The Limey

Stamp Of Approval

The Limey
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 1999 
LionsGate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: There will be some spoilers...

“Do you even understand half the s**t this guy's saying?” 
“No, but I know what he means.”
From The Limey

It’s taken me a good long while to upgrade to a Blu Ray copy of The Limey and quite a long time since I last revisited it. I’m surprised to learn only now that it was a bit of a flop on its initial release but... well, it didn’t seem like a flop to my friends and I at the time. I remember liking this one so much I went back to the cinema a good few times to re-watch it over and over. 

It’s certainly Soderbergh’s best movie (and he’s done a number of good ones, for sure) and it’s an absolute masterpiece. And a timeless one at that... even though I remembered almost all of it on this re-watch, the film still holds up as a vital piece of modern cinema and, with the way it’s edited, it really shouldn’t... but it all just works so well.

The story is mostly linear but presented in a non-linear fashion in terms of its stylistic flourishes and tells a small story about Wilson, played by the incomparable Terence Stamp. He’s just got out from his third or fourth stretch in prison (at her majesty’s pleasure, so to speak) and finds out his daughter, who has been living in LA with a famous record producer called Valentine, played by a wonderful Peter Fonda, has died in what looks like a car crash. Except, Wilson feels it in his bones that it isn’t an accident... so he flies out to LA to do a bit of ‘revenge detecting’ to see if he can uncover the truth about his daughter’s tragic demise. 

Along the way he’s aided by Ed, played by the always watchable Luis Guzmán... and his daughter’s initially suspicious friend played by the great Lesley Ann Warren. And he’s abetted and almost hindered by Valentine’s right hand man, played by Barry Newman (Petrocelli himself ladies and gentleman) and his team of assassins including, among others, one played by none other than Joe Dallesandro (or Little Joe as he’s known in Lou Reed’s song Walk On The Wild Side). 

And it’s portrayed as almost a revenge thriller but it’s not quite that and, more a reflection on the relationships between a father and a daughter and how the rituals and grooves of that can be found to impact each others lives in unexpected ways (at least that’s what I get out of it). 

The film is told, as I said, mostly in a linear way but many conversations and scenes take place over a number of different moments from the past, present and future of the characters scrambled up within the same set of moments, as the voices play out. Especially when each new character is introduced... like a visual anchor point. And sometimes it’s used very cleverly, when a sound bite from a conversation may be cut onto a visual of that conversation but without actually matching up to that specific segment. For instance, when Stamp is talking and it cuts away from him with his voice continuing the conversation and when it cuts back to him, it’s still carrying on but his mouth is not moving because he’s at a pause in the conversation visually. 

It’s actually very reminiscent... and I suspect this was ever present in Soderbergh’s mind when this was being edited... of the cinema of Nicolas Roeg, where he would often suddenly jump cut to the past or present with an audio flourish and then back to where the story beat was, to give an insight into the present of a character by given the context of where they would end up or where they came from (he even did it in his TV episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, if memory serves, suddenly jump cutting to Mata Hari’s bloody death years after the time of the episode before cutting back to the present story, to add insight and drum a message home). 

Soderbergh does this all through the movie in an even more frenetic manner, it seems to me, fracturing the narrative but, inexplicably... and this is the strength of the film... making it so it’s absolutely understandable as a single narrative piece and is not about to lose the audience. Like an impression of a tale drifting like the sea over the perception of the viewer and crashing into them with a traditional understanding of the jigsaw pieces they are being presented with (I’ve deliberately left that quote from the movie at the top because I think it’s a very good comment on the visual mechanics of the movie too, in a possibly non-deliberate, metatextual manner). The director even cuts in excerpts all the way through from the Ken Loach film Poor Cow, to show a much younger Terence Stamp, standing in for this character here.

A good example of how the director makes this work is a specific, long shot of Stamp walking along a building in the middle distance. It’s obviously done in a single take but, as he walks from left to right, the scene lasts a couple of minutes because it’s cross cut with past, present and future moments... the walk itself is the future when Stamp starts it, left of screen but, becomes the present time when he reaches the right of screen. And it probably shouldn’t work but it so does... even though it’s technically quite a sophisticated visual syntax the director is pushing on the audience.

And everyone in this is absolutely terrific. I can’t fault a single one of the actors in this but, with a special emphasis on the absolutely electrical performance given by Terence Stamp as Wilson. What he does in this is wonderful. He explains himself in the simplest terms and, most of the Americans in this are completely confused by his cockney rhyming slang and way of putting over his points... but his silent performance, the way his expressions are used to underline his experiences, shows the intelligent man underneath. 

And although a lot of Stamp’s performance is meditative, exploring the silent, inner dialogue... writer Lem Dobbs’ dialogue in this movie is absolutely brilliant. When Stamp is explaining to the American authorities about why he didn’t kill a ‘screw’ when he saw him in a park after he got out of ‘the nick’, it might seem a trifle at first... but it’s also a good bit of foreshadowing so, keep your ears open for that bit. Another bit of absolute genius is when Stamp is explaining about the relationship with his daughter when, at various points in their life, she would grab the phone and threaten to ‘shop him’ to the police rather than him getting caught and put in prison for a serious crime again. This particular reminiscence takes on a tragic note by the conclusion of the movie. 

Perhaps my favourite Stampism in this is a nice little throwaway line which... I’m sure must have gone over most of the US audience’s heads because, I just don’t think they have this old expression over there. When Lesley Ann Warren’s character offers to give Valentine’s phone number to Wilson, he pointedly say, “Oh, I’ve got his number!” Which, in certain areas of England and London, is an expression for having someone ‘pegged’ and having the advantage over them because you’ve got them completely figured out.

And even Peter Fonda gets some interesting dialogue when, as he tries to sum up the dreamlike 1960s he eventually concludes... “It was just ‘66 and ‘67. That’s all it was.”

Again, the direction on this is brilliant too, including some of the stuff shot and edited as written in Dobs screenplay. When a beaten up Stamp returns to a warehouse in an earlier part of the film, the one he’s just got thrown out of... and pulls a gun from the back of his jeans (a gun plus ammo he’s bought from some kids in a playground, which is a nice comment on gun culture in the US) we see him go into the warehouse to extract bloody revenge and hear it... but the camera stays outside before the last surviving gang member comes running out past the camera and Stamp walks up to the camera screaming at him with the oft quoted bit of dialogue... “Tell him I’m f**king coming!!!!!!!!”. It’s a wonderful moment in a film absolutely full of wonderful moments which amount, incrementally, to more than just the sum of its parts.

Yeah, okay. I think that’s me pretty much done on The Limey. If you haven’t seen it and are a cinephile of any persuasion, you probably should get tuned in to this one. One slight caveat though is that the Lionsgate UK Blu Ray does not include the original DVD commentary track, which is a shame because the commentary between Soderbergh and Dobbs was a bit of an art piece itself, with different parts of the commentary scrambled up and juxtaposed sometimes in a non-sequitur manner, to match the way the movie itself is edited. So, a shame it’s not on there but, if you’re not bothered about the, truly wonderful, commentary then, yeah, this ‘extras free’ Blu Ray is a nice transfer of an absolute masterpiece of a film. Fantastic stuff.