Moriarty Reviews GANGS OF NEW YORK, CHICAGO, And CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND!

Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

Happy holidays.

I don’t want to obscure the simple idea of that under the mountain of stuff I’ve got for you today, so I’ll repeat it, and I mean it sincerely, no matter who you are...

Happy holidays.

I don’t know if I’ll have another chance to post a story again of my own before the end of the year. My first major 2003 column is going to be my 10 Best List, and I’m trying to fit in a number of last-minute screenings of things that are either just coming out or that I missed for one reason or another. I’m also finishing up a big giant DVD Shelf column I meant to have up before Christmas. Problem is, I’m in the homestretch of draft one of the-script-that-shall-not-be-named, and Harry Lime and I have spent every moment we weren’t with our families since BNAT to really hone the work. As a result, I’m a little distant these days to almost everyone in my life, even Harry (sorry, Big Red, and I hope you and Father Geek had a great Christmas, even if the world’s cutest Li’l Monster was in Mexico with his mom and dad), and I’m sorry about that. It’s always like this when I get my head well and truly into something I’m writing. I get distracted, consumed by the thing. This time, especially, there’s a fair amount of self-imposed pressure on me. I’d hate to screw up something so very public, and like any writer, I’m fully confident I have the ability to balls this one up.

Still, I take great encouragement from the way this last six weeks or show has been shaping up at the cinema, and I’ve loved each of my excursions to lose myself for a few hours in someone else’s shared dream. Well, okay, getting dragged to TWO WEEK NOTICE was a special kind of Hell, but for the most part, even when the films haven’t worked this fall, there’s no faulting them for sheer ambition. That, of course, brings us to the first film I’d like to discuss today...

GANGS OF NEW YORK

”Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand, it makes a fist.”

So says Bill Cutting, known to everyone in the New York of 1863 as Bill The Butcher, in a mesmerizing early scene from Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited pet project GANGS OF NEW YORK, the subject of much speculation and rumor and controversy. The last time one of our modern cinema masters released a film with this much attendant posturing on the parts of the studio, critics, and industry wags, it was Stanley Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT in 1999, and like that film, GANGS is sure to polarize people in their responses. It’s worthy of all the discussion that’s sure to ensue, and it defies easy, quick reaction.

In fact, I’m actually glad I saw the film with an embargo date attached to my review, because it means I’ve been able to spend the last two weeks or so chewing on the film, digesting it, thinking about what I liked and what I didn’t. It’s also given me a chance to read the hoopla about the “alternative” cut that people like David Poland and Jeff Wells have seen and proclaimed the superior version. I’m sorry that their reports are going to muddy the waters further, since I think it undermines serious discussion of the only version that matters, the one that is being released in theaters across the country today. Scorsese has already come down quite vocally on the subject, saying this is the only version that will be released, and even detailing the process that led him to this final 2 hour and 46 minute cut. Besides, we’re ultimately talking about a difference of about 20 minutes of total running time, most of which consists of slightly different edits of scenes. And despite what Poland and Wells hypothesize, I’m willing to accept that Scorsese truly believes in his heart that the film I saw, the film that you’ll see, is the best version of the movie.

And I’m equally willing, although saddened, to say that this may well be one of the frustrating and uneven films in the career of this brilliant man.

Let’s get this part of the review out of the way right up front: I love Scorsese’s work. I don’t want to write a bad review for this film, or even a mixed review. I wish I could convince myself that the flaws in this film don’t matter, or that there’s a deeper meaning here dancing just at the edge of the frame, something that will become more evident with repeat viewings. But I hate it when people give someone like Scorsese a pass just because of the backstory on something like this. I know he’s been trying to make this movie since 1977, and I admire the fact that he held true to his vision of the thing for a full quarter-century in his efforts to bring it to the screen.

So it makes me feel absolutely lousy that I’m sitting here at 3:00 in the morning, trying to find a way to start this tapdance, worried about just how much bloodletting I’m going to have to do by the end of this piece. With something like BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, it felt like Scorsese working in a minor key, and I pretty much didn’t like anything about it. It’s easier to dismiss a film outright than it is to dissect something that reaches for greatness and just brushes it before completely derailing. I spent almost 800 words working my way through Scorsese’s career, talking about highlights, things I loved, before I realized I was stalling and backed up, erasing all of it.

Maybe I should ease into this by talking about what I liked and what does work. First and foremost, there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, who casts a shadow over every single moment of this film. His work here is as good as film acting gets, and he deserves the lion’s share of the credit for what makes the film work in its best moments. It is a genuine crime that he has been off-screen since THE BOXER, and this film is a reminder of just how much we’ve been missing in that time. With a glass eye featuring an American Eagle as the pupil and a giant moustache, decked out in African-print vests and giant top hats and suits so narrow he looks like a pipe cleaner, there’s no one else that looks like Bill The Butcher. He’s arresting from the first moment we get a glimpse of him, just this side of absurd. Day-Lewis imbues Bill with an almost stifling sense of menace, though, and once we’ve seen him in action, he’s not a joke, and could never be a joke again. He’s the ruler of this strange, alien world that is somehow our past, a place we all know now, and he’s also our guide, our Virgil in this Hell.

Which, I suppose, makes Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) our Dante, our eyes and ears on this trip into chaos, and he’s got a far more problematic role to play. In a way, he creates a false expectation for the film. We expect Leonardo to be the main character in the movie, the center of it, and based on the opening of the film, one might be misled into thinking he’s the lead. After all, the film opens with him as a child witnessing the death of his father (Liam Neeson) going head-to-head with Bill The Butcher in a street war to see who will rule the Five Points, the place where five major streets come together, the heart of the immigrant population in New York. The outcome of this battle leaves Amsterdam in the care of the city, dead set on revenge for his slain father, to young to know how to go about getting it. That opening street war needs to be mythic in scale and intensity, and during the build-up, it is. Liam Neeson moves through the enormous sprawling home that all of these immigrants share, moving from underground towards the surface, and one by one, they all fall in with him, all of them armed, all of them ready for war. Scorsese expertly builds the anticipation, and then the damnedest thing happens. One of the film’s major flaws is revealed in this sequence. Throughout his career, Martin Scorsese has been associated with the extreme portrayal of violence on film. This is, after all, the man whose TAXI DRIVER was once described by his family priest as “too much Good Friday and not nearly enough Easter Sunday.” In most of those cases, though, the violence comes as quick bursts, sudden flare-ups that are over as soon as they’ve begun. GANGS represents one of his first attempts at a truly large-scale epic battle or fight scene, and it’s interesting to learn that there are indeed things that Scorsese doesn’t appear to be any good at. This street war, this focal event which the rest of the film hangs on, is scored miserably (the Peter Gabriel track with the strange electric guitar sounds doesn’t seem to be remotely connected to the images onscree), poorly shot and choreographed, and oddly truncated. This moment which should kick the film off and serve as the first moment of true power just lays there, and as Liam Neeson slowly bleeds out, so does the sequence. My sense of disappointment in the sequence was so profound that it took me a good fifteen minutes to recover and start to catch back up with the film, and by that point, Scorsese seemed to have found his footing, too.

By this point, Amsterdam has returned to the Five Points after years in an orphanage, and Di Caprio’s physically alarming at first glance, especially if you see him all sleek and polished and streamlined in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. There’s a beefy, thick-necked thuggishness about him, and it’s appropriate. He looks like a kid who grew up hard, and who is used to fighting for whatever he has. It’s in the way he carries himself, and it’s in his eyes. He is recognized right away by Johnny (Henry Thomas), a boy he knew as a child, and he finds himself swept into the only form of survival that any of these kids know, a hardscrabble existence based on what you can take off of whom and dependent entirely on how much. Johnny’s a good guide into the world, but Amsterdam has a knack, an instinctive ability to make the most of a situation. When a house catches fire, it’s Johnny who leads them inside to ransack the place. It’s Amsterdam who has to rescue Johnny, though, and his actions catch the attention of Bill the Butcher, who has become the ruler of this part of New York in the time since Amsterdam left.

And for a stretch, the film works for the most part. If there’s a flaw in this first ninety minutes or so, it’s the role that Cameron Diaz has been given to play. She does a good job with the moments she has, but the script lets her down in a major way. I find it hard to believe that Jay Cocks, Stephen Zallian, and Kenneth Lonergan all worked on this script without one of these very smart writers realizing that they had essentially crafted a paper-thin hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché. It’s a shame, too. Diaz throws herself into the scenes as vigorously as she can, but she’s ultimately stranded, and it leaves her as one of the movie’s many loose narrative threads. On the other hand, I couldn’t get enough of the material involving Jim Broadbent as Boss Tweed. It’s through him that we are given our best glimpse of the way politics worked in this city practically bursting from all the people and ideologies that were packed into it. He plays the role with all the oily charm he can muster, which is a considerable amount, and even though his role is largely expository, he makes it memorable. The things that are good about the Boss Tweed material are the same things that are good about the film overall... that sense that we’re getting a glimpse at American history that we’re never taught in schools, the way things really worked during a time so difficult, so dangerous, that no one got away without scars.

In fact, my favorite moment in the film is a long, incredible tracking shot that does indeed invoke the spirit of Sergio Leone, one of my very favorite filmmakers. In THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY, there’s that incredible stretch of film where we suddenly take a left turn into the Civil War, and we realize that it’s no fantasy canvass upon which Leone is painting his morality play. The same thing happens here in a remarkable tableau that shows Irish immigrants getting off a boat, signing up for their citizenships, signing their conscription papers, suiting up in Union uniforms, and then getting onto new boats, ready to be shipped south to fight for their new country. In that one moment, Scorsese paints entire lifetimes worth of experience, and it’s breathtaking. As you watch something like that, or as you see the way the Five Points have been recreated in painstaking detail, there’s no denying the evidence of Scorsese’s passion for this project. He’s been thinking about this forever, and that raises the question: is it possible to overthink something? Is it possible to carry a project around too long? So often, art requires a sort of vitality, a momentum that can easily be crushed by protracted development. GANGS OF NEW YORK strikes me, especially in the sequences that take place after Bill the Butcher learns the true identity of Amsterdam, as a bit of a museum piece. The recreation of history is remarkable, and the use of period music played from live sources almost makes up for the fact that there’s no score to speak of here, and much of what is used is simply inappropriate or distancing. One of the things that made Leone’s films into poetry despite their pulp origins was the brilliant work of Ennio Morricone, and Scorsese needed a composer on this film who could give it the soul it needed. That wouldn’t have repaired all the film’s flaws, but it could have smoothed out some of the rougher edges.

In the end, I don’t have the heart to rail on the film’s weaknesses. Suffice it to say, they are numerous, and by the time the ending rolls around, I felt completely and utterly distanced from what I was watching. Instead of becoming drawn into the conflict between Amsterdam and Bill, I found myself becoming more and more aware of the seams of the thing. I understand the need for Bill to face down his enemy’s son on a field of honor on an intellectual level, and there is something to the idea of having the larger struggle of the Civil War, the birth pains of a new America, intrude on that personal conflict.

But understanding the intention of the scene and connecting with the scene are two totally different things, and even as I found myself appreciating images (the elephant running through the smoke of the battle is one of those great, surreal images that I love in film, something you just wouldn’t ever expect), I felt like I was outside the experience. And in the last minute or so of running time, Scorsese commits an act of hubris so magnificent that I almost couldn’t believe I was looking at it. Like Spike Lee, he is a lifelong New Yorker, and I understand the need to make sense of September 11th using art, but in reaching for some connection, Scorsese betrays the personal story for the last time, and what we’re left with is portrait as polemic, a drama without tension, an epic without vision.

CHICAGO

Critics who want to look for great depth in CHICAGO seem to be missing the point. Bob Fosse was a dancer before he was a dramatist, and when he originally hired John Kander and Fred Ebb to write the book and score for the piece, he was primarily interested in creating a vehicle for Gwen Verdon, his wife at the time. I’m a huge fan of ALL THAT JAZZ, a hallucinogenic film that chronicles the time right around the creation of CHICAGO, the moment when Fosse was put down by a tremendous heart attack brought on by stress and drugs and various other personal appetites. When you see ALL THAT JAZZ and then look at CHICAGO, it becomes immediately appparent why the musical is so jaded, so completely disgusted with society at large. Fosse seemed to feel he had nothing to lose, and he told the truth as he saw it, wrapped in some incredible dance numbers and some nimble character sketches.

When it originally opened on Broadway, CHICAGO was at best a cult hit. Like Sondheim, Fosse has a rabid following that analyzed everything he did under a microscope, and they saw merit in many of the pieces of what they saw as a flawed whole. The musical was optioned for film almost immediately, and in the years since, there have been many stops and starts in bringing it to life. It wasn’t until musical fanatic and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Bill Condon came up with a framework, a way into the material, that Miramax was able to really make this happen.

I should confess that I consider Condon a friend and a mentor to some degree. He inspires me because of the tenacity with which he pursues the stories that he wants to tell. A societal x-ray about Bess Myerson... a haunted romantic memory of a director dismissed by many as “just a horror filmmaker”... a story about America’s relationship with its gentials as told through the eyes of controversial researcher Kinsey... these are not the stories that Hollywood normally embraces. Yet, somehow, Condon is able to crack them and craft screenplays that allow you into these densely structured worlds and convey both information and emotion in equal measure. When he immersed himself in the world of CHICAGO, I figured it was a natural step for him. He frequently puts on one show score or another to write, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater. That’s both a strength and a drawback, though, because the potential is there for a situation just like GANGS OF NEW YORK. It’s possible to get too close, too caught up in the intellectual exercise, and to lose the sense of the thing as a film, as a communal experience that an audience is going to share.

Thankfully, that ain’t the case here.

CHICAGO is an audience film, first and foremost. It manages to recreate the energy of seeing this sort of show live, and each of the numbers has its own particular style and sound. In the film’s first big scene, “All That Jazz,” there’s a fair amount of busy intercutting between Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger). Velma’s the one onstage performing, a vamp who rolls in late with blood on her hands, and Roxie’s the one who is desperate to be onstage, so desperate that she’s willing to sleep with anyone who tells her they can get her there. When her latest boyfriend reveals his lie and slaps her around, she shoots him to death. Both Velma and Roxie end up in jail awaiting trial for murder charges under the care of Mama (Queen Latifah), who brings the house down with her first big number, “When You’re Good To Mama,” a song that Latifah belts out with abandon, using her considerable physicality to really sell it. Velma and Roxie also both end up signing the same lawyer to represent them, the one and only Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), the guy who’s never lost a case. The story’s not much more complicated than that, even when you toss in numbers about the media, fidelity, and identity.

But that’s the charm of the thing. Musicals, by their very nature, paint in oversized symbols and archetype. For me, the reason to see this is to see what Rob Marshall has done as a director, and to see the performance work by the various actors. When I first heard the casting for the film, I was almost immediately turned off to the entire thing. I couldn’t imagine sitting through a musical starring Gere and Zeta-Jones, and I hate admitting that. I try not to prejudge things, but I’m as guilty of it as anyone else at times. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I think everyone in it was ideally cast once you accept that Miramax was going to cast actors... people we recognize... and not just pure dancers or singers. Can Renee Zellweger sing and dance? Yes. She’s probably the weakest dancer in the film, and there are times that Marshall carefully protects her with the way he shoots things. He’s a choreographer himself, so he knows whether or not he can show someone doing something. There are no doubles used in the film, so if you get a shot of someone tapdancing (as Gere does to hilarious effect in a number in the courtroom), it’s really them. I’d say that Zeta-Jones is the best singer out of the three leads, which leaves Gere as the one who sings and dances well enough to acquit himself, right smack dab in the middle. By casting actors, though, Marshall did the right thing because we’re not watching this on stage, seated 40 rows back. In some cases, we’re inches from these people’s faces. Watch John C. Reilly as he milks every bit of inherent pathos out of “Mr. Cellophane.” He’s wrenching. There’s a lethal mix of fury and heartbreak simmering just below the surface, and it’s because we can see his wounded animal eyes that the number stands out as one of the film’s best. Likewise, the way “We Both Reached For The Gun” has been refigured as a large-scale ventriloquist act would only work on film because of the way perspective shifts, leading to one of the great punchlines in the movie when we see Gere as a puppeteer, conducting the press to repeat exactly what he’s fed them. It’s audacious, and Marshall pulls it off with real panache. Dion Beebe, his cinematographer, is quickly establishing a reputation for being able to achieve high style on a conservative budget, as evidenced by his work on EQUILIBRIUM and HOLY SMOKE! The rest of the art departments all did a great job of striking just the right balance between the artificial and the authentic, and the result is one of the most daring and entertaining mixes of music and film since the passing of Dennis Potter.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND

QUICK EDITORIAL NOTE: This review was run for about 12 hours a few weeks back, but I didn’t realize I was breaking a press embargo at the time. So, I removed it, and now I’m happy to be able to post it again. Sorry if you were one of the TalkBackers who got erased in the process. “M”

I’d like to start this review by saying “Damn you, George Clooney, for making it all look so easy, and for being so freakin’ good at it.”

I mean, sure, you’re a very solid actor who, in recent years, has shown an almost uncanny sense of material, and who was smart enough to partner up with a filmmaker who not only directed your first truly great film role (OUT OF SIGHT), but who also seems possessed of the same adventurous spirit as you. And, sure, the two of you have managed to take your commercial and critical clout and turn it into an excuse to challenge what is typical of both movie stars and A-list directors each time out now.

But did you have to finally pick up an unfilmable, much beloved script, and somehow manage to turn it into one of the year’s most accomplished and intelligent entertainments? And did you have to establish right off the bat that you have a directorial style that is somehow original and vital without ripping off your recent talented collaborators?

And above all else, did you have to be the one who finally figured out what the hell to do with Sam Rockwell?

I remember the first time I read CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. It was the second script by Charlie Kaufman that I got my grubby li’l hands on, and I immediately liked it more than BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. To be fair, neither script was exactly what ended up in front of the cameras, but of the two, more work had to be done on MALKOVICH. CONFESSIONS was one of my favorite reads at the time, dark and trenchant and filled with a spectrum of self-loathing that I was sure would never end up actually funded and released. At least, not as any sort of mainstream film. When Mike Myers was flirting with playing Chuck Barris, I just laughed, because I knew there was no way a studio was going to make this film with a movie star. There was no movie star brave enough to really do it.

If there’s any justice, though, this is the film that will finally turn Rockwell into the star that he’s always threatened to become. There is something magnetic and compulsively watchable about this guy. For one thing, he seems like he can barely stand still, like there’s so much energy and so many ideas all racing through his system that he has to fidget and dance and move, just trying to keep from blowing some sort of gasket. When he started getting his James Brown on in CHARLIE’S ANGELS, it didn’t matter how silly the film was. There was something that made you watch this guy, pay attention to him. In films like LAWN DOGS and BOX OF MOONLIGHT and GALAXY QUEST and THE GREEN MILE, he would continually pull these moments out of the ether, finding some fresh and fascinating way to bring a script to life. But because he’s unconventional looking (i.e. not Hollywood perfect), he seemed to be on the road to a career as a supporting player who would never get his chance to carry a film.

I don’t know what it was that brought Rockwell to mind when Clooney began to cast this film, but I know it came down to a close race between Ben Stiller and Rockwell, and that screen tests had to be done of the two of them in character before Clooney was able to convince the powers-that-be to let him go with his first choice. Stiller’s a good actor, and he’s proven his range, but he didn’t need this movie. It wouldn’t have changed anything for him. For Rockwell, this movie is a revelation. It’s proof that all of those smaller roles really were indicators of an enormous talent just waiting to be fully unleashed.

As the film begins, Chuck Barris is locked in a hotel room in New York City. The place is destroyed, and so is he. His eyes are red-rimmed holes, like cigarette burns, and he is immobile in his misery, staring at the endless cycle of a TV channel signing on for a day of broadcast, then signing off, not caring what he’s looking at. This is a man on the wrong side of a breakdown. And this film is an effort to trace just exactly how that breakdown came to be, and who that man is, and just why it is that we’re supposed to care. I mean... this is the producer and host of THE GONG SHOW. The guy who created THE DATING GAME. The songwriter of a minor nearly-forgotten hit song. Why does it matter that he had a breakdown? Isn’t that one of the oldest stories in Hollywood?

In the hands of Charlie Kaufman, though, working from the “unauthorized autobiography” that we see Barris working on as he’s locked in that miserable little hotel room, this isn’t just another story of how excess burned out someone in the industry. Far from it. Instead, it’s a surreal trip to the heart of self-hatred, another of Kaufman’s pitch perfect scripts that defies easy categorization. I know people keep saying that he’s “weird,” or that his scripts are all about these crazy high concepts, but I don’t agree. I think at heart, each of his scripts are about the same thing: people who simply aren’t equipped to ask for the love they want and need. His longing for connection in ADAPTATION is only degrees away from the nearly-pathological way Chuck Barris chases sex in CONFESSIONS, and they’re both very similar to the longing that drives everyone in the portal in MALKOVICH. These people all act out because they want a stability, an intimacy, that they’re afraid they’ll never have.

For Barris, the pattern is established very early in his life. His first sexual experience isn’t an act of mutual longing. It’s a trick. He tells a neighborhood girl that his dick “tastes like strawberries,” then bets her when she refuses to believe him. His whole life, sex isn’t something that he shares with someone he cares about. It’s a trick, something he gets because he’s clever or he’s successful or he’s got something someone wants. There’s only one person who ever gives herself to him out of genuine desire, a girl named Penny, played with an almost uncomfortably wide-open heart by Drew Barrymore. I’m not a big fan of her work as an actress. She’s a little mannered for my tastes, even in her best moments, but there’s something about the combination of her and Rockwell that finally makes her connect here. Penny’s the kind of girl who just likes to try things. She slips in and out of new personas on a whim, like when she shows up after vanishing to San Francisco and sunnily announces, “Hey, Chuck, I’m a hippie!” What makes this some of the best work of her career is the way she gradually reveals the bruised heart that somehow keeps Penny ticking along, looking for that one thing that’s going to allow her to stop, that true thing that is going to give her a reason to put her search aside. And, sadly enough, when she finds it in Chuck, it’s all wrong despite how right it is because Chuck doesn’t want to settle down. He’s incapable of it. He’s terrified of it for reasons that he won’t admit even to himself.

When you hear people try to debate what of this story is “true” and what of it is “false,” rest assured: they missed the point. Barris is an unreliable narrator, but even in his most bald-faced lies, he is telling a sort of truth about himself, about how he felt as he moved through an undignified but wildly successful career in show business. What’s key about the double lives he leads is the way he works to protect his secrets, the way he tries desperately to keep the two halves of his life from colliding. So often, even when we want to give ourselves to someone or share our lives, there are things we compartmentalize, things we hide away, and we justify it by telling ourselves that it’s got nothing to do with them, or they wouldn’t understand, or it would just hurt them for no good reason. The truth is, though, secrets fester. They’re like shrapnel that travels under the skin, tearing an unpredictable path in slow-motion, hurting us over and over. Barris is a bit of a wild animal in the film, especially as a young man, and that’s what draws the attention of Jim Byrd, a CIA agent played with a convincing sense of smarm by Clooney. He recognizes something in Barris that wants to destroy, some seed of rage that can be used in service to “the greater good.” Barris puts up a feeble protest, saying that he’s not a killer, but even he doesn’t seem to believe that for a minute. When he goes a camp sponsored by the CIA to train killers (Robert Burke’s absolutely hilarious supporting role here is worth the price of admission all by itself), he is suddenly in his element, as much or even more than when he’s working as a producer on one of his various TV shows.

Kaufman’s script may be loaded with quirk (only he would “solve” the JFK assassination in a throwaway joke line of dialogue), but it’s never at the expense of emotional honesty. Films that convincingly portray someone on a downward spiral can be difficult to sit through. If we invest in these characters we’re watching, then we get dragged down with them, and it can hurt terribly when we finally reach bottom. For Barris, the bottom seems to be hard to define. There’s a scene when he’s at the Playboy Mansion, for example, and he’s got his hit shows on the air and everything seems to be great and he makes eye contact with this stunningly beautiful woman in the pool (played with surprising flair and poise by the insanely beautiful Krista Allen), only to be devastated once she actually speaks to him, lambasting him for the puerile garbage his name is attached to.

So is success enough? Does he need something else to complete him? And would contract killing for the CIA give him that outlet for his self-loathing and his anger and the pain he still feels from his humiliating childhood? Would t