a gun, a car, a blonde, a problem

Speaking of private dicks, I mean of the investigative kind, I found another character fantasising about being one in A gun, a car, a blonde, a film of a few years ago that I picked up on DVD at Market Bazaar. Jim Metzler plays Richard Spraggins, a wheelchair-bound victim of spinal cancer, formerly active, athletic and successful, now reduced to being preyed on by a shiftless and ditzy younger sister (Kay Lenz), who’s ostensibly his ‘primary caregiver’, as Garfield would say. However, since Richard was in his former life an effortlessly wealthy businessman, he has others, staff and/or friends, to help him out, including a black and probably gay personal assistant, a housekeeper probably from south of the border, and a new age old mate (John Ritter). Richard slips into despair fuelled by alcohol, much to the concern of his supporters, and starts developing a fantasy around a sexy new neighbour (Andrea Thompson). In the film noir fantasy world he becomes P I Richard Stone, the neighbour becomes his client, and his various other associates play police or underworld figures. They include Billy Bob Thornton, who in the ‘real world’ plays Syd, the sister’s slumming boyfriend.
Of course, Stone is as capable and confident as Spraggins now isn’t, and the dull Syd is transformed into a larger than life villain, and there are some fine wisecracks and amusing references from one world to the other, and I suppose it affirms the positive power of fantasy as release, but it was all spoiled for me by some typically yank middle-class attitudes. We’re asked to believe that Spraggins, whose multi-tiered, open plan home is tastefully decorated in low-key culture vulture style, was in his pre-cancerian existence the owner-manager of a tyre factory turning a handsome profit (Richard always had a golden touch, claims his sis, which of course is meant to indicate her ‘view’ that it’s all just a matter of good and bad luck). Further, this effortless and unlikely capitalist writes a will which hands the factory over to its workers. A bit communistic, says his lawyer. A bit vague and unconvincing, say I. The equation of capitalism with deserved wealth and generosity of spirit is hard to ignore, especially when you look at the nasty sister, self-absorbed and parasitic – ah, sigh, the poor will always be with us. The struggling Syd is also painted as a loser, and a user. The good guys are the housekeeper (illegal immigrant – oppressed minority) and his friend/personal assistant (black, possibly gay – doubly oppressed minority). It’s a kind of complacent apologetic, reinforcing the assumption that the poor largely deserve their place and must be put up with stoically or avoided. You might want to help them in an abstract way (the factory workers), but best to keep them off-stage. Oppressed minorities are okay as long as they’re not looked into too closely, or as long as they’re quasi middle-class themselves. God knows a lot of poor and struggling people are bad news in one’s personal life, bitter experience teaches that, but they’re never entirely the authors of their own misfortune or of their own unfortunate characters, it’s way more complex than that. This isn’t remotely touched on in the film – and why is Richard such a vastly different character from his sister anyway? We never find out, indeed the question is never posed.
So, by a kind of omission, a lot of yank claptrap about winners and losers and being self-made is inferred, and it lingers unpleasantly on the palate.