The Usual Suspects (1995): better left in the ’90s?

The singer/songwriter Ethel Cain recently kicked off a minor cultural debate by saying she was sick of irony. “There is such a loss of sincerity, and everything has to be a joke all the time”, she complained, making me feel deeply relieved for her: at least the 26-year-old Cain wasn’t around for much of the ’90s. The ’90s were a decade drowned in irony, by the all-encompassing snark of The Simpsons and Seinfeld, by the Young British Artists’ celebrations of cultural detritus, by mega-budget remakes of cruddy old sitcoms and B-movies. Previously, you could at least rely on independent cinema for a different viewpoint, but the 1990s also saw the rise of “major-minor” studios like Disney-era Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics and Fox Searchlight which smoothed the distance between the indie circuit and Hollywood. As a result, the indies offered not a repudiation but a refinement of the prevailing irony culture. The main difference between mainstream irony and indie irony was abrasiveness. The decade’s signature indie crossover, Pulp Fiction, is an amoral parade of material that would be beyond the pale in previous or coming decades (heroin use, gang-rape, casual murder, white guys awkwardly saying the N-word) all presented with a smirking affectless that dares you to be the kind of loser who objects to any of it.

Well, so be it. You can easily make the case that, contra Ethel Cain, we live in an age where everything seems to mean far too much, weighted down with unspoken meanings, anxieties and sensitivities, and from this viewpoint a dose of ugly ’90s nihilism can be quite refreshing. I recently rewatched Pulp Fiction and found it as entertaining as ever – more so, really, now we’ve had time to forget about its imitators. For a while, the main achievement of Pulp Fiction was inspiring every unemployed screenwriter in Los Angeles to add pop-culture riffs and racial slurs to their workmanlike crime scripts. It was as unbearable as it sounds, and the consensus is that only a few movies rose above the herd. Foremost among them was Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, now reissued in a limited-edition 4K Ultra HD edition by Arrow Video.

The Usual Suspects has all the twists, turns and unreliable narrators of a post-Tarantino crime thriller, but it’s generally agreed to be elevated by three factors. Firstly, the cast is superb, eschewing the kitschy faded stars of most ’90s crime films in favour of heavyweights (Gabriel Byrne and Pete Postlethwaite), future stars (Kevin Spacey, Benicio del Toro and Giancarlo Esposito) and people who are just unaccountably good in this and nothing else (Stephen Baldwin). Secondly, unlike the motormouth quipping Tarantino and his imitators favoured, the tone is sincere and grounded, with its moments of comedy being believable as a criminal’s dark sense of humour rather than a screenwriter’s showing off. Finally, it has That Twist.

In the phenomenally unlikely event that someone reading this review doesn’t know what the twist is, I’ll try to avoid describing it here, other than to say that on repeat viewings it absolutely doesn’t make sense (what happens if that fax comes through a minute earlier?). Singer has compared Christopher McQuarrie’s script to Rashomon and Citizen Kane, which makes sense on a structural level but which does show up how hollow The Usual Suspects is by comparison; Kurosawa and Welles were asking big questions about the nature of truth and the effect of power on a man’s soul respectively, whereas most of The Usual Suspects‘s action is a life-support system for That Twist.

Some of the film’s positive qualities are down to this. Del Toro realised that his character was a plot device early on, and decided to make him as outrageous as possible to compensate. That works – other misdirects don’t. Pete Postlethwaite as the nonspecifically brown lawyer Kobayashi is impossible to take seriously, and the effort Singer and McQuarrie expend to stop you asking questions about the plausibility of this story also stops it being fun. Tarantino’s films – as well as better ’90s neo-noirs like Fargo and Bound – want you to laugh at the audacity of their big twists and narrative contrivances; since doing this to The Usual Suspects would result in the whole story unravelling ahead of schedule, it adopts a tone of unwarranted dourness which is much less entertaining.

Perhaps it was cut more slack for being a calling card; now Singer’s proved he can film a tight, disciplined screenplay, he’ll get his hands on some real money and blossom into the Gen X Scorsese he’s clearly destined to be. Except he didn’t: he became the first promising indie director to be sucked into the superhero machine, and seems to have found it harder than most to make his way out. Thinking about Singer’s career in the light of later allegations made against him, it’s easy to see why he never went back to indie crime dramas for a quick credibility top-up. If your ‘process’ involves getting banjoed on prescription drugs and repeatedly not showing up to set (and we should note that these allegations have been denied by Singer’s publicist), then a $200 million production will at least absorb the cost of all those delays more easily than a $6 million one.

I’d hate to give the impression that my disappointment at revisiting The Usual Suspects was the product of its director and star’s tarnished reputations, though. Mostly, I was disappointed to find it was a silly film dressing up as a serious one, one that’s too busy concealing its absurdity to be as endearing as even the worst of its peers. Dazzling as it was in its day, it’s the sort of film that only a decade as irony-glutted as the 1990s could mistake for a lasting masterpiece.

Or maybe not! It’s foolish to deny that The Usual Suspects has a lasting fan base who can rewatch it with none of my qualms, and they’re well served by this restoration. Singer and McQuarrie appear on one commentary, editor John Ottman on another, and there are interviews with Ottman and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. There’s also behind-the-scenes documentaries both new and archival, a look at the film’s Cannes premiere, a booklet with new writing by Barry Forshaw, and quite a lot more. Sigel supervised the gorgeous-looking restoration.

Graham’s Archive – The Usual Suspects