The Nice Guys
Shane Black’s hugely entertaining and very funny The Nice Guys is a private eye picture with jokes. The distinction between that description and straight comedy is a meaningful one, as Black (still best known perhaps for writing the original Lethal Weapon) respects the detective genre and doesn’t ignore the consequences of violence. The heroes — or “tarnished heroes”, as Black described them on a recent podcast — are private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) and unlicensed, low-rent enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe). In 1977 Los Angeles the two are working opposite ends of a case that touches the porn industry, Detroit auto companies, the Justice Department, and a missing young woman (Margaret Qualley). The case, while comprehensible, is only the excuse for a movie about people on the margins that finds two top-drawer actors stepping out of familiar territory.
Ryan Gosling, on something of a comic run after this and The Big Short, plays March as a man who has forgotten how talented he is. Drinking too much and guilty after a personal tragedy, March is barely able to care for his daughter Holly when Healy arrives at his door. Special mention must be made of Angourie Rice as Holly; she more than holds her own with older costars and pulls off all the moments when Black’s script (written with Anthony Bagarozzi) makes her the film’s conscience. Gosling is as loose and funny as he has ever been, and he and Crowe are able comic partners. Russell Crowe either gained weight or padded up for this role, but when two thugs brace him at his apartment Healy is able to dive over a couch and come up firing. There’s a slapstick quality to much of the gunplay, and Black turns the hotel where the climax takes place into a sort of life-sized Rube Goldberg machine with March falling off ledges and through multiple layers of glass. The laughs don’t obscure the fact that the bullets hit people, and the death of one character is carried out with a brutality that calls the efficacy of March and Healy’s mission into question.
In the podcast I linked to above, Shane Black describes how his early love of pulp detective novels influenced his writing. The end of The Nice Guys has a rueful cynicism that would do John D. MacDonald proud, but the joy of how Black executes his tale is a welcome gift from a sometimes cold cinematic universe.
