies are deemed forgotten when they are quite memorable to me. I’m one of those people who sees almost every movie when it first comes out. I have followed the careers of most of the cast. My mother was an extra in State of Grace and I bought the video when it first was available. Here are some “forgotten” movies you may enjoy or find interesting: Silent Running with Bruce Dern, The Fall with Lee Pace, Fur with Robert Downey, Jr., Betrayed with
Debra Winger and Tom Berringer, The Doctor with William Hurt, Moon Over Parador (I just adore Raul Julia), Welcome To the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean (with the odd Karen Black and newbie Kathy Bates…oh, and Cher)…to name just a few. Check them out.. maybe you’ve seen them!
Oh, wow — thank you, Leslie, for reading the post and leaving such a gracious comment! I really appreciate your time and engagement.
Just curious: Do you happen to know which scene from State of Grace your mother appears in?
While the 1970s and ’80s certainly ushered the so-called “blockbuster era” of four-quadrant entertainment (Jaws, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Tim Burton’s Batman, Terminator 2: Judgment Day), the cinematic ecosystem was still healthy and diverse enough to support character-driven and/or “street-level” stories like State of Grace and the others you cite above. (I recall being quite fond of The Doctor back in the day, and should make time to revisit it — and all of those movies you recommend.)
Indeed. Unfortunately, now that the studios are owned by corporate conglomerates, Hollywood has gone all-in on branded-IP entertainment that caters exclusively to the juvenile tastes and nostalgic yearnings of nerd culture, a topic I’ve covered extensively in posts including “In the Multiverse of Madness” and “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” There’s little oxygen left in the room for more thematically complex or emotionally mature movies. Those kinds of stories, if they’re told at all anymore, are now produced as ten-episode “prestige” TV series — and very often (though not always) the storytelling is needlessly bloated. Movies like State of Grace — a closed-ended, narratively focused, two-hour feature with a singular aesthetic point of view — are relics of a bygone era, much like the Flannery gang itself at the end of the 1980s. And yet…
While there is always going to be a hardcore fan base for corporate IPs — we have an entire generation of viewers, after all, trained from childhood to be lifelong subscribers to superheroes and Star Wars — I think there’s some hope to be taken from the fact The Flash bombed this past weekend, coming on the heels of both Fast X and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts underperforming. Meanwhile, box-office predictions for the new Indiana Jones grow increasingly pessimistic.
It may just be that general audiences have had enough of these never-ending IPs. I suspect — I hope — there’s a renewed hunger for stories with strong artistic points of view, relatable themes, and cathartic resolution. But I also think that kind of old-school storytelling needs to be consciously reintroduced to a generation raised exclusively on “storyless” fiction (meaning corporate mega-franchises), which is why it falls to the elder generations to share their appreciation for movies like State of Grace with their kids. Because the great thing about a “forgotten” movie is that it’s like an archeological treasure just waiting to be rediscovered.
So grateful to you, Leslie, for sharing your enthusiasm for this cult classic! Please come again…
Sean!
Just a quick note that a cinephile friend o’ mine will be watching SoG tonight for the first time off of my reco. I already know he’s going to love it. He’s one of us. Our numbers are growing.
Cooper
P.S. Hope you are well and grand!
Cooper! So nice to hear from you, pal! I’m great — thanks for asking! Since we last spoke, I left Hollywood and, much like our old pal Terry Noonan, came home for good to NYC. In addition to that, the novel I was only just outlining during our last correspondence, The Dogcatcher, is now slated to be published by DarkWinter Press this autumn. I’ll be posting a behind-the-scenes essay on the development of the novel, titled “The Dogcatcher Unleashed,” later this month. Hope you’ll check it out!
How did your friend enjoy SoG?! Whenever I recommend the film to contemporaries who’ve never seen it, their initial reaction is inevitably: “How have I never heard of this movie before?!” Once that’s out of the way, my first question is always this: Did you see the twist coming — that Terry was an undercover cop? I ask because I did not see that coming when I first watched the movie at age fourteen (despite having been ushered into adolescence by the cops-undercover procedural 21 Jump Street), but have often wondered if I would’ve picked up on that as a virgin viewer in adulthood…
And I’m always shocked to hear that, across the board, no one ever sees the “twist” coming. They all say some variation on this: “You know, I was just so caught up in those characters and their world, I wasn’t even thinking that far ahead. I wasn’t trying to ‘outsmart’ the movie, just enjoy it.” I’m curious: Did your friend have a similar reaction?
Franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones have systematically trained audiences to try to “outsmart the narrative,” an engagement strategy I studied in “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 1.” Any discussion about those movies must be preceded with a caveat: No spoilers.
And yet the one “spoiler” in State of Grace wouldn’t diminish the power of that movie at all even if you did know Terry’s secret from the outset. Christ, Joanou practically telegraphs it during that opening scene in Queensbridge Park! Still, no one seems to see it coming.
It reminds me, happily, that SoG is from an era when movies were far less concerned with plot than they were with character. When I think about some of the movies that had the strongest formative influence on me — This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Moonstruck (1987), Stand by Me (1986), The Lost Boys (1987), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Dances with Wolves (1990), Scent of a Woman (1992), Wolf (1994), Smoke (1995), Nobody’s Fool (1994), Jerry Maguire (1996), and of course SoG — all of them are memorable not for what happened but who it happened to. There are no “spoilers” in any of those movies, because the plots, such as they are, are nigh irrelevant.
(Good lord, Scent of a Woman literally pauses its main conflict for an hour and a half while Chris O’Donnell and Al Pacino go on a weekend-long adventure in New York that has virtually nothing to do with the movie’s central dramatic question! Most of the movie is entirely unconcerned with the matter of whether O’Donnell will be expelled from school! And yet Scent is one of the most dramatically satisfying, emotionally affecting feature films I’ve ever seen. You’re just so invested in those characters. And when Pacino, who’s spent the entire movie practically daring O’Donnell to sell out his classmates, comes to the rescue at the movie’s climax, show me an adult male who isn’t sobbing inconsolably during that fiery monologue. Same when Wind In His Hair declares his love for Dunbar in the final moments of Dances with Wolves. I watch movies like that and I wonder how an entire generation of middle-aged men said, “Fuck that shit, just give me more superheroes goddammit.”)
But even so many of the films from that era that did put a higher premium on plot — Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Home Alone, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and other high-concept blockbusters that spawned franchises — what’s the “spoiler” in any of those movies? What’s the “spoiler” in Blade Runner? The Exorcist? The Godfather? The Karate Kid? Escape from New York? Even Michael Mann’s magnum opus Heat, which is as brilliantly plotted as any movie I’ve ever seen, leaves you thinking and talking about those characters, not so much the events that put them into conflict with one another. (If you haven’t read it, Cooper, check out my review of Mann’s Heat 2.)
In the five years since I first published this essay, I’ve only come to see with greater clarity how the kinds of closed-ended, character-driven, street-level films I admired as a young adult — State of Grace foremost among them — simply no longer exist. They’ve been stamped out of existence by the mega-franchise, the branded IP. Such is what happened when Hollywood was subsumed by nerd culture.
But I also believe that Hollywood as we’ve known it for, say, the past fifteen years is not going to survive the current labor strikes. I think we’re on the precipice of a cultural/cinematic revolution, much the way New Hollywood emerged from the ashes of the studio system’s Golden Age. Artists have been utterly devalued in the Age of the IP, and I don’t really see the studios seeing the error of their ways, à la Ebenezer Scrooge.
Furthermore, I suspect the box-office failure/underperformance of so many sure-thing IPs this year — Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Fast X, The Little Mermaid, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash (which, let’s face it, was really Batman Returns… Again), Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Fiber Supplements, Mission: Impossible VII — Part One, Blue Beetle — suggests that IP-driven “storytelling” may have reached its saturation point. Audiences are starved for the kinds of character-driven, avant-garde stories that Hollywood abandoned when it transformed into the superhero–industrial complex, and I suspect filmmakers and artists, who are never going to get a fair deal from the studios, will start exploring other avenues of production and distribution. The current model of corporately mediated, IP-driven excess is collapsing, and my hope is that an alternative studio system emerges in its place, just like what happened in the 1970s.
State of Grace is, after all, a story about a way of life, a mode of existence, that was coming to an end, and the tragic inability of some — in this case, the Westies — to accept or adapt to those changes. It might be a movie the execs in Hollywood should make the time to watch; there’s a lesson in it for them.
Cooper: You’re the man! Thanks for being such a steadfast support of that great movie and this humble tribute to it. Please welcome your friend into our club!
Sean
Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was not distributed in theatres, on TV, or streaming
I expect more movie-makers to take that route. I’m surprised more haven’t already
Completely agree, Dell: I don’t know why Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog didn’t kickstart a sweeping movement of indie-produced and -distributed web series/features… but I expect we’re going to see more artists/filmmakers moving in that direction on the other side of the current WGA strike. (Earlier this week, Willem Dafoe predicted an industrial collapse if there isn’t some kind of radical paradigm shift in Hollywood — and there won’t be.) Per Wikipedia:
Right. Dr. Horrible was creative, experimental, entertaining, and met with overwhelmingly positive reception! (That said, I haven’t seen it in fifteen years, so I can’t offer an assessment of its moral imagination.) If I’m Joss Whedon at the height of my power and influence (before things went to shit for him), I’d much rather work outside the system than be an indentured servant to it! That’s what George Lucas did so enviably in the 1970s: He bought his independence from Hollywood. Also per Wikipedia:
Again: Why anyone would trade that to be a hired gun for the superhero–industrial complex I do not know. I mean, I get The Avengers, because that had never been done before — a team-up crossover that reconciled the different tones and narratives of four otherwise unrelated movies. There was no guarantee something that ambitious would even work, so I get why he wanted to take that challenge on. But why he accepted the job to try to clean up Zack Snyder’s mess on Justice League…? What a thankless, miserable task that must’ve been.
But then, Whedon is the father of mainstream geek culture, so perhaps the money and prestige of working within the system — of being the go-to guy whenever a studio had an ambitious superhero project (because the “shared cinematic universe,” as a filmmaking model, was only just coming into being in the wake of the last strike) — was too hard to fully extricate himself from. And hell, it’s also possible Whedon had already had his one good idea — that he was never again going to conceive a project that would match the commercial success and cultural influence of Buffy. I don’t care to psychoanalyze Joss Whedon, but it could very well be that Dr. Horrible served only as a creative pit stop in his career rather than a new direction for it because he was ultimately too institutionalized to seize the opportunity to self-finance, -produce, and -distribute his work.
The question remains, then, why other artists didn’t follow suit? Maybe they were too institutionalized, too, the same way Conan O’Brien didn’t want to be a late-night host… he wanted to be the Tonight Show host. He wanted to put his mark on an institution, even if it meant less creative freedom.
But things have changed radically between the two WGA strikes. You no longer have to be a Joss Whedon in order to self-produce and -distribute. Anyone can do it — cheaply and easily. And with a studio system that is almost certainly on the verge of collapse, my hope is that artists reject the old paradigm and start a new alternative filmmaking industry that bypasses the rentiers (meaning, in this case, the studios) so artists might create new and challenging works that can be offered directly to the audience via online video-sharing platforms.
I genuinely believe we’re on the precipice of a cinematic renaissance — and by “cinema” I simply mean filmed entertainment, not necessarily the two-hour feature film, which I suspect will be more or less phased-out in the coming decade — we just need for the current system to irretrievably implode in order to catalyze that metamorphosis. But implode I very much think it will. The winds of change are blowing through the entertainment industry…
I believe that this film is one of the best ever made considering how entertaining it is from a story standpoint. Not only that, but the fact that it is literally a time capsule of New York of the era and if you had been to Manhattan in the 90’s or 80’s it would appear exactly as it was.
I only watched the movie during the pandemic after researching films that I had never seen but were of quality. To me, the ending could’ve been better as the whole shootout made it sort of boring and predictable.
Everything else leading up to the ending was stupendous though. Especially the use of U2’s Trip through your Wires and Sweet Child in the bar scenes. You literally feel drunk watching the scene and you feel as if you were in the bar with those characters. Gary Oldman as evil as he was in the film was so likeable. That is a huge feat.
Furthermore, the inclusion of the Italian mob in the movie was the cornerstone of the conflict and was played to perfection. What if Oldman had joined the fellas in the bar and made amends? This is where the film turned to a situation where reality meets fiction.
To me, the film is gem because of how unknown it is and mostly because of Oldman. Absolutely fantastic and even the secondary characters as well.
Carlos,
I am so pleased you discovered and enjoyed State of Grace — and even more delighted that you found my humble tribute to it and contributed such a thoughtful comment!
For my money, State of Grace sits right alongside The Godfather and Goodfellas in the mob-movie pantheon. It’s that good. It’s important to recognize, though, that Godfather, Goodfellas, and Grace don’t lend themselves to apples-to-apples comparisons. SoG isn’t going for the sepia-toned somberness of The Godfather or the coke-fueled kineticism of Goodfellas; it’s got its own aesthetic: gritty, elegiac, gutter-level. These particular mobsters are street vermin; Frankie wishes he were Michael Corleone!
And yes: It is absolutely a time capsule of a New York that no longer exists. (Even the tenement building that housed the Irish Social Club — the dive bar where the Flannerys hung out — at 402 West 50th Street was recently torn down.) Joanou shot that film right at the moment before the gentrification — and Disneyfication — of New York started to happen in the early 1990s.
As for the climactic shootout: There really was no other way that story could end, in my view. Terry is a passive hero for most of the movie. There’s a scene in Matty’s Bar (filmed at Puffy’s Tavern) where Terry’s got the bartender pinned down on the bar, with a gun to his temple. The bartender says, “Don’t do this!” To which Terry replies: “Noboby’s doin’ nothin’ to anybody! It’s all just happening, see.” Terry is a protagonist who — quite rightfully — does not feel in control of his own narrative.
So, when Terry makes the decision to march into the Irish Social Club and gun down the entire gang — revenge for Jackie — it’s in effect the first proactive action he’s taken in the entire story. That’s what makes it so powerful. Terry decided to put it all on the line for Jackie — a loser thug who was going to die young, anyway! Because Terry was ultimately a loser, too. I’ve explored the archetype of the “hero cop” in essays like “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” and my book review of Heat 2 (and most recently in “No, Virginia, Die Hard Is Not a Christmas Movie”), but there’s nothing admirable or heroic about Terry. He was just as pathetic as Jackie and Frankie and Stevie, in his own way. He goes into that bar with the intention of making sure no one ever comes out — himself included.
When I was a teenager, I absolutely believed Terry survived that gunfight and at some point after his convalescence reconciled with Kate. I needed to believe there was a happy ending after the fadeout. When I rewatched the film in 2018, for the first time in over two decades, as the end credits started to roll, I went, “Yeah, he’s fucking dead.” As an adult, it was absolutely undeniable to me that his wounds were fatal, even though Joanou smartly keeps Terry’s fate ambiguous.
Interestingly, it turns out there was a postlude scripted and shot in which Terry does in fact survive and makes amends with Kate. I don’t know if that footage still exists, but the fourth draft of Dennis McIntyre’s script (dated April 10, 1989) contains those three pages of deleted scenes. But I would suggest that if a 14-year-old kid can predict your ending, then maybe it’s not the best ending! Joanou was right to fade to black as Terry slumps to the floor. These characters went out of the world in precisely the same manner in which they’d lived: pathetically.
(Some critics, like Janet Maslin in her review for the New York Times, felt setting the final shootout against the backdrop of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade was melodramatic. To which I say: When the hell else would it be set? LOL! Nothing wrong with occasional, artfully deployed melodrama!)
And I second your comment about how real the bar scenes play. Often in movies and television shows (like, for instance, Cheers), bars are underpopulated, and the filmmakers don’t want the dialogue to compete with diegetic music. State of Grace contains some of the most realistic bar scenes ever put to film. You can practically feel yourself curing in the whiskey vapor and cigarette smoke!
As far as I know, the subplot about the Irish mob trying to form an alliance with the Italian mafia was inspired by real-life events involving the Westies. But plot is very much secondary to characterization in State of Grace, as I noted in my reply to Cooper. Those are very rich characters embodied by an all-star cast. SoG truly is one of cinema’s lost gems! I’m so glad it’s picked up another devoted fan, Carlos! Please come back again! In the meantime, happy holidays!
Sean