The Usual Suspects

While watching Se7en the other day it reminded me that Kevin Spacey had another role in 1995, and he won an Oscar for it. The film was The Usual Suspects, and while the film has its naysayers, I find it to be intriguing because it one of the best examples of a common noir trope, the unreliable narrator.

The whole story is told in flashback by Spacey as Verbal Kint a man with cerebral palsy and a not very bright con man. The film begins with several murders and a burned ship. Spacey spins a yarn for a U.S. Customs agent (Chazz Palminteri) that it all began when five men met in a police lineup in Ne York City..

They are all career criminals, though Gabriel Byrne is trying to go straight. He's reluctant to go for a job from Stephen Baldwin, but is finally persuaded to do so, joining Kevin Pollak and Benicio Del Toro (who has an impossible accent).

After that job they are approached by a mysterious attorney, Pete Postlethwaite, who says he works for an international crime boss, Keyser Soze. No one has ever seen Soze, and Spacey says he's not sure if he even exists. The most quotable line is "The best trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he doesn't exist."

So the story becomes "Who is Keyser Soze?" If you haven't seen the film don't let anyone tell you, because it's one of the great switcheroo endings of all time. The key is that after the movie is over we don't know what was true and what wasn't. We replay the movie back in our heads but it would be impossible to sort out what Spacey said was true and what wasn't. Some find this needlessly complicated, but I loved it.

The script by Kevin McQuarrie also won an Oscar, and he and director Bryan Singer pulled off something difficult--they made a great movie without sympathetic characters. It's kind of like The Asphalt Jungle that way. These guys are all slime, even Byrne, but we somehow root for them, even if only to satisfy the criminal in our own souls. Perhaps we all to pull something that we can get away with.