Prizzi’s Honor was largely acclaimed at the time as a late
career peak for director John Huston, and one can certainly admire the sense of
unflustered control that he brings to it; however, it’s awfully hard now to
determine whether the expertise yields much more than a sustained impenetrable blankness.
Essentially it’s a single premise film (and not a premise of great inherent
interest or wider applicability) - a cold-blooded amorality (under the guise of
family unity and honor) that permeates and subsumes all else, from the exercise
of business to that of love and marriage. High-ranking mobster Charley Partanna
(Jack Nicholson) falls for Irene (Kathleen Turner), a glamorous stranger he
glimpses at a family wedding, and soon determines he can’t live without her,
even as it comes to light that she’s herself a professional assassin, and
responsible for embezzling money from the all-powerful Prizzi family for which
he works, so that he would typically be knocking her off rather than wanting to
marry her. Huston carries the inscrutability to a surely counter-productive
extent, such that the final, potentially tragedy-tinged machinations between
Charley and Irene become almost entirely abstract and meaningless (especially
as Nicholson’s initially amusing performance rapidly becomes monotonous, and
Turner doesn’t get much opportunity to flesh out her character); it’s rendered somewhat
more interesting though by the sense that Huston might know exactly that, and
is almost daring the audience to find him wanting. The script’s steady flow of
deadpan incongruities (“I didn’t get married so my wife could go on working,”
protests Charley, as Irene plans out a role for herself in an upcoming
atrocity) marks it as a comedy of sorts, but one devoid of any relief, stifling
laughter as thoroughly as it does moral accountability. Anjelica Huston’s
supporting actress Oscar now seems as peculiar as much else about the film.
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