Smoke

1995 dramedy

Rating: 17/20

Plot: The lives of a cigar shop owner, a kid who doesn't seem to know his own name, a one-armed filling station owner, a one-eyed woman, her two-eyed pregnant daughter, a novelist struggling with the loss of his wife, and somebody named The Creeper intersect. The story drifts, like smoke.

Well, look at that. It's an entire movie based on a Tom Waits' song. OK, so that's a stretch, but it's the kind of agility that I'm allowed because nobody reads this anyway. This is reminiscent of those other random-characters'-lives-colliding movies from the 1990s--Grand Canyon, Short Cuts--and although it's advertised as a comedy and does have its share of humorous moments, I was more touched than tickled. See, I can write stuff like that and get away with it, too. Smoke is a very human jumble of stories. You connect with the characters created by Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Harold Perrineau, Forest Whitaker, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing. You spend about thirteen seconds watching them, and it feels like you've known them for years. Keitel's performance is just about perfect. The scene where he's showing Hurt his photo album with that "You'll never get it if you don't slow down, my friend." His Christmas story with the slow zoom to his face and sink to nothing but his lips. Wow. More than a few of the scenes in this movie hit me hard. The scene with the kid and his dad, the extended shot of Ashley Judd with the smoke from her cigarette drifting up to her face after her parents leave, the scene at the picnic table that is completely without dialogue. This is a simple story about complex lives, one of those rare movies that somehow manages to seem more real than reality. My question: Is there a movie with a Screamin' Jay Hawkins song that isn't good? I bet there isn't. I can make claims like that on here because nobody reads this anyway. It's also the same reason that I can get away with calling something a dramedy.