M O V I E S illtown Written and directed by Nick Gomez Starring Michael Rapaport and Lili Taylor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK Nil by Mouth Gary Oldman's working class antiheroes find life nasty, brutish and short Live Flesh Is Almodóvar all grown up or just worn out? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE ARCHIVES MOVIES TELEVISION INTERVIEWS FEATURES

"ILLTOWN" | PAGE 2 OF 2 The justice that comes calling in "illtown" has an Old Testament ferocity. Dante (Michael Rapaport) and Micky (Lili Taylor) are drug dealers trying to make a go of it in Florida. Devoted to each other, the two have been trying to have a baby. When Micky's deaf kid brother turns up after stealing a car and running away from home, they take him in and care for him. Gomez doesn't need to point up the obvious irony of two decent-seeming people who are naive enough to think they can sell smack as if they were running a mom-and-pop convenience store. When one of their runners is killed, Micky says in disbelief, "Now a kid's dead," and she really can't see that this possibility existed all along. She and Dante aren't lying to themselves as a means of survival. They really do see themselves as just another young couple trying to get by. What makes them recognizably human is what's anomalous about them, and it's what, in the world they inhabit, makes them targets. The movie's angel of death is Gabriel (Adam Trese), the former partner Dante and Micky gave up to beat a jail stretch. Single-minded and frighteningly unpredictable, Gabriel circles around them, insinuating himself with the drug kingpin D'Avalon (Tony Danza), going after Dante and Micky's police protection, their runners, their customers. It takes some time to put the pieces of that basic story together, and the material may seem too simple for the oblique, nonlinear style in which Gomez tells it. "illtown" proceeds in abstract bursts punctuated by long silences, dream sequences that don't always announce themselves as such, laconic dialogues where a glance or a gesture can hold more weight than words (in a film of characters who communicate this way, Micky's deaf brother isn't at a disadvantage). Gomez's technique, which favors character exploration and a slowly enveloping -- finally consuming -- mood, prevents the film from descending into the genre mechanics of revenge and becoming just another crime melodrama. The subject here is what's inside his characters' heads, and what's burdening their souls. The way he tells the story in concentrated pieces mirrors characters who can only see what's in front of them, who can't envision the big picture. Any formal explanation, though, pales before the mysteriousness of the film itself. No filmmaker makes this radical a change in style with complete success. "illtown" doesn't entirely escape portentousness, in the spiritual associations of the characters' names (Dante, Gabriel) or the conception of Isaac Hayes' role (he may or may not be a police contact and/or God), and in some of the acting (as the gay Mr. Big, Danza is stuck with metaphysical lines that drop like weights). And at the end, when Gomez's meanings need to sharpen and come together, he indulges in some symbolic diffusion. But these seem trifles next to the mesmerizing effect of the film as a whole. The cinematography, by Jim Denault (who shot another of the most distinctive recent American films, Michael Almereyda's "Nadja"), is infused with the half-light before sunset, when everything seems still, suspended, fraught with anxiety. And the constant underlayer of Brian Keane's score, a sort of ambient wash, contributes to the feeling of tension. The most haunting moments here are ultimately inexplicable, like the sight of two golf carts driving over a green that's meant to denote paradise. It's a measure of how fine Gomez's direction is that the film remains stylistically all of a piece without neglecting the actors. Rapaport, who in every other role I've seen him in has been unbelievable in a dem, dese and dose way, is authentic and pitiable. Lili Taylor, a wildly talented actress who can be very mannered, gives one of her completely genuine, empathetic performances. They're matched by Kevin Corrigan (he was the video-store clerk in "Walking and Talking") as Cisco, Dante and Micky's partner. Corrigan, a laid-back, likable presence, has the scene that sums up the movie's unresolvable feelings about its characters. Pressed by Dante, Cisco tells the story of the wife he loved who died, killed in the crash of a plane flown by a rich drunk she had befriended at a club. He relates it in the manner of a man who doesn't want to appear to be asking for sympathy, and just as your heart goes out to him, he says, "I dug up his grave. Took the body up to a vacant lot on 185th and let the stray dogs have a feast." Then, after a shrug, "Had to be done, man." "illtown" isn't especially graphic, but I don't know when I've been so unnerved by the violence in a film. Gomez doesn't make the mistake of trying to explain the scary crew of teen dealer/assassins that Gabriel enlists to do his bidding, nor does he indulge in any overwrought op-ed page shock. He knows there's nothing that can excuse or explain the blank, affectless brutality of these dead-souled killers. Gomez finds horror in the nonchalance of it all: the smile of a kid watching a young dealer stagger as bullets hit him; the calm with which another retrieves his gun off a buddy's corpse after the kid has lost a showdown; the use of the '50s doo-wop number "We Belong Together" when a character we've come to care about meets his fate at the hands of Gabriel's scariest emissary. This is the movie where Gomez earns the Scorsese comparison. The violence here may be as abrupt and random and plausible as in any American movie since "Mean Streets." Now, when almost all films about crime or life on the streets come with a set of standard-issue components -- explosions and car chases and shootouts on one hand, retro-hipster dialogue and clothes and music on the other -- this movie, whose style is a means to a more complex and unsettling view, startles. "illtown" is one of those movies that, after seeing it, seeps into the way the world looks to you. When a film this audacious languishes without a chance to reach the audience it deserves, all those people talking noise about the "indie revolution" might as well be speaking Martian. SALON | Feb. 27, 1998  Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.