In 1988's Gotham Virginia Madsen is a Sexy Ghost and Tommy Lee Jones a Sexy Ghost-Fucker
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1988 was probably the final year that anyone could get away with titling something Gotham that has nothing to do with the iconic crime fighter without comic book fans getting hopping mad.
The following year Tim Burton’s take on the Dark Knight was an iconic smash. Six years after that Tommy Lee Jones famously refused to sanction Jim Carrey’s buffoonery during the making of 1995’s Batman Forever.
Tommy Lee Jones is understatedly amusing in the 1988 Neo-noir Gotham but he characteristically eschews buffoonery as well as shenanigans, monkeyshines, hijinks, mischief and tomfoolery in favor of deadpan under reaction.
In his own crabby, cranky, craggy fashion, Jones is a funny actor. It’s just a bone-dry, incredibly restrained style of humor that is put to good use in the spectacularly silly yet strangely seductive detective yarn Gotham.
Jones’ down and out gumshoe Eddie Mallard owns a Rubik’s Cube but otherwise Gotham goes out of its way to feel like the product of 1938 rather than 1988.
The struggling private eye is just a tiny step up from homelessness. The walls of his office are the color of rancid split-pea soup. He appears to have somehow scored the cheapest, saddest office AND apartment in the state of New York.
He’s just barely scraping by when a client comes by with a curious proposition. He wants the detective to tell wife Rachel Carlyle (Virginia Madsen) to leave him alone. The strange part is that she has been dead for a solid decade.
Jones’ shabbily clad detective clearly wants to tell the man that he is out of his gourd and that ghosts don’t exist. But, like all of us, he desperately needs the money. So he humors the man and his delusions and tells the sexy, possibly dead woman to stop stalking his client.
It is a most unusual meet cute but then Gotham is a very strange endeavor, a cross between Noir, Tales From the Crypt and those supernatural pay cable romance shows whose selling point is gratuitous nudity.
Remember the legendary scene in Ghostbusters where Dan Ackroyd’s paranormal investigator gets his knob slobbed by a ghost? Of course you do. It topped AFI’s list of the 100 best movies where a Blues Brothers receives oral sex from an apparition.
Gotham takes posthumous eroticism a big step further. It’s less concerned with a dude getting a monster BJ from a literal monster than with full-on ghost fucking.
The blonde femme fatale who may or may not be deceased takes a liking to the unsmiling private investigator with the Salvation Army wardrobe. She denies being a ghost and they begin a torrid sexual affair complicated by Eddie’s nagging suspicion that while he’s probably not boning someone who died a decade earlier, he can’t be 100 percent sure that he’s not doing something at least spiritually or morally akin to necrophilia.
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The role of a frequently nude woman of taste and distinction who could very well be a horny spirit who isn’t about to let death get in the way of getting her fuck on as often as possible is, like pretty much everything in Gotham, utterly ridiculous.
It should be impossible to pull off but Madsen creates something real and haunting and achingly sad out of a character that on paper seems more fit for a zany comedy than a moody romance that has elements of comedy but ultimately takes itself fairly seriously.
Madsen is so irresistible and sexy that it’s way too easy to believe that men would do anything to be with her sexually and romantically, even repeatedly transgress the blurry line separating life and death in search of carnal satisfaction.
name a more iconic duo!
The future Academy Award nominee has tremendous range. She can be the girl next door, a princess from outer space, someone sexually attracted to Paul Giamatti or a sexy ghost obsessed with retrieving the jewels she insisted on being buried with.
Gotham makes inspired use of Madsen’s ethereal beauty and underlying melancholy, to the sense that she’s not quite of this earth but rather belongs on a higher plane of being, like an angel or a ghost.
Writer-director Lloyd Fonvielle’s sole directorial effort debuted on Showtime but has cinematic production values thanks to virtuoso cinematographer Michael Chapman, who shot The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Space Jam.
Chapman picked up one of two Oscar nominations for his work on The Fugitive (the other was for Raging Bull) so he has good chemistry with Jones. Chatman creates a world of shadows, darkness and sensuality deeply rooted in the visual conventions of Noir without feeling cliched.
On a plot level Gotham is both confusing, almost insultingly stupid and far-fetched. As a visually sumptuous mood piece rich in romance and retro glamour, however, it has an unmistakable appeal.
Gotham should be an unintentional laugh riot, pure camp. That it’s not is a testament primarily to Jones and Madsen’s deeply committed performances and strong chemistry and Chapman’s visual mastery.
This over-achieving television movie is yet another pleasant surprise in Madsen’s early filmography. It’s no masterpiece or unknown treasure but it is an engaging Neo-Noir with a kooky supernatural twist.
The off the wall premise seems to promise flat-out buffoonery but Gotham is shockingly convincing for a movie with a conceit this kooky and impossible.
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