Cutter's Way

Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges (Blown Away)) is driving home in the pouring rain at night when his car breaks down in an alley.  As Bone tries to get the engine to start another car pulls up behind him, a man gets out, dumps a body in the trash and drives off almost running over Bone.  The mysterious man didn’t see Bone at first because of the rain and it was dark out.  And Bone doesn’t notice the corpse for the same reasons and he was also busy with his car.  After that whole fiasco Bone decides to abandon his car and walk home.  The next morning the cops tell him what happened and lean on him because he’s their only witness.  The issue is he saw almost nothing.  Later Bone is hanging out at a local parade with his friend Alex Cutter (John Heard (the dad from Home Alone)) and Cutter’s wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn (The Vanishing)) when Bone thinks he spots the murderer, millionaire J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott (Death Wish, Beverly Hills Cop)).  Cutter then becomes obsessed with proving Cord did the deed and taking him down.

The feel of this movie is pretty unusual.  They leave a lot for the viewer to figure out on their own.  Like the relationship between the three leads isn’t spelled out and it took me a while to catch on that Cutter and Mo are husband and wife and Bone is their buddy who stays with them sometimes and he and Mo sorta have a thing for each other.  It seems complicated.

I don’t think we’re told how Bone and Cutter became friends in the first place either.  They’re a bit mismatched which gives their rapport some serious tension.  Bone is handsome, neatly dressed, sleeps round a ton and is more discrete while Cutter is a war vet missing an arm, a leg and an eye, is constantly scruffy, audacious and blurts out every thought in his head.  They see something in each other though and are almost like two halves that together make one full remarkable human.  In that sense they remind me of the killers from In Cold Blood.

All three like to booze a lot and that could be another uniting factor.  Misery loves company and they know they can drown out their personal demons in each other’s presence without being judged.  They can be their true selves with an unspoken understanding and acceptance.

These characters are already interesting with enough tragic drama between them but then this conspiracy theory gets thrown in and it goes off in a different dark direction.  We don’t know for sure that Cord perpetrated any crimes at all so to go down a rabbit hole where Cutter conducts his own investigation, uses blackmail and plots against this man is truly insane.  And it’s even weirder that Cutter takes on this cause when it’s his buddy who got unexpectedly swept up in a fucked up situation.  However, Bone doesn’t remain on the sidelines.  He doesn’t know what to believe so he keeps going back and forth on joining Cutter and rejecting his crazy bullshit.

The film takes you on a bizarre journey that flirts with film noir but doesn’t fully commit.  It rides the line just enough so you don’t know what’s real and what’s not.  Is Cord an evil person doing evil acts or is it coincidence or a total misunderstanding?  It’s all open to interpretation.

Everyone does a fantastic acting job here but the definite standout is John Heard as Cutter.  He’s like a pirate with his missing limbs, eyepatch, scraggly voice, mysterious ramblings and cocksure attitude.  Heard completely transforms into this character and had to internalize the rage this guy was carrying around with him for who knows how long.  He’s repulsive, bombastic, impulsive, charismatic, sad, sarcastic, venomous and damn intriguing.  It’s an incredible performance.

Newton Thornburg wrote the novel this was based on (called “Cutter and Bone”) and I wonder how faithful this adaptation is.  I might have to check that out one day.  He’s only had one other book turned into a picture, Beautiful Kate, which came out in 2009.

Ivan Passer (Silver Bears, Haunted Summer) directs and I haven’t seen anything else he’s done.  He presents the events very matter-of-fact without tipping his hand too much.  There isn’t a specific visual flair to the film but it’s all put together perfectly fine.  It’s the handling of the material that shows nice restraint and makes you feel kinda helpless.  Like these characters are already drifting aimlessly and then they dig a strange and scary hole for themselves.

This is a fascinating little picture that makes me think.  Pieces of it stick with me.  I honestly don’t know if I believe Cutter but at the same time I want him to be right.  He obviously needs that validation in his life and to a lesser extent so does Bone.  Someone really did kill a woman and someone’s gotta pay.  Cutter will make sure of that.