Taglines: How much can three friends share?
Simpatico movie storyline. As youths in Azusa, Vinnie, Carter, and Rosie pull off a racing scam, substituting winners for plodders and winning big bucks on long odds. When an official uncovers the scam, they set him up for blackmail. Jump ahead twenty years, Carter and Rosie are married, successful racers in Kentucky about to sell their prize stallion, Simpatico.
Vinnie is a drunk in Pomona. Vinnie decides to make a play for Rosie, lures Carter to California, steals his wallet and heads for Kentucky with the original blackmail material. Carter begs Vinnie’s friend, a grocery clerk named Cecilia, to follow Vinnie and get the stuff back that he has in a box. Will she succeed?
Simpatico is a 1999 film starring Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Sharon Stone, Catherine Keener, Albert Finney, Liam Waite, Shawn Hatosy, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Whit Crawford, Ashley Guthrie Baker and Nicole Forester. It was adapted for the screen from the 1994 play Simpatico by Sam Shepard.
Film Review for Simpatico
“Simpatico” is a long slog through perplexities and complexities that disguise what this really is: the kind of B-movie plot that used to clock in at 75 minutes on the bottom half of a double bill. It’s based on a Sam Shepard play, unseen by me. Since Shepard is a good playwright, we’re left with two possibilities: (1) It has been awkwardly adapted, or (2) it should have stayed in Shepard’s desk drawer.
The plot involves a kind of exchange of personalities between Carter (Jeff Bridges), a rich Kentucky racehorse breeder, and Vinnie (Nick Nolte), a shabby layabout from Cucamunga, Calif., who has been blackmailing him for years. They were once friends, long ago when they were young, and involved in a scheme to cheat at the track by switching horses. Vinnie has some photos that Carter would not want anyone to see, and that gives him leverage.
This time, he interrupts Carter in the middle of negotiations to sell an expensive horse named Simpatico, demanding that he fly to California to get him out of a fix. Seems a supermarket cashier named Cecilia (Catherine Keener) is accusing him of sexual misconduct.
Oh, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, and neither Cecilia nor her relationship with Vinnie is quite as described. Two other figures from the past also enter: Rosie (Sharon Stone), now Carter’s boozy but colorful wife, and Simms (Albert Finney), once a racing commissioner, now a tracer of bloodlines. Students of noir will know that the contemporary story will stir up old ghosts.
Those who are not noir lovers won’t be in the dark for long, since director Matthew Warchus and his co-writer, David Nicholls, supply flashbacks that incriminate some of the characters (although not, in this day and age, seriously enough to inspire the vast heavings of this leviathan plot).
Nolte and Bridges are portrayed as young men by Shawn Hatosy and Liam Waite, a casting decision that adds to the murkiness, since Hatosy, who is supposed to be the young Nolte, looks more like the young Bridges, and Waite, who is supposed to be the young Bridges, looks like nobody else in the movie. This theme is developed further, I suppose, as Nolte and Bridges subtly start to resemble each other.
It happens that I’ve just seen a complicated noir, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” which also involves sexual misconduct in the past and blackmail in the present. One reason it works so well is that the characters seem to drive the plot: Things turn out the way they do because the characters are who they are. The plot of “Simpatico” is like a clockwork mechanism that would tick whether or not anyone cared what time it was.
Simpatico (2000)
Directed by: Matthew Warchus
Starring: Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Sharon Stone, Catherine Keener, Albert Finney, Liam Waite, Shawn Hatosy, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Whit Crawford, Ashley Guthrie Baker, Nicole Forester
Screenplay by: Matthew Warchus, David Nicholls
Production Design by: Amy B. Ancona
Cinematography by: John Toll
Film Editing by: Pasquale Buba, Seth Flaum
Costume Design by: Karen Patch
Set Decoration by: Ellen Brill
Art Direction by: Andrew Laws
Music by: Stewart Copeland
MPAA Rating: R for some strong sexuality, and for language.
Distributed by: Fine Line Features
Release Date: January 28, 2000
Views: 115
