Cruising

William Friedkin’s connections to the real story that inspired this film are probably more interesting than the film itself. Friedkin hired Paul Bateson, an x-ray tech, to play a doctor in The Exorcist. Bateson went on to murder several gay men in New York through the 70s, even going so far as to imply that he had done more than he had been convicted for. The story of the film doesn’t touch on Bateson directly, instead being inspired by a novel written by Gerald Walker. It also seems to get completely lost in trying to obfuscate things from the audience, attempting to blur the line between reality and…I’m not sure. I don’t want to be completely dismissive of Friedkin’s efforts here. He was obviously trying something, but I’m just not sure what it was or whether it was successful or not. I lean towards no, though.

As gay men in the BDSM subculture in New York City are being brutally murdered (either by being stabbed or dismembered, the police are lumping them all together), Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) recruits the young policeman Steve Burns (Al Pacino) to infiltrate the subculture and investigate as an undercover detective. Burns takes the job because of the quick promotion to detective that it represents, and it’s not well received by his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) since he has to pretty much completely disappear from her life for who knows how long.

So, Steve throws himself into the culture, and this is probably where the film is the most interesting. It’s a pretty standard police procedural about how one man has to infiltrate into this strange new place for him. The details of these BDSM gay clubs is very stark and defined (with forty minutes of it being dropped to satisfy the MPAA to get an R rating instead of an X), and Burns gets lost in this world. There’s intentional obfuscation about how much Burns is actually doing, whether he’s just wandering into and out of these clubs, making himself known and asking questions, or if he’s actually partaking in things. And I think that level of unknowingness works within this first half or so. How far is he willing to go? It’s an interesting question that the movie ends up not really bothering with because it is more interested in other obfuscations than that.

Burns ends up zeroing in on a particular suspect, Skip (Jay Acovone), after another murder at a porno theater. With increased pressure from on high, Edelson arrests Skip and interrogates him, buoyed by the fact that he works at a steakhouse that uses knives that match very closely to the stab wounds of previous victims, but Skip’s fingerprints don’t match those from the theater. This is the point where the film just steadily starts to lose me. The actual mystery seems to increasingly take a backseat to the action on screen as Burns gets progressively deeper into finding anyone to blame. It’s helped not at all by the fact that his investigation is almost incidental to him zeroing in on the next suspect, a Columbia student named Stuart (Richard Cox) who was the student of one of the first victims, a Columbia professor (killed before the movie started). How does Burns figure this out? Edelman gives him the pages from a yearbook that Burns then recognizes Stuart from his trolling of the gay bars.

This just feels completely out of order to me. This comes more than halfway through the film when it should be something like an introductory element to the investigation, not some kind of last gasp when the investigation is getting desperate. It’s where the police procedural elements just kind of fall apart, and we’re left with Burns obsessively tailing Stuart. It’s also where the film just starts to outright and fully embrace the idea that there could be multiple killers (always implied from the beginning when the police are throwing together different deaths with completely different methods together) to the point where there’s heavily implication that Burns himself is the killer, especially the way he ends up just outright stalking Stuart.

Is that a bad choice? That’s where I become uncertain about things. There’s a certain level of interesting about this series of choices in the film’s latter half. Leaving behind the BDSM clubs for the greener spaces around Columbia is a marked contrast, but it’s counterbalanced by Burns getting darker, the influence of his investigation staying with him. And the pieces of the investigation don’t really seem to stick together all that well in retrospect (especially the events around the fingerprint in the theater which belongs to Stuart but there are further implications that it’s not him). I don’t know. I think it’s too messy without actually leaning into something like an unreliable narrator (there is none, and we see plenty of stuff away from Burns for that sort of rigid point of view reading to work at all) while losing the interesting part of the subculture. It both becomes more regular and less readable at the same time.

I really just don’t think it works. It’s really trying something different, which I recognize, but I don’t think it works.

Pacino might be part of my problem as well. First of all, the dude is simply too old for the role (he was 39 but the character is supposed to be something like 27). Secondly, he doesn’t really bring much to the role, which is a weird thing to say about Pacino, but Friedkin seems to have directed Pacino to play everything close to the chest. This is also a writing and editing issue where we have no real sense of who Burns is outside of the investigation, but the view of him in the investigation is intentionally opaque. We’re not supposed to get to know him because of the later implications about his culpability in the crimes in question. This film is intentionally not working on normal narrative terms, but I just don’t see it working on the other terms it offers up. It feels like an experiment in trying something new that simply didn’t end up working.

So, I kind of admire it on one level, but I don’t think it comes together on the other. I’m kind of just mixed on the whole thing.

Rating: 2/4