Rocking the Suburbs with George Armitage

How the late Roger Corman acolyte and 'Miami Blues' director darkened the rom-com with 'Grosse Pointe Blank.'

“You can never go home again, Oatman. But I guess you can shop there.” — John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

The director George Armitage died this month at age 83, ending a career that found significant cult appreciation in many corners. But it was also a great “what if,” due to long stretches of inactivity and an offbeat sensibility that seemed out of step with both Hollywood and the few independent producers interested in making genre films through the late 70s and ‘80s. His crowning achievement—and an early New Cult Canon entry—was 1990’s Miami Blues, a quirky, violent, romantic and darkly hilarious neo-noir that brought Armitage seemingly out of nowhere, courtesy of producer Jonathan Demme, a fellow graduate of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking who correctly surmised that Armitage and crime novelist Charles Willeford would be the right match. 

The Corman connection is crucial to understanding Armitage, who wasn’t someone who merely passed through the Corman system, but something of a devotee. Armitage admired Corman as a director and met him and his Corman’s brother Gene when they were making 1967’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Fox, where Armitage had been working his way up through the mail room. (Armitage’s counterculture connections made him useful at Fox, where executives were trying to get a handle on youth culture.) Corman tasked him with writing his fascinating 1970 AIP production Gas-s-s-s, a post-apocalyptic comedy about the leak of an experimental gas that kills everyone over the age of 25, and he had a hand in two of Corman’s “nurses” movies, making his directorial debut with 1971’s Private Duty Nurses and scripting 1972’s Night Call Nurses for director Jonathan Kaplan. 

From there, Armitage got Gene Corman to produce 1972’s Hit Man, which adapts the same source material (Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) that was turned into Get Carter the previous year but as a blaxploitation vehicle for Bernie Casey, whose former cop bullies his way through Los Angeles to seek justice for his brother’s death. Armitage wrote another blaxploitation picture, this one about a female biker gang, for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1975 called Darktown Strutters that counts Quentin Tarantino among its admirers, and directed a Kris Kristofferson action film, 1976’s Vigilante Force, that gets filed under “vetspoitation,” though it also has some satirical underpinnings. Armitage always had a strong sense of humor and a leftist political bent, but critical and commercial success mostly eluded him. He spent nearly 15 years in the development wilderness before Miami Blues came along. 

Yet Armitage was able to experience something reasonably close to a hit in 1997, when he proved the ideal choice to direct Grosse Pointe Blank, a deadpan romantic comedy about a professional killer coming home for his ten-year high school reunion. With Miami Blues, Armitage had been able to establish an almost child-like bond between a sociopathic thief (Alec Baldwin) and a naive sex worker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) whose expectations for a man are heartbreakingly low. (“I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me.”) And so the challenge this time was rekindle an old flame between Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack), a contract killer, and his high-school sweetheart Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver), who he’d abandoned on prom night. That’s a steep hill to climb. 

And yet John Cusack was the right man to do the climbing. It makes some sense to think about Grosse Pointe Blank as Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler in 1989’s Say Anything… returning for his not-quite-10-year reunion had he decided Ione Skye’s brainiac was better off without him. In a moment of senior-year panic, Martin had chosen to flee for the Army, setting his life on a weird trajectory that led through the CIA and into still-darker mercenary corners, a slide down a slippery moral slope. Yet it’s easy to imagine Martin echoing Lloyd’s words when asked what he intended to do for living: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” That crosses out a lot of job opportunities in the Classifieds. But not the job of contract killer. 

Credited in part to Cusack and his writing buddies Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis, who had reworked an original draft by Tom Jankiewicz, the script is set in an upscale Detroit suburb not unlike the tonier areas of Evanston, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where Cusack grew up. Though Grosse Pointe Blank was regrettably not filmed in Grosse Pointe, the setting allows for the collision between upper-middle-class suburban normalcy and a confab of warring assassins to register with maximum force. Yet Martin’s return to Grosse Pointe finds him in a vulnerable existential mood, so much so that he keeps his terrified therapist, Dr. Oatman (a brilliant Alan Arkin) on speed dial throughout the ordeal. (“I’m very serious about this process,” Martin tells Oatman, who tries to beg out of their arrangement. “And I know where you live.”) On top of reencountering Debi, who’s haunted his dreams for years, Martin pulls up to his old house, only to discover that it’s been turned into a convenience store. Whatever connection he had to his old life—or any kind of normal life—is gone. 

What hasn’t changed much is Debi, who Driver plays with such radiance and wit that it makes you doubly angry that 1997, the year of this film and Good Will Hunting, was both her breakout and her peak in Hollywood. She’s not as hostile as expected toward Marvin—and Marvin not as contrite, frankly—but she’s curious about where he’s been and why he left, and she seems to have not found anyone like him in the meantime. The two greet each other with a brief make-out session that seems to surprise them both and their chemistry survives his natural reticence to give her any information about himself. Meanwhile, he’s got a ton of work-related issues, including a contract job in Detroit, a set-up by a rival hitman (Dan Aykroyd) who’s trying to talk him into unionizing, two government agents (Hank Azaria and K. Todd Freeman) following him, and an international assassin (amusingly named Felix La Poubelle and played by Benny Urquidez) who’s trying to kill him over a dead dog. And he’s chosen this inopportune time to be a little gun shy. 

Grosse Pointe Blank represents a transitional period in Cusack’s career, when he was pushing the limits of the breezy charisma that had gotten him through “Savage” Steve Holland comedies like Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, and the earnestness that had carried his work in The Sure Thing and Say Anything…. Here and in High Fidelity two years later, Cusack plays hipster jerks who are trying to sort through the mess they’ve made of bachelorhood, specifically how they’ve disappointed women who are too good for them. Cusack always seemed to know that audiences would find him redeemable—it helps that he’s witty and always has excellent taste in music—but he approached these roles without much movie-star vanity. He was willing to play the asshole for a while. 

At the same time, Grosse Pointe Blank taps into a highly specific brand of Gen-X slacker disaffection, when late-twentysomethings were drifting around a culture that seemed to lack much definition or meaning. As Martin tells it, when he took his service exam for the Army, his psych profile “fit a certain ‘moral flexibility’” and you can see that his sniping skills proved useful elsewhere due to his exceptional talent at bullshit rationalization. (“The idea of government, nations is public relations theory at this point,” he says, though he does refuse to shoot someone on a Greenpeace boat.) To his mind, if someone has been targeted for assassination, they’ve probably done something bad enough to deserve it, and he’s too lazy to inquire further about it. 

Yet Grosse Pointe Blank isn’t just about slacker disaffection—it embodies it, too, which is why it works so fabulously as a comedy. Most of the time, Martin doesn’t even bother coming up with a fake occupation, telling folks straight up that he’s a professional killer, which of course they find charmingly absurd. Armitage consistently scores off the comic tension between his gruesome vocation and the sunny suburban attitudes of a place like Grosse Pointe. In one of the funnier bits, Felix Le Poubelle enters the reunion looking very much like a European assassin and tells the alumnus at check-in, “It is I, Sidney Feldman.” She notes that he’s sure changed a lot since graduation, but gives him a pass anyway. The only sticking point for a guy like Martin is coming up with some forgettable job that his fellow graduates can nod at politely and smile. (This proves difficult. “I’m a pet psychiatrist.” “I sell couch insurance.” “I test-market positive thinking.”) 

At its darkest, the tone of Grosse Pointe Blank resembles a comedy like Repo Man, which surely Armitage and company had in mind when Martin walks into the convenience store that was once his home and the song “Live and Let Die” turns into Muzak. Martin isn’t a punk like Emilio Estevez’s Otto Maddox in Repo Man, but neither man belongs to the mainstream. Yet Grosse Pointe Blank ultimately isn’t very dark, because it also serves as a pleasing romantic comedy, buoyed by good chemistry between attractive stars and one of the era’s best soundtracks, which cherry-picks excellent ‘80s pop hits (“Walk Like an Egyptian,” “99 Luftballons,” et al.) and New Wave singles that are just this side of obvious. (It’s so good to see people dancing to Tones on Tail’s “Go!”) 

And surely, for some significant portion of the audience, there was some additional pleasure in Grosse Pointe Blank being the square peg in the round hole of the ‘90s rom-com boom. Ridiculous concepts are part of the rom-com formula, after all, so why not try one about a hit man coming back to high school and the girl he left behind? When a blood-streaked Martin declares, in the middle of a shootout, “Debi, I’m in love with you and I know we can make this relationship work,” it is ridiculous and sweet simultaneously, which is how a good rom-com operates. Armitage was the type of director who could give a premise like that a little edge and a little soul. It made all the difference.