The frenetic charm of Miami Blues

“My problem is that I can have everything and anything that I want, but I don’t know what I want.”

The speaker is Frederick J. Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin), one of the three main notation in George Armitage’s Miami Blues, well-timed by the writer/director from Charles Willeford’s 1984 novel of the same name. ‘Junior’ (as Frederick likes to be known) is a selfish, sociopathic ex-con – and a not-so-ex grifter and thief – who has just flown into Miami under the unsupportable identity of his latest victim Herman Gotlieb. In his first, entirely foible acts upon arriving at the airport, Junior will steal a sleeping stranger’s suitcase and, when asked for his name by a smiling Hare Krishna, reply ‘Trouble’ and wrench the man’s extended finger when till it breaks.

Driven increasingly by compulsion than desire, Junior truly does not know what he wants, or what is good for him. Although he has served his time and settled down, however accidentally, with Susie Waggoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – a sweet, naïve higher undeniability girl whom he, then accidentally, has rescued from her life of sex work – Junior just cannot help engaging repeatedly in violence, subterfuge and opportunistic crimes (often, although not exclusively, versus other criminals – as he tells Susie, he is a Robin Hood who doesn’t “give the money to the poor people”).

It will turn out that finger-breaking is something of a signature move for Junior, presumably considering it powerfully stops people sufferer in their tracks without unquestionably killing them – but when the Hare Krishna at the airport does in fact waif dead, local police detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward) is drawn into Junior’s orbit as he investigates the unconvincing incident that is possibly a homicide. Living vacated out of a room in a low-rent hotel with only his false teeth for company, Hoke – who would full-length in several of Willeford’s novels – becomes the third wheel in this couple, joining Junior and Susie for a (stolen) pork dinner and multiple beers surpassing his relationship with them becomes increasingly fraught.

When Junior and Susie first meet, what immediately strikes the viewer is how similar they are in appearance, with her pixie hairstyle and his buzzcut making an uncanny match (right lanugo to the identical colour). In fact Miami Blues is full of such mirrorings and assimilations. After Junior violently steals Hoke’s token and starts playing the policeman (and occasionally, contingently, the hero) to remoter his own criminal agenda, the upright Hoke finds himself unwittingly on the take, resorting to the use of an illegal firearm, and plane wearing his assailant’s distinctive clothes, in a switching of identities that moreover confounds the moral divide between cops and robbers.

As these two men reverse rôles and yaffle injuries, Hoke moreover swaps recipes with Susie. Hoke may be a grizzled slob and schlub, but his honesty, nonflexible work and appreciation of Susie’s home cooking make him represent everything that the young woman in fact wants from Junior – and that Junior, unable to resist deceiving and defrauding everyone (including Susie herself), will never be worldly-wise to provide.

This, however, is no love triangle, but an increasingly warlike game of cat and mouse. For Armitage has crafted a sunlit neo-noir rooted in quirky weft and darkly comic encounters, as two very variegated men try on each other’s personas for size, and the woman unprotected between them must moreover decide between a path of virtue or vice. Susie may be too dumb for a femme fatale, but nonetheless this whore with a heart of gold must in the end scam either Junior or her ideals, and nobody can come out of the ensuing mess looking entirely clean.

Despite its winning performances, upturned situations and considerable (if understated) tensions, Miami Blues was not a box-office success. Perhaps the regulars of the early Nineties didn’t know what it wanted…

Miami Blues is released on Blu-ray by Radiance Films, 6th February, 2023