‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ At 25: Geena Davis Was The Matt Damon Of Her Time – Decider

For a ten year period from the late 80s to somewhere in the 90s, Geena Davis followed a peculiar arc. Incredible in David Cronenbergs The Fly, not the least for the chemistry of a real-life romance with Jeff Goldblum that flamed out after a passionate conflagration, she found herself a curious kind of star. Too pretty to be the nerd, too nerdy to be an idol, she was a kind of dreamgirl for the very smart and the kind of lonesome. She anchored pop-cultural touchstones like Thelma & Louise where she introduced the world to the particular pleasures of objectifying an on-the-cusp Brad Pitt; and A League of Their Own which has in the decades since accumulated almost as many laurels as a feminist rallying point. My fondest impressions of her, though, are from The Fly (of course), but also her turn as suburban ghost Barbara in Beetlejuice and odd, unconventional Muriel in Lawrence Kasdans underseen The Accidental Tourist where Davis matched up perfectly with the similarly unconventional William Hurt. Its those seemingly disparate qualities of capable athlete and lovable dork that people like Zooey Deschanel would later parlay into careers. In details of her personal life that found currency during this same period, I find evidence of both of those things in Davis foray into Olympic archery, and simultaneous-in-my-memory revelation that the Boston University grad was a member of Mensa. Though there are obvious explanations for Davis elevation as a feminist icon (and lets not forget Earth Girls are Easy), I think often of her, some would call it bizarre, two-film run with then-husband Renny Harlin where she made a play for action hero before settling in to play mom roles in animated mouse movies.

Cutthroat Island landed first, earning immediate scorn as arguably the worst film of 1995 and a financial boondoggle to boot. In it, she plays the dread pirate Morgan who, in the first ten minutes of the film, makes two dick jokes and skins her fathers head for the treasure map tattooed there. It has its pleasures, in other words. Theres a lovely stunt where Davis herself seems to time a fall from a window into the shotgun seat of a racing carriage, but the picture is vile and loud, obnoxiously over-written, has numerous monkey reaction shots, and fails I think to capture the thing about Davis that is the most arresting: that is, her ability to play characters that are in the process of discovering something about themselves. Davis is like Matt Damon in that way: they are too smart to be likable unless what were watching is a process of them figuring out just how special they actually are. I dont think its a mistake that career highlights for both involve characters who are special agents with amnesia, fishes literally pulled from the water and into normal, domestic situations before circumstance calls them to action. Harlin, I dont think, entirely understood what it is about Davis that made her a star, not entirely, but he got a lot closer the second time out with the exuberantly bonkers The Long Kiss Goodnight. Perhaps unfortunately for The Long Kiss Goodnight, it landed just one year after Cutthroat Island.

Working from a script by Shane Black, The Long Kiss Goodnight was dismissed at the time as just another loud, obnoxious, ultra-violent piffle that further degraded Davis momentum and was popularly speculated to have been at least part of the reason Davis and Harlin ended their marriage soon after. Stripped of its tabloid interest, The Long Kiss Goodnight is exactly the kind of movie that filmmakers have been chasing recently, in this newly diverse-aspiring climate: the unapologetic action movie heroine grounding a potential franchise. This is the movie I think of when I watch things now like Atomic Blonde, movies that know the notes but, without the particular, difficult-to-replicate complexities that Davis brings to the party, dont quite hear the music. In this, Davis plays Charly Baltimore, a government-bred assassin whos lost her memory and so begun a new life as a housewife. Her past catches up with her, of course, and as pieces of her old skills start returning, she partners with good samaritan Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) to protect her new family and, why not, save the world from evil in the process. I love this movie I love in particular the scenes where Charly plays the wife because there is something always fascinating about someone like Geena Davis in a role that is so completely familiar. She makes a comfortable thing uncomfortable with the volume of combustible potential energy she brings to it. A sequence where, while cooking dinner, she discovers she has unearthly knife skills (Maybe I was a chef!) is absolutely a delight for how Davis plays it as not a superhero origin story, but a woman coming into power.

Geena Davis is like Matt Damon: they are both too smart to be likable unless what were watching is a process of them figuring out just how special they actually are.

Beyond Blacks typically-snappy and world weary banter, thats what sings about The Long Kiss Goodnight 25 years after its initial release seeing Davis joy as not just the best wife and schoolteacher there ever has been, but eventually, the best killer the world has ever seen. I recall vividly the Siskel & Ebert pan where they talked derisively about the physics of outrunning a fireball, missing entirely that Davis when shes on fire with the right material to suit her many facets. The film is trenchant in its pessimism about government agencies with the baddies actually being the CIA in the process of planting a false-flag operation in order to better persecute Muslims at home and abroad. I dont think I understood exactly how opportunistic our government was, nor how easily our racism is weaponized against the minority bogey-du-jour, when I first saw this film. Its nihilism struck me back then as unsettling and The Long Kiss Goodnight was easier to dismiss as a particularly bleak fantasy. Watching it now, after everything weve been through the last quarter century, its maybe not nihilistic enough?

Whats constant, though, is how effortlessly Davis moves back and forth from warmth and nurturing, to calculating and deadly. Theres something archetypal about Davis towering over most of her co-stars, gangly in one moment and lissome in the next, as at home in a leather trench coat as she is in a gingham dress. She is the very image of unpinnable and as a being of complete liminal possibility, she becomes like Hitchcocks Roger Thornhill; Cary Grant in a light blue suit who is everything to everyone but truly knowable only by the person he chooses.

The action in The Long Kiss Goodnight remains memorable. Harlin, of all the things he is and is not, is a master of muscular motion. During this his period of greatest production, he began the decade crashing an passenger deck full of people in Die Hard 2 and ended it with a super-smart shark interrupting Samuel Jackson mid-diatribe. In between, the better-than-it-should-be Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger (and Stallone was floated as one possible star of The Long Kiss Goodnight should Davis not work out) and a game adaptation of Daniel Waters The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. But for me, hes the director of these two attempts to find a franchise for Geena Davis who has been good in everything shes been in, but has never had her unique skill set entirely honored by any single project. The Long Kiss Goodnight came the closest and its influence on filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Doug Liman, even Chad Stahelskis John Wick epic, continue to cast long shadows. If you havent seen it, you owe it to yourself. Its brutally violent and surprisingly tender; hilarious and somber; absurd and all too familiar. Its all the contradictions inherent in Davis, too, this complicated star for a complicated decade whose greatest gift of polar ambiguity might be coming into focus only now, when were similarly fractured and looking for a way all those pieces fit into one possible whole.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Long Kiss Goodnight

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'The Long Kiss Goodnight' At 25: Geena Davis Was The Matt Damon Of Her Time - Decider