Fingers

Fingers is still the best thing writer-director James Toback has ever done, and one of the most startling debuts in American film.

The movie is raw and over the top, yet it has an emotional force that more refined works only wish they had. [15 Nov 2002]

Directing his first film, the writer James Toback seems to be playing the literary-adolescent's game of wanting to go crazy so he can watch his own reactions...Yet the film never seems ridiculous, because he's got true moviemaking fever.

A gangster psychodrama that doesn't play by genre rules, Fingers is a study in bold contrasts, mingling the sublime and the vulgar, classical music and '50s rock, brute masculinity and sexual confusion.

It's not exactly pleasant, but it is compelling.

Obviously, a split this elementary and theoretical needs all the concrete dramatic evidence it can get to stay alive. Toback's scenario lacks that evidence, as well as a dramatic structure.

Mr. Toback favors a stiff, staccato, nervous style of direction that's heavy on the hocus-pocus and low on verisimilitude or insight. Aiming for a mood of nightmarish abstraction, he borders all too often on jumpy incompetence.