Elmore's Revenge

Danny Devito, Rene Russo and John Travolta do lunch in the faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty.

'Get Shorty' is Elmore Leonard's payback for all the bad versions of his novels

By Allen Barra

It would be easy to hate the hugely entertaining commercial contrivance that is Get Shorty. Smart people will watch it for a while, feeling above it, wisely wanting to dislike it because it's everything a smart person should resist: glitzy, expensive, shallow and devoid of artistic intention. Even smarter people, however, will start to ask themselves, Okay, almost every big-budget Hollywood movie is those things, so why does Get Shorty work?

The film not only works, it works like its hero, Chili Palmer (John Travolta), on several different levels, all at the same time. For one thing, it's based on an Elmore Leonard novel, and Leonard is our foremost practitioner of crime fiction. Martin Amis, slumming on the subject of Leonard for The New York Times earlier this year, noted that all of Leonard's thrillers "are Pardners' Tales, in which Death roams the land--usually Miami and Detroit--disguised as money."

With Get Shorty, the book, Leonard offers a second plot: How Hollywood has continually screwed up the film versions of his seemingly foolproof thrillers. Probably no popular author has been as public in denouncing the movies made from his books, particularly the hideous Stick (a vehicle for the fading Burt Reynolds in 1985) and 52 Pick-Up (1986), which caught the flavor of Leonard in the secondary roles but ruined the atmosphere by taking the characters out of the Detroit slums that spawned them and placing the story in L.A.

Get Shorty can be read as Leonard's benevolent revenge on the film industry. Leonard takes his small-time loan shark Palmer and puts him in Hollywood, where he thrives. What gets him there is the pursuit of a hustler who has faked his death and skipped Miami with the insurance money his wife collects.

Under normal circumstances, this premise would serve as a perfectly good Leonard plot--it would also make a great movie. Which is precisely what Travolta's Palmer thinks. When the job puts him in contact with Harry (Gene Hackman), a horror-movie producer, Palmer starts to pitch his own saga.

Get Shorty relies on two major gags. The first is that the story Chili is proposing is being played out as the film progresses: The second is that Chili is the only hustler in the story who really loves movies, and he becomes a Hollywood player with dazzling speed.

"Yesterday, you were a loan shark," someone protests. "Yeah," replies Chili, "but I was never that into it." He's right; the movie business, it turns out, is his natural medium. "What do you know about making movies?" someone asks. "I don't think a producer has to know that much," is the casual reply.

That's Leonard taking a shot at Hollywood. Specifically, it's Leonard saying that the best films are sometimes made by people who know how to stand aside and let the creative people do their work. Like The Maltese Falcon, Get Shorty is practically a page-by-page shoot of the book (about the only thing screenwriter Scott Frank and director Barry Sonnenfeld bring to the party is the good judgment as to which pages to leave out, but that's enough).

The casting is a no-brainer, as they say in Hollywood; Leonard had already cast several of the roles ("If I could get Gene Hackman, say, we'd be in production as we speak," says the character in the book whom Hackman ends up playing). The Shorty of the title is one of the two guys who could play the part. From the book, I'd guess Leonard wanted Joe Pesci, but Danny DeVito is acceptable.

Travolta strides through the Hollywood of Get Shorty like a bemused camp counselor, amazed that such penny-whistle tough guys could have maneuvered themselves into positions of power. His scenes with Rene Russo as a former B-movie queen have an immediate sexiness. Their characters recognize each other immediately: They're both cool, they both want to make movies, and they both love Hollywood. I'd love to see what movies they end up making. They'd probably discover the next Quentin Tarantino.

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Get Shorty (R; 105 min.), directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, written by Scott Frank, photographed by Don Peterman and starring John Travolta, Rene Russo and Gene Hackman.


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