Angel Heart

Angel Heart

When it is all over and the dust has cleared and the blood has dried, you can unsort “Angel Heart” and see that it is really quite simple. But not then. Then it has the logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything is inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.

The movie stars Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel, an unwashed private eye who works out of an office that looks like Sam Spade gave it to Goodwill. He gets a call to visit some kind of devil-worship cult in Harlem, where a strange man wants to talk to him. The man’s name is Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), and he wants Angel to track down a missing person for him. Angel takes the case for five grand and follows a trail that is littered with stale leads and fresh corpses.

This sounds like a million other private eye movies, and in some ways it is. A few things make it different: sly humor, good acting, good directing, yes; but also there comes a point when Harry Angel descends into the supernatural and learns the horrifying truth about his investigation.

The director is Alan Parker, who cheerful said he’d work in every genre if only they’d let him. With “Angel Heart,” Parker can cross two off his list: private eye movies and supernatural horror films. Parker’s films are always made with great energy; they’re not afraid of excess look at “Midnight Express,” “Fame” (1980) or “Pink Floyd: The Wall.”

This time he got carried away by style points while shooting one particular scene involving Rourke (as Angel) and Lisa Bonet (as Epiphany Proudfoot). She plays a young Louisiana woman who holds secrets from Angels’ past; their affair begins during a rainstorm so heavy that water falls through the ceiling like blood. In context, the blood makes sense; but the scene created an uproar at the Motion Picture Association of America, which told Parker he’d have to trim it for an R rating.

The scene is in character with the rest of the movie, which is depraved and sensuous. Robert De Niro’s appearance sets the tone, with his sharp nails and his elegant black suits. He looks uncannily like Martin Scorsese, his favorite director; Scorsese must be wondering how De Niro achieved this effect on a diet of bread and water. Given what we eventually find out about Cyphre, it’s a wicked resemblance.

Rourke takes center screen as a violent unmade bed. Only Gerald Depardieu has made so many movies while looking so hungover. Rourke looks unshaven and unwashed and desperate even before things start to go wrong for Angel, and by then he’s screaming for a sedative or 10.

His “Angel Heart” odyssey takes him from New York to Algiers, La., a town across the river from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland. A grizzled old blues player (played by fast-talking Brownie McGhee in a performance that shows Dexter Gordon isn’t the only old musician who can act) advises him to go home. But he doesn’t listen; he lets himself be drawn ever deeper into bayou country, where he spies on the forbidden rituals of a voodoo cult.

Bonet is the priestess of the cult and she plays the role with an abandoned sensuality that you wouldn’t have expected after watching her on “The Cosby Show.” Taking this controversial role as her movie debut was probably one of the smartest things she could have done; it’s such a stretch from the Cosby character that it establishes her as a plausible movie actress.

Once we do figure them out, the final revelations in the movie make a weird sense. This is one of those movies where you leave the theater and run through what happened again in your mind, re-interpreting all of the early scenes now that you know what’s going to happen at last. “Angel Heart” is a thriller and a horror film, but most of all it’s an ebullient exercise in style where Parker and his actors enjoy themselves by taking everything as far as they can.

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