Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Robert Towne wrote and directed this 1988 romantic crime picture, and it arrives with the pedigree of a man who once penned Chinatown. What we get is a California noir about a retired drug dealer, his detective best friend, and the restaurateur lodged between them like an olive in a very expensive martini. The plot is dense enough to require a diagram. Three attractive people orbit one another for two hours, a Mexican kingpin named Carlos lurks offscreen, and everyone speaks in the clipped, knowing tones of people who have read the screenplay and found it pleasing. It looks immaculate. Conrad Hall shot it, and the Academy noticed, though it lost. The film itself was nominated and won nothing.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. Raul Julia and a scattering of Latino performers fill the cartel roles, which is the standard furniture of the era's drug thrillers, not a statement of any kind. Michelle Pfeiffer's Jo Ann runs her own restaurant and carries herself with a chilly competence that the camera admires, but she exists to be fought over, and the fighting is the point. Race is present as casting texture and nothing more. No ecology, no class grievance, no bodies to be celebrated, no minds to be understood, no history to be corrected. The movie wants to be Casablanca for the cocaine decade, and it says so in its own advertising.

What saves it from sermonizing is that it has no sermon. It is a tangled, glossy romance that never once stops to instruct us on how to live. That restraint now reads as almost archaic. We are left with three movie stars, a hot tub, and a boat that explodes with millions aboard. The cocktail has little kick, as one contemporary critic observed, but it goes down smoothly and asks nothing of the conscience. A modest vintage. Not a challenging one.