Another Day In Paradise

Another Day In Paradise

“Another Day in Paradise” is what you might call a sleazy, low life, drugs and blood road movie, and so the basic materials will be familiar to audiences of the post “Easy Rider” decades. There’s not much new here, but then there’s so rarely something new at the movies that we’re sometimes grateful to see the familiar done well.

What makes it special are two performances by James Woods and Melanie Griffith and two reflections of them played by Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. Woods and Griffith play types they’ve played before, but with a zest and style that brings the movie alive especially in the earlier scenes, before everything gets clouded by doom. He is Uncle Mel; “I’m just a junkie and a real good thief,” he says about himself. “Kind of go together.” She is his woman, Sid; they met when he was her drug dealer.

The movie opens with the younger couple, Bobbie and Rosie (Kartheiser and Gregson Wagner). He breaks into a junior college to burgle a vending machine, gets in a struggle with a security guard, is badly wounded and stabs him to death. Soon he’s being treated by Uncle Mel. Are you a doctor?” he asks. Yeah sure I’m a doctor shooting you up with heroin,” says Mel sarcastically. As Bobbie recovers, Mel spins visions of all four as family members setting out on an adventure on wheels together forever after under endless skies promising paradise only love can deliver. That’s because he’s seen it somewhere else before: It never works out that way except in the movies.

She takes them shopping for clothes as part of their initiation into paradise and then to a nightclub (where kids get drunk on stage during midget wrestling matches performed for drunken rednecks who hoot from behind chicken wire).

We know it can’t last. Mel needs money too badly, because he needs drugs; and because he needs drugs, he’s willing to get money in dangerous ways. Soon Bobbie is learning about crawl spaces, and Mel is planning the world’s least professional crime. The pattern of this movie is pretty much dictated by the genre: You’ve got your early glorious freedom on the road, followed by lowering clouds, gathering omens and the closing net of fate.

They do a lot of drugs in this picture. Five scenes of shooting up and one of snorting, according to the invaluable Screen It” Web site (which adds helpfully that the f-word is used at least” 291 times). The writer-director is Larry Clark, whose previous film was Kids” (1995), about some high-spirited Manhattan street teenagers who dabble in sex and drugs as if they were harmless toys.

Clark seems drawn to decadence or marginal lifestyles; what interests him most are kids who are in danger. Kartheiser and Gregson Wagner have that same kind of scary energy we remember from Juliette Lewis and Brad Pitt in Kalifornia” (1993), or Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek all those years ago in “Badlands” (1973). The underlying story structure harks back to “Bonnie and Clyde,” itself inspired by earlier road movies. The road goes ever on into crime and doom a destination reached more often than any other in movies.

“Another Day in Paradise” may not bring any new ideas, but it does have some old arias powerfully sung. James Woods and Melanie Griffith are having fun with their characters they’re enjoying the scenes of supercharged speed, fear, fantasy and crime. Woods has played variations on this character many times (how many times have we seen him driving a car, smoking and talking like a demented con man?).

Griffith is the last rose of summer: still fragrant, but you can see her energy running out, until finally it’s more important for her to get away from Uncle Mel than to have access to his drugs.

A movie like this reminds me what movie stars are for. We see them so many times in so many movies over so many years that we grow used to their cadences and their range. We invest in them. Those who we like, we follow. James Woods is almost always interesting and often much more than that. Melanie Griffith has qualities that are right for the role she plays here. The kids, Kartheiser and Gregson Wagner, are talented but new. It’s a sign you’re a movie lover and not just a fan when you start preferring the fine older vintages to the flavors of the month.

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