The 1996 Flop Blood & Wine Brought Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine Together for the First and Last Time For No Damn Reason At All
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
When I was a child, Jack Nicholson’s popularity transcended film. He was so much more than just one of the biggest and most respected movie stars in the world as well as a legendary lady’s man and raconteur, although he was certainly that as well.
Nicholson defined stardom and celebrity for me. He had a persona so big and irresistible that countless lesser actors more or less stole it wholesale, most notably Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff and William DeVane.
He was the big-grinning super-fan in sunglasses cheering on the Lakers night after night in front row seats alongside pal Lou Adler and a Texas-sized personality hack comedians felt duty-bound to imitate.
Then Nicholson stopped acting after 2010’s How Do You Know and began to recede culturally in a very big way. It would be a mistake and a gross exaggeration to say that Nicholson has been forgotten but I am regularly struck by how dramatically his cultural footprint has shrunk over the last twenty years.
Part of that is attributable to our short attention span as a culture. We live forever in the feverish present tense. If you’re not out there creating new work and/or promoting the old stuff there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll begin the inevitable process of forgetting no matter how big you happened to be in your prime.
Think of Johnny Carson. He was as big as they came when I was ten years old but I suspect that young people see him the way I did Jack Parr: as a talk show host whose career and show were incontrovertibly huge but that they would never experience firsthand or understand.
The Shining is just as big and iconic as when it came out, if not more so, but I can’t recall the last time I heard anyone reference the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces and that shit used to be everywhere.
Jack Nicholson was huge but some of his films were smaller than others. The 1996 flop Blood & Wine marked the 6th official collaboration between Nicholson and Bob Rafaelson, who first worked together as the screenwriter and director of the transcendently trippy 1968 Monkees movie Head.
1970’s Five Easy Pieces, 1972’s The King of Marvin Gardens, 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and 1992’s Man Trouble all followed before they collaborated a final time on Blood & Wine.
I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long to get around to finally covering a flop that marks the first, last and only pairing of screen legends Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine. It probably has something to do with Blood & Wine’s generic title and an ad campaign that makes it look boring as well as bad.
I much prefer bad to boring and Blood & Wine unfortunately is a bit of a snooze. Like The Last Tycoon, which paired Robert De Niro and Nicholson for the first, last and only time, Blood and Wine is worth seeing for the opportunity to see legends share the screen for the only time but that is the only reason to see it.
Nicholson stars as Alex Gates, a wine dealer leading a double life. He regularly steps out on troubled wife Suzanne (Judy Davis) with mistress Gabriela (Jennifer Lopez) and hatches a plan with criminal associate Victor Spansky (Caine) to steal a necklace valuable enough to finance both of their retirements.
Speaking of retirement, Caine apparently came out of an early retirement to do the film at Nicholson’s urging, then was so happy with the experience that he kept acting. It’s easy to see why.
Blood & Wine is not a great movie. It’s not even a good movie but Caine’s heartbreaking performance transcends the film’s curdled nastiness. Caine lucked out in playing a dying character who gets closer and closer to death with each successive scene.
It’s the kind of flashy role that wins awards and critical hosannas even as it’s tethered to an almost defiantly forgettable motion picture, pure Neo-Noir hokum.
Alex and Victor’s big score goes sideways when Suzanne figures out that her husband is cheating on her and also purloined a very pricey necklace. Suzanne and her son Jason (Stephen Dorff) steal the stolen jewelry and head out of town, much to the chagrin of its previous owners, who stole it fair and square.
A desperate struggle for advantage ensues, with the older crooks trying to get their hands on the jewelry before terminal illness takes Victor.
Victor has the laddish charm and laid-back charisma of an archetypal Michael Caine rogue but with an explosive, violent temper that makes him dangerous despite his advanced age and sickness.
He’s a nasty piece of work but then Blood and Wine stays true to the bleak ethos of Film Noir with a gallery of schemers who run the gamut from profoundly flawed to psychotic.
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, whose credits include The Usual Suspects, X-Men and Drive, gives the film a lush, verdant look redolent of money and sin and the unforgiving Florida sun.
Blood & Wine looks fantastic and benefits from a ferociously engaged performance from Caine and a solid, if less compelling turn from Nicholson but grows more dramatically inert as it progresses.
It does not help that while Blood & Wine was understandably marketed as a Jack Nicholson/Michael Caine movie Stephen Dorff scores just as much screen time as his Oscar-winning and infinitely more talented costars.
Like his Alone in the Dark costar Christian Slater, Dorff wasn’t just influenced by Nicholson in the way seemingly every actor of his generation was influenced by the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest star. That dramatically underestimates Nicholson’s influence on him. No, Stephen Dorff basically stole Nicholson’s whole shtick.
Nicholson’s unforced charisma can’t help but make Dorff seem like even more of a callow pretender by comparison. The movie suffers terribly any time Nicholson and Caine are offscreen and while Lopez has a luminous presence the three decade plus age gap between her and her onscreen lover is consistently distracting.
Blood & Wine immerses us in a familiar world of sin, sleaze, sex and duplicity but gives us no one to root for or be emotionally invested in.
Rafaelson’s nihilistic thriller was a huge box office bomb for reasons that are readily apparent. It’s an almost impressively unpleasant motion picture populated by opportunists, murderers, thieves and backstabbers of all sorts.
It’s terrific vehicle for Caine but a less effective showcase for Nicholson. It’s notable almost exclusively for the once in a lifetime teaming of Nicholson and Caine and for being the final film Nicholson made with Rafaelson.
Like so many partnerships, Rafaelson and Nicholson’s roared out of the gate with Head and Five Easy Pieces but limped to a close with a regrettable shrug of a movie that deserves its status as a minor footnote in its stars’ extraordinary careers.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
I’m on Subtack now! Check out https://nathanrabin.substack.com/ for my brand spanking new newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas!
Buy the 516 page Sincere Movie Cash-In Edition of The Weird Accordion to Al AND get a free coloring book for just 20 dollars, shipping and taxes included, at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-in Edition free!
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 12.00, shipping, handling and taxes included, 23 bucks for two books, domestic only at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Y’all know my steez: I make my living largely through Patreon so if you would consider throwing in even a dollar a month over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace