That is, unless they mean the F words these cops, grifters and slinky, treacherous broads are now allowed to snarl into the smoke of their unfiltered cigarettes. But surely the characters in such film-noir classics as “Gun Crazy” would have told each other to “take a flying f- at a rolling doughnut” (as Gary Busey tells James Woods in one “Fallen Angels” episode) if some so-and-so censor hadn’t nixed it. The only other whiff of the ’90s is the apparent decadence of the whole enterprise. It’s a knowing resurrection of long-dead conventions, enlisting such directors as Phil Joanou (“U2 Rattle and Hum”), Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies and videotape”) and neophytes Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, and such actors as Gary Oldman, Laura Dern, Bruno Kirby, Isabella Rossellini, Joe Mantegna and Meg Tilly.
But the meticulous workmanship of all concerned including costumers and set decorators–makes the triviality transcendent. Executive producer Sydney Pollack says he wanted to create “perfect little miniatures.” “Fallen Angels” evokes the dramas that made TV worth watching back when Pollack directed such shows as “Naked City” in the early ’60s: tales with plot twists and memorable characters (complete with tragic flaws and ironic comeuppances), all in 30 minutes, minus ads.
In “Fallen Angels” you can see some plot twists coming a mile away. When a crooked cop (Mantegna) with a teenage daughter shakes down johns who consort with underage prostitutes, whose body do you think ends up on that slab in the morgue? When everyone tells an anguished cop (Oldman) that his trampy estranged wife discovered her one true love just before she was murdered, who do you think the one true love turns out to be? And-double twisteroo!–one guess who killed her.
What holds our attention is the little touches that adorn these silly yarns. The opening shots are particularly ingenious-like the two boiling eggs Soderbergh’s camera keeps watching and watching until he’s good and ready to shows us who’s going to eat them. The industrious artifice of “Fallen Angels” suggests this isn’t gritty realism but opera, with improbably intense characters acting out their improbably tangled destinies: not sung but spoken in its own stylized language (“Dat’s tap city now”) and set in a low-rent province of never-never land. No men were ever so terminally cynical, no women so purely predatory. And no show this summer will do a better job of whisking you away from the increasingly unacceptable ’90s. These half hours are all too short.
