'You Kill Me' hits its target as deadpan mob farce
"You Kill Me " is a black comedy about an alcoholic hitman in love, and after "The Sopranos ," "The Matador ," and "Grosse Pointe Blank ," that's slicing the neurotic-mobster bologna a little thin. But wait: Sir Ben Kingsley plays the hitman, a dour Polish-American burnout relocated from Buffalo to San Francisco. The dryly sensuous Tea Leoni plays the object of his affection. And the director is John Dahl , whose "Red Rock West" and "The Last Seduction " gave neo-noir a good name in the 1990s.
So one's hopes are raised. They're kept afloat, too, by the film's air of battered romance, even as "You Kill Me" resolutely refuses to transcend the clever but narrow idea at its core. It's a predictable but acridly pleasant 12-step bonbon: self-help noir.
Frank Falencyzk (Kingsley) may have once been Buffalo's best killer, but at the start of the film, he's coasting on fumes of self-loathing. We see him shovel snow off his front steps after a blizzard, tossing a bottle of vodka down stair by stair until the joke kicks in: That's his incentive.
After sleeping through a hit, Frank is called on the carpet by his uncle and boss, local Polish kingpin Roman (Philip Baker Hall , jowls wobbling in indignation). The Irish mob is muscling in under the leadership of the smarmy O'Leary (Dennis Farina ), but family comes first, so Frank is shipped to the West Coast with instructions to get himself to an AA meeting. Part of him wants to get sober, admits Frank, but it's "the part I don't like."
There's a good, hard honesty to that line that addicts would probably recognize. Kingsley plays the part in the opposite corner of the ring from his celebrated Don Logan in "Sexy Beast " (2000). Where Logan was feral and unpredictable, Frank just doesn't give a damn. Until he does, which would be when Laurel Pearson (Leoni) visits the funeral parlor where Frank has been assigned a job. She's burying her stepfather and is happy to see him go, noting that "even people you don't like die."
Frank is smitten, embracing recovery with newfound fervor. The movie has fun with this -- when a professional hitman in AA makes a list of "People I've Harmed," it's long -- and for a while "You Kill Me" bubbles along merrily, tracking the couple's two-steps-forward-one-step-back courtship and indulging the secondary characters. One of these is Frank's minder, a prissily arrogant housing broker (Bill Pullman ) who hisses, "In a town with a 2 percent vacancy rate, a real estate agent is God, and that's what I am!"
Also on hand is Frank's sponsor, a gay tollbooth attendant named Tom (Luke Wilson ) who's as sketchily drawn as that description. Part of the problem with the script, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, is that after a while Frank tells Tom what he does for a living -- and then Laurel, and then his group -- and no one calls the police or even bats an eye. With that, a fundamentally realistic film stumbles into fantasy and never finds its feet again.
True, movies backslide just like addicts do. "You Kill Me" keeps its sense of humor even as it fritters away believability, the cast frolicking in cinematographer Jeffrey Jur's honeyed lighting scheme. Leoni gets you to buy that Laurel would stand by her man, where another actress might have given up and gone home; her deadpan line readings and Kingsley's bleak stare are the movie's chief assets.
This isn't the return to form John Dahl's career needs, though. At its best, neo-noir extends its moral weariness to the world outside the movie theater -- you come out seeing shadows you didn't know were there. In "You Kill Me," the shadows don't live past the end credits. "I've kinda been accused in the past of losing my boundaries," Frank says, and his sin is the movie's as well.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog. 