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 char­ac­ters in George Armitage’s Mia­mi Blues, adapt­ed 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 assumed iden­ti­ty of his lat­est vic­tim Her­man Gotlieb. In his first, entire­ly char­ac­ter­is­tic 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 bend the man’s extend­ed fin­ger back till it breaks.

Dri­ven more 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 col­lege call girl whom he, again 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, against 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 because it effec­tive­ly stops peo­ple dead in their tracks with­out actu­al­ly killing them – but when the Hare Krish­na at the air­port does in fact drop dead, local police detec­tive Hoke Mose­ley (Fred Ward) is drawn into Junior’s orbit as he inves­ti­gates the bizarre inci­dent that is pos­si­bly a homi­cide. Liv­ing alone out of a room in a low-rent hotel with only his false teeth for com­pa­ny, Hoke – who would fea­ture 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 before his rela­tion­ship with them becomes more 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 down to the iden­ti­cal colour). In fact Mia­mi Blues is full of such mir­ror­ings and assim­i­la­tions. After Junior vio­lent­ly steals Hoke’s badge and starts play­ing the police­man (and occa­sion­al­ly, con­tin­gent­ly, the hero) to fur­ther his own crim­i­nal agen­da, the upright Hoke finds him­self unwit­ting­ly on the take, resort­ing to the use of an ille­gal firearm, and even wear­ing his assailant’s dis­tinc­tive clothes, in a switch­ing of iden­ti­ties that also con­founds the moral divide between cops and robbers.

As these two men reverse rôles and accu­mu­late injuries, Hoke also swaps recipes with Susie. Hoke may be a griz­zled slob and schlub, but his hon­esty, hard 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 able to provide.

This, how­ev­er, is no love tri­an­gle, but an increas­ing­ly aggres­sive game of cat and mouse. For Armitage has craft­ed a sun­lit neo-noir root­ed in quirky char­ac­ter and dark­ly com­ic encoun­ters, as two very dif­fer­ent men try on each other’s per­sonas for size, and the woman caught between them must also 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 betray either Junior or her ideals, and nobody can come out of the ensu­ing mess look­ing entire­ly clean.

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

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