'Chicago Cab': One Hell of a Ride

June 18, 1998

Showings:
June 20 - Cinemark Movies 12, 9:30pm

Based on a long-running play ('Hellcab' by Will Keen), this ride with a taxi driver (Paul Dillon) through the streets of Chicago shows us how easy it would be, in the words of co-director Mary Cybulski, to be "sucked into people's lives". A cross-section from the straight to the weird and downright bizarre, moving from comedy to high pathos, this is film as drama at its Aristotelian best. Chicago Cab is a pot-pourri of the fucked-up tribulations of contemporary urban life - from loneliness to racism to the scourge of lawyers (there's a pecking order apparently; 'baggy-pants' criminal lawyers are the worst!), to why women stay in abusive relationships, to that age old standby in the absence of anything else to say - the weather. After the umpteenth complaint about the cold, he replies, "It's Chicago - it's winter."

Normally, I'm wary of adaptations of stage works, especially when a stage actor repeats their role. The static, confined nature of the theater is difficult to translate to a medium that tells its story through pictures. Paul Dillon played the part, bought the film rights, and sought to have it made. The normally extravagant emotions so beloved by theater actors (a la Kenneth Branagh) are mercifully absent from his performance, largely one of reaction on his weary, pock-marked face to the goings-on in his back seat, whether it's a man going down on a woman or bible punchers telling him, after him saying that he can't make it to church with them because he has to work, that "some things are more important than work - like your immortal soul." You can almost see what's running through his head - should he respond to questions, come-ons, derogatory statements that he doesn't agree with, potentially violent confrontations?? Oh, yes, and being touched. "I can't stand being touched!" he shouts at an elderly drunk woman craving for company. That's one line he doesn't want crossed.

Cutting between two worlds, the cloistering claustrophobia of the cab and the bleak, shell-shocked indifference of an aesthetically numbing exterior, this is cinema at the other extreme of Titanic - as a mirror to the complexities of the soul, clinging to you as your brain swirls to the extremes of emotion, the barren expanse of Julianne Moore's face, lit by a slight shaft of light, doing more in her 3 minutes of screen time to define artistic expression than 3 hours of manipulative Titanic-like diarrhea. My only slight complaint would be the excessively PC nature of the piece; in a city famed for its racial divisions, all the black characters are decidedly middle class, and the makers avoid dealing with the issue that the filmmaker herself raised in the Q & A of black criminality on the Southside, and whites' fears of that. Still, this is a minor issue within the context of an otherwise tour de force of a film.

Peter Lewis
A true African-American, Peter has led a peripatetic lifestle, and after graduating from UCF with a film degree, he is pondering life as another wannabe, devoting his time to working on a novel, his thesis film, a suntan and the dubious benefits of Rogaine.