Color of Night

Color of Night; thriller, USA, 1994; D: Richard Rush, S: Bruce Willis, Jane March, Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Scott Bakula, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, Kathleen Wilhoite, Shirley Knight

New York. When his patient commits suicide by jumping off from his office, psychiatrist Bill Capa is traumatized and left color blind. He arrives to Los Angeles to visit his friend Bob, a psychiatrist who leads a group therapy consisting out of Casey, Clark, Sondra, Buck and Richie, a teenager with gender identity crisis. Bob is killed, and Bill starts investigating, while at the same time he meets Rose and starts a passionate relationship with her. After Casey is killed, as well, Bill finds out Richie is actually Rose in disguise, since the real Richie committed suicide while under custody of his older brother Dale, so he decided to cover it up. Since Rose secretly had relationships with Casey and Bob, Dale killed them. When he threatened Bill, Rose kills Dale. Bill comforts Rose as to not commit suicide.

It seems highly peculiar that after getting an Oscar nod for "The Stunt Man", it took 14 years for the director Richard Rush to helm his next film, "Color of Night", often considered his weakest achievement. "Color of Night" is a mess of a thriller, as if someone wrote the worst possible rip-off of "Vertigo" and "Basic Instinct" and re-packaged them into an even bigger mess: for instance, while the protagonist got his fear of heights in "Vertigo" after a traumatic event, here the hero Bill becomes color blind after a traumatic opening in which a patient commits suicide in a highly exaggerated sequence where she goes "through" the glass to jump off from the building, not even bothering to open the window beforehand. What triggered that? It is unclear. Why did she have to go to that particular building instead of doing it in her home? Unclear. Even worse, what difference does it make that Bill has now become color blind? None. Throughout the storyline, no crucial moment seems to hinder Bill in his daily life without colors. The film also has incredibly trashy, heavy-handed depictions of murders and violence, from the murder of Bob who falls on his back through a door and is left impaled by glass up to the ridiculous, demented sadomasochistic strangulation of Casey. In another scene, Bill opens his mailbox and finds a rattlesnake inside, and then just lies there underneath, calling for help. Why not simply slowly crawl back away from the mailbox, since the rattlesnake is not budging from it, anyway?

The whole film is just so routine and bland that it seems like a soap opera of a thriller, with endless scenes of Bill walking and "investigating", but without any inspiration, care or spark while depicting him in these situations. It is as if the director's or the screenwriter's heart is somewhere else while creating these scenes. There are only two good things about "Color of Night": one is the beautiful actress Jane March as Rose, since she delivers some charm and wit in the story—the sex sequence in the middle of the film is sensual and well done (though she was better in Annaud's "The Lover"), while she also has some playful moments, such as in the sequence where she surprises Bill by wearing only an apron in the kitchen, turning around to reveal her naked butt, only to quickly take two napkins to cover her two butt cheeks. The other virtue is the plot twist at the end—even though it is in plain sight in front of the viewers, many will miss it, and thus it deserves a plus point for its surprise factor. Unfortunately, the film is way too long at 120 minutes—or 139 minutes in the director's cut—since Rush fooled himself into thinking there is some sort of a deep, psychological message about intolerance and persecution of transgender people at the end, when in fact the whole story is boring, with bad dialogues and tiresome scenes. The movie should have been just about the passionate relationship between Bill and Rose, since this is the only territory where it works, and should have just ditched the thriller elements which simply do not work.

Grade:+