Mike Figgis’ first feature was the neon drenched neo-noir Stormy Monday (1988). Lensed by the great Roger Deakins, Stormy Monday is a lush and beautiful looking debut. Already Figgis’ preoccupation with jazz and his penchant for slowly building character studies is on full display here. So is Figgis’ love/hate relationship with American culture which plays a significant part in the atmosphere as well as the plot of the film.
Stormy Monday concerns a nightclub owner named Finney (Sting) who refuses to sell The Key Club to American gangster and developer Cosmo (Tommy Lee Jones). At the center of this conflict are Brendan (Sean Bean) and Kate (Melanie Griffith) who become unwitting pawns in the power play to further develop New Castle.
Brendan and Kate are the classic noir archetypes. Brendan is the average Joe caught up in something he doesn’t fully understand with a girl who used to be the main squeeze of the film’s bad guy. Figgis undermines and subverts the roles of these archetypes by resisting violence on screen and slowing the narrative momentum of the piece. Gunfights evaporate and in their place are instead lengthy scenes of the seemingly doomed lovers just hanging out.
Cosmo and Finney are also subversions of their archetypal roots. Neither man likes guns or violence even though their roles in the piece are that of the heavy. Instead Figgis imagines Cosmo as a garish capitalist whose greatest sin is gentrification. When violence does inevitably occur it is condemned by both sides. In place of action Figgis prefers transactions; rendering gangster violence as part of a capitalist system.
The entire plot plays out with New Castle’s America Week in the background. The patriotic pomp and circumstance of the festivities color Cosmo’s shady dealings. Figgis equates Cosmo not just with American capitalism but American culture in general as something loud, vicious and campy. The one American import the “good guys” approve of is jazz.
The jazz score is essential to the film. It often starts off as diegetically motivated in one shot then becomes non-diegetic after a cut in another shot. This connects the whole world of the film to music and the act of live performance. Be it at a club or a political rally, it is jazz that unifies every character’s experience. The use of jazz also recalls the great jazz scores of the fifties by David Amram and Chico Hamilton in latter day film noirs that were critical of American culture.
Stormy Monday is a film that critiques its genre even while it embraces it. Stormy Monday is an anti-neo noir that asserts the folly of the romanticized criminal and the innocence of the average working stiff. Stormy Monday renders noir for the maximalist eighties where corporate corruption possessed more dramatic urgency than organized crime.
