Vintage Movie Review: Clay Pigeons shows just how dark a dark comedy can be
Joaquin Phoenix and Vince Vaughn make a grisly discovery in the very dark comedy, Clay Pigeons.
“Evil has many faces and is often disguised” was the old saying that kept running through my mind during the screening of Clay Pigeons. In the film, Clay (Joaquin Phoenix) is being framed for the murder of his best friend, Earl, by Earl’s wife, Amanda (Georgina Cates). To make matters worse, Clay befriends a drifter named Lester Long and pretty soon, he’s being linked to every dead body that turns up in town.
Newcomer Georgina Cates is wonderful as the cruel, heartless, and trashy Amanda, who frames Clay for brushing her off after their many sexual encounters. Janeane Garafolo is fiendishly sardonic as the FBI agent who arrives in town to question Clay and investigate the murders. Her dry sense of humor is a scream: “Barney, could you not poke the body with a stick, please?” she calmly and seriously asks a police officer she’s working with.
Vaughn and Phoenix are fantastic when they’re together onscreen, dancing around each other in a deadly game of deception. The tension between the two adversaries is spellbinding. The suspense builds up every minute as they gauge each other’s moves and prepare themselves for whatever the other is going to do next.
With this role, Vaughn proves his versatility as an actor. As the psychotic Lester, he is both hilarious and terrifying, guaranteed to send chills up your spine. Swingers fans will never see Vaughn in the same light again. His character is a master at twisting the truth: “If it started with a slap in public, imagine what you did to her when you got her alone,” he tells Clay, referring to the dispute he and Amanda had.
Garafolo, Vaughn, and Phoenix each have a lot of witty, bleak, and sarcastic one-liners, especially during a scene in which one body washes up in a lake and another turns up when Garafolo searches through Clay’s place. The camerawork is great at repeatedly dissolving on Clay’s horrified reaction after witnessing one of the many bodies turning up dead. The sound effects are also excellent. You can actually hear the echoing of the camera snapping pictures of dead bodies. Finally, the more subdued toned snippet of a flashback cleverly helps us piece together who the murderer really is.
Clay Pigeons is a lot of movie genres successfully rolled into one. It’s a dark comedy, a drama, a mystery, and a thriller. It had my attention and senses alert all the way through. This is easily one of the best films of the year and it is one of the more recent films that just may help save Hollywood from itself.
This article originally appeared in the October 15, 1998 edition of Towson University’s newspaper, The Towerlight. Since then, I have grown older, wiser, and much more well-rested with age. I’m sure (and I hope) the same thing can be said for my editor. Therefore, I have made some revisions.
