The first movie directed
by James Toback, a ferocious chronicler of the male animal in extremis, Fingers can be viewed as a blueblood’s
response to the cinema of Martin Scorsese. Whereas Scorsese made his name by
dramatizing the lives of small-time hoods prowling the streets of New York,
Toback announced his presence by depicting intersections between New York
street crime and the city’s supposedly civilized intelligentsia. In his script
for The Gambler (1974), which was
directed by Karel Reisz, Toback presented the semiautobiographical character of
a college professor who spends his private hours feeding his gambling addiction
no matter how dangerous his circumstances become. In Fingers, Toback introduces a character following the opposite
trajectory, thereby approaching the same themes from a different perspective.
Jimmy “Fingers” Angelelli (Harvey Keitel) is the son of aging loan shark Ben
Angelleli (Michael V. Gazzo), but Jimmy wants more from life than threatening
people for repayment. A self-taught pianist, he has visions of performing on
the Carnegie Hall stage, and he may or may not have sufficient talent to
realize his dream. As with all of the troubled men in Toback’s movies, however,
Jimmy is his own worst enemy. Not only does he allow feelings of guilt and
obligation to pull him deeper into his father’s violent world, but Jimmy is a
sexual daredevil who can’t resist the thrill of the chase. Everything in Jimmy’s
twisted psyche conspires to shift his focus away from his dreams. Even before
the grim machinations of the plot take hold, this is grim material on every
level—meaning that Fingers exists in
the creative sweet spot for both Toback and leading man Keitel.
Toback has a special
gift for showing how testosterone drives men to madness, and he’s also a master
at creating fully rounded leading characters—by accumulating detail and drawing
subtle connections, Toback creates a space in which strange behaviors feel like
eccentricities instead of literary contrivances. Jimmy blows through his world
like a whirlwind, all fidgety energy and pretentious scarves, and he nearly
always carries a portable radio issuing vintage pop tunes along the lines of
“Mockingbird” and “One Fine Day”; the juxtaposition of these sweet melodies
with the savage nature of Jimmy’s actions is strangely appropriate.
Toback also
plays an interesting game by having Jimmy alternate between gutter vulgarity
and outrageously lofty dialogue, because it’s clear that Jimmy receives
messages on frequencies inaudible to others. Consider this jaw-dropping pickup
line, which Jimmy uses on artist/prostitute Carol (Tisa Farrow): “Don’t you
understand? I’m going to bring you into your dreams of yourself. All you have
to do is believe in me.” Showing his street side, Jimmy takes a wholly
different tack when trying to make time with gang moll Julie (Tanya Roberts),
cooing that he can sense her nether regions are like “silk.”
Fingers goes to many, many strange
places—for instance, the subplot about Jimmy’s encounters with Carol’s brutal
pimp, Dreems (Jim Brown)—even though the movie eventually drifts down to earth
for a violent finale that borrows from the Scorsese playbook. Keitel gives one
of his most crucial performances, employing so much intensity while channeling
the soul of the peculiar man he portrays that Jimmy seems alternately magnetic,
pathetic, and terrifying. While very much an acquired taste thanks to its
bone-deep darkness, its fascination with sleaze, and its primitive portrayal of
women, Fingers ranks among the most unique
American directorial debuts of the ’70s.
Fingers:
GROOVY
