Fingers

This late 70s film is nicely filmed and looks very good. Now, if I were going to follow the adage of "if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all", there would nothing else I could say about Fingers. Since I'm something of a bitter prick, there's a whole lot more to this review. This aimless mess is fully of caricaturish performances and scenes that look like outtakes accidentally left in the movie. When watching it, I frequently couldn't believe what writer/director James Toback was offering to me on screen and spent much of the last half of Fingers laughing at the gaudy, overwrought, nonsensical nature of it. Jimmy (Harvey Keitel) is a man in his late 20s who desperately wants to be a concert pianist. He practices relentlessly and childishly mouths along with the notes as he plays. Jimmy is also an obviously disturbed young man with an explosive temper and a needy desire for the opposite sex. He's got a mother in a mental ward and a father who's a loan shark. This story concerns the thoroughly disconnected strands of Jimmy getting a chance to audition for Carnegie Hall, his fixation on a woman he sees out on the street one day and his father asking Jimmy to collect on two outstanding debts. Along the way we see a scuffle over Jimmy's 1970s purse-sized portable radio and cassette player, a rectal exam, a bathroom sexual encounter that resembles a man trying to squeeze under a limbo bar and football great Jim Brown portraying the forerunner of South Park's Chef. This film is just ridiculous. It appears to be an middle class take on a Taxi Driver-ish breakdown with an undercurrent of homosexuality thrown in, but it's so meandering and parts of it are so exaggerated that it's hard to know for sure. There are moments in this movie that come out of nowhere and then vanish back into oblivion. The three separate plot threads are so fragmented and halting it's as if the script were written longhand by someone with Parkinson's disease. It's kind of difficult to accurately describe Fingers because there are so many odd moments that are played completely seriously when they actually belong in the gag reel as the end of one of Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run movies. I mean, writer/director Toback literally spends the better part of a minute showing a couple of white chicks sucking on Jim Brown's nipples. What do you say about that? Harvey Keitel is…well, Harvey Keitel and yes, he does end up naked at one point looking into the camera with a "What do you want me to do about it?" look on his face. He does a nice job with the symptoms of Jimmy's personality disorders but there's nothing whole or coherent about the role he was given. Tisa Farrow as the woman Jimmy's obsessed with speaks and moves in a monotone. As for the rest of the cast, all you can do is play "Spot the future member of The Sopranos". When talented creators do crappy work, their admirers often feel compelled to pretend otherwise. That's about the only explanation I can come up with for why this thing made it to DVD. It's astonishingly poor storytelling put to no good use.

This hard to find film is well worth the search. Kietel gives an amazing, painful performance as a brilliant pianist whose self-destructive neurosis seems to keep him from ever achieving greatness. The film has been called mysognyistic most likely due to the portrayal of little Jimmy "Fingers". I'd have to say the film itself deals a fairly rough hand to the character's mysogny. Jimmy's social ineptness with women is painful to watch. He alternates between the utmost charm and just plain disturbing street thugishness. All in all it's a powerful film and one of Kietel's best performances.

Dear Harvey Keitel, your performance was the best thing about Fingers - a film about a tough young man torn between his loyalty towards his gangster father (Michael.V.Gazzo) and his ambition to become a piano player. The scenes where you're playing the piano were really intense and beautiful. You must have worked your ass off. You were also at your very best in the scenes where you're collecting debts for your father and living the gangster life. The film is a very deterministic character study about a young man struggling to escape his roots. Made almost ten years after the Manson killings, it is also about the dark side of sexual liberation when a mixed race threesome ends in violence (an alpha male black gangster smashes together the heads of two white women when they refuse to kiss each other). There is also a funny scene when you literally jump on a woman in a restroom and indulge in casual sex. Michael.V.Gazzo is a very talkative and cunning gangster, not too different from the role he played in Godfather 2. Jim Brown is effortlessly menacing and nasty as the black gangster. Spike Lee almost certainly based Radio Rahim in Do The Right Thing on your character who walks around playing loud songs on a tape recorder. There was one remarkable bit of editing when a scene of violence cuts straight to you playing the piano, Harvey. Best Regards, Pimpin. (8/10)

Troubled pianist Jimmy Fingers (Harvey Keitel) pursues artist Carol (Tisa Farrow) with his radio but she is with Dreems (Jim Brown). He gets his musical skills and madness from his institutionalized mother. He's also a ruthless debt collector for his aging mobster father Ben (Michael V. Gazzo). He's the only one left working for him. His father has a large debt to collect but the arrogant gangster is refusing to pay the over-the-hill Ben. This is Keitel's Taxi Driver. It is lesser known and not as great. The commonality is the lead. Keitel is masterful. He has so much internal fire. He is a man ready to explode at any moment. Now, times have caught up with filmmaker James Toback recently. He's had a career of extraordinary highs and ugly lows. It doesn't get much lower than he is today. That is beside the point. For this movie, there is greatness and his name is Harvey Keitel.

Harvey Keitel is Jimmy fingers, a man divided by his passion for the piano and his day job as a collector for his mobster father. He is the perfect choice for this dark and schizophrenic role, since it matches his personality. His father is Italian, and he wishes him to carry on in the family business, and his Jewish mother hopes for him to become a concert pianist, and so that is what he must choose from. It is pretty straight forward, as he slips back and forth from sitting at a keyboard, performing classical music, and in the next moment, beating someone for not paying his debts in a timely manner. I love Keitel as an actor, but I found Fingers tedious and I didn't really care what happened to the nut case in the end. A 5/10 for Harvey.

The pianist/loan shark collector at the center of writer-director James Toback's "Fingers" is a quirky, volatile character, one with a defensive edge and a hair-trigger temper. Yet, by the end of the film, he's in far worse shape than he was at the beginning, making him not so much a crestfallen anti-hero as simply a bad example. Harvey Keitel is marvelous in the lead--tense and coiled, yet magnetic--and he's allowed room by the director to give his character some boyish shading (when he's playing his beloved vintage pop tunes on his cassette recorder in public). But the character has no life outside of his duties for his father, his attraction to a teasing sculptress and his dark, personal world of music. He has no friends, he fights with everyone he comes into contact with, he argues with his doctor doing a prostate exam and his virtuosity at the piano does not pay him back in kind. Some see this, Toback's directorial debut, as a portrait of a character in hell, but by not writing a full, rounded life for this man, it's a movie traveling a dead-end street. It seems extremely lazy and monotonous from a narrative standpoint, although the picture (filmed in wintry New York City, with its brown buildings and bare tress) certainly looks good. Personal taste will have to decide its ultimate impact. ** from ****

Jimmy "Fingers" Angellelli (Harvey Keitel) is an aspiring concert pianist, but also a debt collector for his father who is a small-time racketeer. In addition Jimmy has enough sexual conflicts for a dozen men - sometimes he is shy, sometimes overly aggressive, most times attracted to women, sometimes attracted to men, but always sexually confused. And all of this is complicated by a serious prostate problem that makes the sexual act problematic in any case (be prepared for the most graphic prostate exam ever filmed). Jimmy's personality split between his better nature and being a thug is by implication handed down to him by his parents. His artistic side came from his mother, who was a pianist (now institutionalized) and his baser side came from his father Ben (Michael Gazzo). Ben is past his prime and depends on Jimmy to do his dirty work. In many ways Jimmy, who is a man in his thirties, is still a child. He is still trying to please his parents and make sense of his sexuality. Interesting themes, but I didn't buy a lot of what is presented. If Jimmy really had a shot at performing at Carnegie Hall, he would need to have been practicing six hours a day and studying with a mentor. We see scant evidence of that, so I just didn't believe in his talent as a pianist. Keitel is so obviously not playing the piano in those scenes where he is supposed to be playing Bach that it is disconcerting; his fake emotionalizing at the piano is embarrassing. Plus he is not very protective of his hands, to say the least. Michael Gazzo seemed to be able to talk only in an irritating shout. His overacting got on my nerves every time he made an appearance. And how was it that such a crude man was ever married to a classical pianist? Jimmy's sense of duty to his father did not seem well grounded. How can you have much allegiance to a father who tells you, "I should have strangled you in the crib"? However, Keitel gives a powerful, nuanced performance and that is the main attraction. This is the story of a man who is torn in so many directions that you are pretty certain that the ending is not going to be pretty, so don't expect to be uplifted when it's all over. This was essentially remade in France in 2005 as "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté). I think that film is more subtle and the personalities more well developed.

****SPOILERS**** Outlandish motion picture that tries to cover too much ground and in the end gets buried under it. Harvey Keitel, Jimmy "Fingers" Angelelli, comes across as a borderline psycho who's about to explode, which is just what he does at the end of the movie. Jimmy is pressured by wanting to become a Carnegie Hall caliber Bach playing pianist and at the same time doing his job for his dad Ben, Michael V. Gazzo, a Mafia loan shark. Jimmy who's very sexually active with the ladies he even seems to be interested in men as well. We get to see Jimmy early in the film making eye-contact with an obviously gay waiter at a restaurant as if he wanted to pick him up. Jimmy unfortunately has a very severe prostate condition that becomes inflamed and unbearable when ever he has sex. It turns out that having sex for Jimmy is more like rape and his prostate condition drives him almost out of his head. I did like the brutal mobster, debt collector, contrasted by the sensitive artist, pianist, angle of the movie. This contradiction stems from Jimmy's gangster father Ben and pianist mother Ruth, Marian Seldes, who we later see in a hospital ward suffering from a mental breakdown. Writer/Director James Toback seemed to add something in "Fingers" straight out of the movie "Taxi Driver", which Harvey Keitel also stared in, into the story. We have Jimmy falling in love and then wanting to save Carol (Tisa Farrow) who's, when we first see her, a sculpture. Later when we meet Carol's boss or pimp Dreems, Jim Brown, we realize that Carol is hooker which makes her a combination of both Iris & Betsy in "Taxi Driver". You begin to think that Jimmy like Travis Bickel in "Taxi Driver" will in the end dispatch Dreems and his henchmen and save Carol from her life of sin and have her back living with her parents and family. Instead the movie just can't make up it's mind and as it comes to it's brutal conclusion Carol and her pimp Dreems are totally written out or forgotten about! It's as if they were put in the film just to fill in some time to make it a full-length 90 minutes motion picture! I felt that Jimmy's unrestrained brutality in the movie was more due to his failure to become a concert pianist then to his painful sexual experiences due to his prostate condition. Since his prostrate is treatable with medication but his failure as a concert pianist isn't. It's just that Jimmy can't mentally get it all together whenever he's on stage playing th piano and being judged by music critics. We see Jimmy in action early in the film when he cold-cocks the massive and powerful pizza store owner Luchino, Lenny Montana, who owed his lone shark dad Ben money that he lent him. But as the movie goes on it's obvious that Jimmy is getting more and more out of control because his both uncontrolled and painful sexual urges. Jimmy virtually rapes Julie, Tanya Roberts, in order to intimidate mobsters Riccamonza's, Tony Sirico, girlfriend who also owes Jimmy's dad money. Later Jimmy forces himself on Carol who you thought up until then he was trying to rescue from a life on the streets and practically rapes her as well. The worst and most sickening act by Jimmy is when as an act of revenge he savagely beats and murders Riccamonza who had Jimmy's father killed. Jimmy murders Riccamonza by blowing his eyes out of his eye-sockets like he said that he would do earlier in the movie; luckily for Riccamonza he was already dead when that happened! As the movie "Fingers" ends we see Jimmy stark naked playing the piano in his apartment with absolutely no musical skill at all and obviously insane. All alone in the world, everyone that he loved and cared for have either died or left him, Jimmy is just waiting for the men in the white suits to take him away in handcuffs and a straight-jacket.

It doesn't appear that many people have seen this little gem. "Fingers" is James Toback's first (and still best) film and contains an edgy vivacious performance from Harvey Keitel. The on-location filming in New York City adds to the desperation of the struggling wannabe pianist played by Keitel. Fascinating character study.

I love Harvey Keitel as an actor, and I'd read a review of his performance in a magazine, so I thought I'd take a peak to judge for myself. After watching it though, it left a bad taste in my mouth. From that day to this, all that stands out is the rape scene in the bathroom and his demand for the other woman to take out her diaphram before he has sex with her. I wanted to enjoy his performance, but those scenes were too disturbing for me. I don't even remember what the movie was about, since the rest didn't leave an impression on me. Now, whenever I see him in anything else, those scenes get triggered in my memory, and I wait out the shivers it gives me. I'll get over it eventually. In the meantime, I'll watch his other films to wash out this one so I can sleep at night.