I remember when The Last Seduction came out. There was a lot of praise for actress Linda Fiorentino’s performance in the lead role as an amoral sociopath who is always one step ahead of the men in her life. I later saw Fiorentino in both Men in Black and the Kevin Smith movie Dogma, and what little I knew about this movie told me she probably would make for a great, old-fashioned femme fatale. She is an attractive woman for starters, and her smokey voice reminds me a bit of the likes of Lauren Bacall in her prime. Yeah, I know Hollywood chews up and spits out a lot of actresses, but I was a bit curious what happened to her.
According to Wikipedia, she hasn’t had an acting job since 2009, probably after she pleaded guilty to something involving a boyfriend at the time. Wikipedia doesn’t mention if she got any jail time out of it. Regardless, The Last Seduction popped up on The Criterion Channel this month.
Bridget Gregory (Fiorentino) is a manager at a telemarketing company while her doctor husband Clay (Bill Pullman) is selling medicinal cocaine on the street. After a very tense sale earns Clay a large sum he needs to pay back a loan shark, a shaken Clay ends up slapping Bridget when she insults him after he was nearly killed. She then swipes all the money while he’s in the shower and runs off, leaving him back where he started in New York City while she presumably makes her way to some other big city. She instead ends up in a small town, Beston, where she meets insurance agent Mike Swale (Peter Berg) at a local bar and is soon having sex with him. She also gets a job at the insurance company he works for under a new name.
However, Clay needs the money back as that loan shark keeps coming by and breaking fingers. He knows Bridget’s tricks and how to track her when she makes collect calls home to find out things. Meanwhile, Mike is falling hard for the woman who is clearly only using him for sex. She won’t talk much about her hopes and dreams even as he’s trying to get to know her as a person. Meanwhile, she’s using her job to manipulate people around her and stay one step ahead of Clay. Can Bridget get away with what she’s doing or will either Mike or Clay figure out what she’s up to before it’s too late for either of them?
I said I figured Fiorentino would make a good femme fatale, and I was right. She’s fantastic in this movie, and it helps that she has a great script to back her up. Bridget is the sort of smart women who can think well on her feet and always find an advantage, up to and including using a small town’s racism to her advantage. She’s not a particularly sympathetic character, nor is she supposed to be. Even the inciting incident that might have convinced her to leave Clay, his slapping her, isn’t really something that upset her. Even she more or less admits she probably would have taken the money and left him anyway regardless of whether or not he hit her. It doesn’t exactly make Clay a misunderstood man–morally, he seems to be on the same level she is only not as clever–but it does show how well the husband and wife know each other.
If anything, the movie’s weakness is Mike. He is far too naive to be all that believable. I can believe that a man like him, largely innocent in the ways of love, might fall for someone like Bridget, but he watches her do a lot of sketchy things, things he repeatedly says she shouldn’t do, and he follows her around anyway. Yes, the final scenes resolving the situation with both Clay and Mike work very well for the sort of movie this is, but I just couldn’t really believe Mike was that foolish. If he wasn’t, the movie wouldn’t work, but yeah, as a character, he didn’t work for me. But that’s a fairly minor complaint for a fun movie.
Grade: B+
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