Throw-away people, recycled into new lives...

July 23, 2017

As the weekend falls upon it, let’s talk about a movie that, on the surface, should have never become as critically-acclaimed as it was. It was about prisons, theatre, dreams, not the trifecta for success, as you can imagine. The movie is called Weeds.

Nick Nolte plays Lee Umsetter, a small-time crook who has pretty much been a whole lot of nothing his whole life. He has managed to get himself the Big Ride – a life sentence. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, we see Lee try to kill himself twice. He can’t even do that right, though. After being saved from hanging himself, he wanders into the prison library and asks for a book, any book. The librarian slams a copy of War and Peace on the counter, and Lee takes it back to his cell.

We see Lee working his way through the classics, trudging through Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Shakespeare, down through the works of Jacqueline Susann, a rather nifty little riff on how good and bad self-education can be. But Lee is on fire after finding the world through literature. A visiting theatre troupe puts on a production of Waiting For Godot, and Lee’s mind explodes, creatively, of course. Suddenly, the lifetime loser has found a calling. He writes a play about being a prisoner, forms a company of his fellow inmates, and stages the play for the prison population.

Needless to say, the play goes over well for its audience. After all, it’s about prison life and the innermost faults of prison life. But when a San Francisco drama critic, played by Rita Taggert, sees it, she is impressed enough by the play and its author to begin a campaign for Lee’s release. Once out of prison, Lee sets out to find the members of his prison theatre group so they can take his show all the way to New York and the Great White Way.

The story itself is based on the experience of former convict Rick Cluchey, who founded the San Quentin drama group that toured with Cluchey’s play The Cage. The movie blends the craziness of a theatre company on the road with the harshly real traumas of ex-cons trying to adjust to life on the streets again. We see these guys trying their best to get back to living, but being drawn back into the very lifestyles that got them time behind bars. It’s Lee who offers a  way to something better.

I’ll be straight with you. It’s a heavy combination, but man, does it work. Yes, every now and then, it gets hung up between the slapstick and the gritty realism, but it finds its way back to its main story. One of the best moments in the movie is when an outsider, a “real actor” joins the troupe to take the place of one of the former convicts after a horrible accident. The actor, played by Joe Mantegna, has to take part in an after-show Q&A session about prison life. Of course, the actor has never even stepped foot in a police station, much less a prison, so the convicts dream up a criminal record for him to brag about. It’s such a surreal moment, each convict making up a crime for this lightweight, and each one gets more horrific than the one before, that you HAVE to know that it actually happened at some point during Cluchey’s tour.

Along with Mantegna, you get to see some real talent within the cast. Lane Smith, probably best known as the prosecutor in My Cousin Vinny, plays the stage manager, a tight-assed convict who is as much concerned about the show running smooth as he is about his ill-fitting toupee staying in place. William Forsythe, who you may remember best from being John Goodman’s brother in Raising Arizona, is a genuinely stupid convict whose very lack of intelligence makes his “stage role” perfectly believable.

I bet, by now, you are wondering how this movie links to yesterday’s. The wonderful Anne Ramsey is the key. She plays a small role as Lee’s mother. When the troupe finally does make it to Off-Broadway, they have an opening night party at Sardi’s. When Lee walks in, he finds that the drama critic, who is also now Lee’s lover, has arranged for Lee’s parents to be there. When he sees his mother, you see his world fall away, and he is suddenly just a boy again. His mother has written him off as a lost cause years ago. But, now, in this moment, they embrace, and the look on Ramsey’s hard-chiseled face is honestly a wonder to behold. She is a mother who has been given new life and new hope because her son has finally amounted to something more than a career criminal. Ramsey may have never been what we know as a ‘beauty queen,’ by any stretch of the imagination, but in this scene, she is as lovely as the Pieta.

Weeds is a movie you might have to flat-out buy in order to see. It rarely makes the rounds on the the various pay-TV channels, and it’s even more rare to catch it in an edited form on a basic cable channel. But, if you want to see Nolte when he seemed to give a damn about acting rather than being bombastic (a period of his career that has only just ended with his performance in A Walk In The Woods), throw the price of a standard movie ticket price at this movie. You won’t be disappointed at all. In fact, you might actually wipe your cheek a time or two. I hate it when it gets dusty while you watch a movie, don’t you?