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Where the Money Is Review by
David Luty
You'd
be hard pressed to find an actor who's aged more gracefully than
Paul Newman, with that aura of utter comfort and confidence along with
the magical, mischievous glint
still bouncing off his eyes. He's so charismatic
that his presence alone is almost enough, which is about all he's able to
bring to Where the Money Is, a movie as banal as its name. He
plays aging convict Henry Manning,
ex-bank-robber extraordinaire who's found a way to
escape prison by pretending he belongs in another. Having mastered the
act of faking a stroke, and with
the prison medical ward overstuffed, he's been
moved to a nursing home out in the sticks, where he meets Carol Ann McKay
(Linda Fiorentino). She's his nurse, and she becomes driven by the
conviction that the vegetable sitting in front of her is no veggie at
all. Before you know it, she's
trying to convince Manning that she and her husband
(and ex-prom king) Wayne (Dermot Mulroney) should help him pull off one
last bank heist. Newman,
now in his mid-seventies, was most likely driven by the chance
to play an outlaw again, but he should have thought to ask where the
character was. Because the movie is really about Carol and her desperate need
to do something, anything, to spice up her now humdrum life, Manning is
not so much a human being as he is an attitude, an emblem of Carol's lost
youth and a nostalgic endorsement of wayward behavior. The problem with
this notion is that Newman is far
too vibrant a presence to be playing a symbol,
never mind one of lost youth. When his presence isn't being squandered
during his catatonic wheelchair scenes, the movie threatens to come alive
whenever he enters the frame (as all movies do), but it never rises
above, because Manning as a
character has nowhere to go. So the movie fails Newman, but it ultimately fails its own story as well. Carol's search for fulfillment is an oft-told tale, and Where the Money Is has nothing new to say on the matter. Fiorentino also happens to be the wrong person to flesh it out, since she isn't able to get through her hardened personality to properly transmit the vulnerable yearning the character requires. Director Marek Kanievska (whose last film was Less Than Zero in 1987) slaps lyrically appropriate but musically jarring tunes by The Cars in a lost attempt at establishing a consistent tone, and the script passes up not one, but two possible endings that could have added some substance to the proceedings, instead choosing to go the more mundane (in movie terms) route. Where the Money Is turns out to be a weightless, forgettable trifle, and considering they had Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy territory, that should be a punishable offense. Contents | Features | Reviews
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