Dick Tracy

For over a decade (actually, ever since “Star Wars”) American movies have been getting closer and closer to comic books. I guess it wouldn’t be a surprise that Warren Beatty’s attempt to win the summer-movie sweepstakes finally takes us all the way. More than “Batman” or “Superman,” “Popeye” or “Flash Gordan,” “Dick Tracy,” released in 1990, has been stylized into a live-action comic strip – Owen Gleiberman describes it as “a lavishly eye-popping Day-Glo gangster movie.” The film’s light pleasures include insanely color-coordinates sets. Stylizes close-ups taken straight from the Sunday papers, villains who look like mutants (Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles and William Forsythe as Flattop keep putting their spongy, alien mugs into the camera), and a hero whose most distinguishing feature is his yellow trench coat that looks like a banana peel.

Beatty and 80s pop singer Madonna are at the top of the actors list, but they aren’t the stars of “Dick Tracy.” The color format is. From first shot to last, the movie is a tender rainbow of the primary colors red and blue, bright greens and pinks and oranges, and (obviously) raincoat yellow.  Gleiberman says, “The whole film looks good enough to eat.” Plenty of the action is wrapped in velvet shadow, but that just makes you notice more of how Tracy’s coat matches the yellow trashcan in an alleyway, or how the impossibly tall big-city buildings seem to shine from within, or how the streetlights and fairy-tale moonbeams bounce affectionately off rain-swept streets. It’s like if the 30s underworld melodrama has been colorized by Andy Warhol.

Beatty and his team of colleagues have sharp the brilliantly cheap urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip. Gleiberman points out, “Indeed, there's something almost fetishistic about Dick Tracy's gorgeous visual design. The movie is like one of those aestheticized yuppie diners that serve white wine with meat loaf.” As an exercise in American pop surrealism, the picture succeeds brilliantly, yet it also feels weak and distanced.  “Dick Tracy” is less a movie than an incredible slide show. What’s missing is the passing vulgarity that gave the original Tracy comic strip its rude, no-nonsense thrust.

As the story develops, the troublemaker gangster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) has deep-sixed his enemy, Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino), and calls himself king of the local mob. Who can save the city? Tracy can! But can the lone-wolf detective save himself from the bad-girl maneuverings of Breathless Mahoney, played by Madonna when she was still hot, a beautiful torch singer desperate to be searched by our hero?

Gleiberman says, “The plot would have been more involving had someone put a kinkier spin on the '30s melodramatics. The screenplay team of Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. (Top Gun, Legal Eagles) has come up with another of their perfunctory, freeze-dried jobs. These guys are outline writers posing as scriptwriters. They know how to pile up scenes (the movie is all transitions), but they haven't figured out a way of making anything matter.”

Beatty looks like as if he’s still hiding from Barbara Walters. Here he is, controlling the most high-profile movie of the year, and he plays Tracy as a charming, polite nobody, a Clark Kent with no Superman inside him. The idea behind the casting seems to have been Warren Beatty = Superstud = Storybook All-American Hero. But if Dick Tracy is anything, he’s an extreme customer with roaring resolution. Beatty’s plead has always been his gentleness, his half-drowned helplessness. He’s such a gentle actor that he just disappears inside the trench coat.

Madonna does better. Gleiberman notes, “Her rendition of Stephen Sondheim's acridly sexy ''I Always Get My Man'' gives the picture some atmosphere, and when Breathless has to coo sweet nothings at Tracy, Madonna's eyes speak sleazy volumes.” However, she’s not on screen that much.

Other than Tracy, the main character is Big Boy Caprice. Gleiberman describes, “As Pacino plays him, hunched and beady-eyed, he's a ghoulish vulgarian, like someone running a deli counter inside a morgue. Pacino's abrasive scenery chewing certainly gives the picture a jolt of energy.” Still, there’s not that much charm to this ranting performance.

Since Big Boy is strictly business (he takes no vicious pleasure in evil), Pacino can’t give the picture a smirking, wicked center, the way Robert De Niro did in “The Untouchables” or Jack Nicholson did in his amazing one-man parody of evil in “Batman.” Gleiberman says, “When comic-strip movies become too literal-minded, they deny their characters any human shadings.” After all, actors aren’t the same as drawings on a newspaper page. All the visual stylization in the world can’t make them so. “Dick Tracy” is an honest effort but finally a bit of silliness. It could have been used a little less color and a little more flesh and blood.

Hope everyone liked today’s review. Stay tuned on Wednesday for the next installment on “Al Pacino Month.”