As much as I love John Cusack elsewhere, and could probably come to love Annette Bening, they lack a certain grittiness and don't seem to fit here, either in these characters or together. Unfortunately, despite a lot of promise, this seemed like film noir lite, a rather tepid, listless affair, without a whole lot that was original. Bening is often nude and there are incestual overtones thrown in, but those things seemed gratuitous, and like desperate attempts to spice things up. The film does have its moments though, usually involving Anjelica Huston, who was the best thing it had going for it.
There are several scenes that strain credibility, perhaps not uncommon for the genre, but less forgivable in a modern film, like Huston's character hiding the money she's stealing from a mob boss (Pat Hingle, who's great) in open view, Huston not waking up when Bening rattles several keys at her hotel door, or the police seeming to think Cusack's character needed to see his mother's entire body in the morgue. Would Bening really need to sleep with her landlord given what we find out about her later? Maybe it goes to show the amorality in her character, which was certainly matched by the mother, and that pitch black ending. This isn't awful, but it's pretty flat, and unworthy of the accolades it garnered.
