I knew exactly nothing about The Pope of Greenwich Village aside from the fact the title sounded vaguely familiar. That was it. Granted, I have watched movies for less than that, but given this is a 38 year old film and the title still rings something of a bell, I figured it was worth a look. Granted, I only learned after the fact that it was considered a comedy as I didn’t see it that way. Yeah, there were moments that could be seen as funny throughout, and knowing it’s supposed to be funny had me re-evaluate much of what I saw, but it didn’t hit me as a comedy, even a dark one, while I was watching it.
That doesn’t automatically make the movie bad, mind you. It just forced me to rethink my first take a little.
Cousins Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) work together at a restaurant where Charlie is head waiter/maitre d’ and Paulie is another waiter. However, Paulie is caught skimming checks, so both men are fired. Charlie is trying to do the right thing. He dresses well and does what he can to stick to the straight and narrow. He wants to open a restaurant, he has alimony payments for his ex-wife, and his current girlfriend, aerobics instructor Diane (Daryl Hannah) is pregnant. Paulie, meanwhile, is looking to solidify his controlling interests in a racehorse he sees as a ticket to future riches and success. Seeing as how he somewhat owes his cousin and needing help pulling off a plan, Paulie proposes the pair rob a safe that, Paulie is certain, will be easy money that the two can get away with without too much hassle. Paulie recruits an older safecracker (Kenneth McMillan) looking for one last big score before his eyesight gives out, and everything seems to be going well.
Or not. Diane, for one, thinks Paulie is far too unreliable, and she may not be wrong. The plan goes awry rather quickly too, as an undercover cop comes across the trio at work and accidentally dies. Furthermore, while there is a lot of money in the safe, Paulie never quite got around to saying whose money it was, namely local mob boss “Bed Bug” Eddie Grant (Burt Young), and Grant isn’t the kind of guy who will let that much of his money take a walk go lightly. Can the cousins get out of this mess alive and intact?
So, I think I know why I didn’t think of this as a comedy right away, and it has to do with how a movie like this might be made today. There are lots of eccentric characters in this, many played by recognizable character actors, and it occurs to me that this is the sort of movie that, today, would be played as a more straightforward crime movie since putting eccentrics in a crime movie is much more likely to happen today. Last year’s Copshop comes to mind there. That was played pretty straight even as the characters themselves were more like exaggerated examples of real human beings as opposed to, you know, actual human beings. And even if there were parts to that and other movies like it, movies that have become more prominent since Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene that were genuinely funny, I still don’t think of these movies as comedies. That, basically, is probably why it didn’t occur to me that this movie was meant to be darkly funny.
Besides, there’s a lot of legitimately good acting going on here, most notably from Rourke and, in a very small role, Geraldine Page that would not have looked out-of-place in a drama. However, I honestly found Eric Roberts more annoying than anything else here, and that greatly affected my enjoyment. When Hannah’s Diane suggested that Charlie needed to stay away from Paulie, I half expected the movie would end up vindicating her. It doesn’t, but that was my honest hope. While Rourke and many of the other actors were largely playing their roles straight, even during the more humorous moments, Roberts seemed to be overacting in a much more over-the-top manner. True, his style fits the whole “it’s actually a comedy” thing better, but since it was so much different from the others, it stood out, and not in a way I particularly liked. That ended up affecting my enjoyment of the movie in the end, so while there’s a lot to like about The Pope of Greenwich Village, Eric Roberts’s performance was not one of those things.
Grade: C+
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