Every time Michael (Nicholas Cage) tries to leave Red Rock, Missouri, a town of pretty casual murderers, he gets pulled back in. The first time he tries to leave, there was a fresh $20000 in his glove compartment, but he couldn't just leave a guy hurt in the middle of the road. Another time, he couldn't leave the pretty girl who needed some help to rob her asshole-husband. And yet another time, after a foot chase through a forest, bullets splintering trees just inches from his face, he lucked on to the main highway just as a car passed. A ride out of town and to safety. Except the driver wants to stop and buy Michael a beer. "I'm not good enough to buy you a beer?" the man in the black cowboy hat and metal bolo-tie asks. If Michael says 'no', he's home free. Michael says 'yes'. Michael can't be rude.
Michael is a former marine, the nicest of guys who's having a bad-run of bad-luck. The film opens as he awakes after a night sprawled across the backseat of his Deville and opens the door with his toes. He does one-armed pushups in the middle of the deserted blacktop and, under a windmill, shaves, dipping his razor in a bowl of tepid water. He practices for his job interview in the reflection in the driver's side window: "Am I glad to meet you, Mr. Hanson." But because he won't lie about his bum knee -- "That wouldn't be right" -- he doesn't get the job. The last $5-bill in his wallet is just enough gas to get to the next town, Red Rock, Missouri, and a bar that's hiring. "You're Lyle from Texas, right?" the bartender mistakenly asks, assumes because of the Texas-license plate. "You're here for the job?" This time, out of opportunity and necessity, Michael lies. "And you must be Wayne," Michael gleans from a sign behind the bar. Michael's 'yes' precedes knowing what the job actually is: killing Wayne's wife.
On the scale of Cage, this Nic is at a quiet 3 out of 10 crazy. His Michael is so down on his luck that Cage needs to hold back and can't indulge, rarely flashes that mad-scientist smile of his. Things keep happening to Michael so he's more quiet-sufferance than manic. After all, he's a former soldier who survived a bombing in Libya so he knows the value of staying composed. There are familiar dashes of Cage, though, mixed-in. He freaks-out once, slaps at the bare bulb above the washroom sink in Wayne's bar. He's cracking walnuts when he surprises Wayne's wife, Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle), as she returns home from some horse-back riding. So Michael is still a Cagey odd-duck, but the least-odd of the odd characters that populate Red Rock.
The real Lyle-from-Texas is played by, of course, Dennis Hopper. Lyle and Michael both have matching Texas license plates and even matching US Marines tattoos. "Last unit to leave Vietnam, April '71," Lyle says on one of the drives back to Red Rock. There is a symmetry between Hopper and Cage, a manic-ness and an outsider's intensity. They aren't the subtlest guys. Outside of Kyle McLachlan, Hopper and Cage are the most Lynchian of actors, the two guys who most fit into that world of pop abstract-expressionism (though there's no hard-core deviance in this movie, there's lots of other Lynchian stuff going down like the aforementioned twinship, there's the campy tone that underscores the violence, and there's even a scene inside a closet shot looking-out through horizontal slats). There's a more ready violence to Hopper and Red Rock West knows this, too. It's his Lyle who asks Michael to join him for a beer and it's a delight to watch Michael try and fail to say no. Michael's trapped both by his desire to be polite and the fear of something in his new acquaintance that might boil over.
Lara Flynn Boyle plays the wife-to-be-killed and adds an extra dash of Twin Peaks to Red Rock (JT Walsh is great as her husband). There's an oddness to her, too, especially in those Lakers games she spent courtside with an already-old Jack Nicholson. In her prime, she was pretty, but there was something off to her pretty. Maybe it's the almost impossible petite-ness, the wispyness, of her frame. Or the paleness of her skin, the way her nose seems to fade into her face in certain shots. I most remember her as Wayne's stalker ex-girlfriend who so truthfully believed a gun-rack is the right gift for a guy who runs a community-access rock-and-roll show. Her Suzanne in Red Rock West is not shocked when she finds Michael, guns and walnuts in hand, waiting for her. She doesn't shake when she pours him whiskey. "You ever been married?" she asks Michael, rhetorically. "It does strange things to people." And she offers him double-the-fee to kill her husband.
The "Welcome to Red Rock" sign becomes a Sysyphean-punchline after about the third time Michael passes it. He's a good man, he doesn't steal from that deaf gas-station attendant and he took that Libyan shrapnel for our freedom, so we cheer a little bit every time he seems to make it out of town. But we laugh a little bit more every time he doesn't. He belongs in Red Rock.
