The Travolta/Cage Project #42 Get Shorty (1995)

As Chili Palmer, cinephile career criminal and aspiring movie producer, John Travolta elevates sitting to an art form in Barry Sonnenfeld’s absolutely wonderful 1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. Usually when a performance is best described as “sedentary” it is a criticism but the sly and calculating Chili turns being seated, preferably with a cigarette in his hands, into a power move. 

Chili doesn’t have to stand up, or raise his voice to be commanding, even intimidating. Scott Frank’s marvelous screenplay suggests that Chili can almost invariably achieve his ends through guile, calculation and eye contact so he does not have to resort to violence. The mere threat of violence is enough most of the time but it is tremendously satisfying when Chili is pushed too far and is forced to open a Texas-sized can of whoop-ass on punk ass motherfuckers who most assuredly have it coming. 

I’m taking about scum of the earth like Ray "Bones" Barboni, a rabid attack dog of a low-level mobster played by Dennis Farina in a career-best performance as feral doofus who makes the mistake of thinking he can out-maneuver a smooth operator like Chili. Chili is Bugs Bunny to Barboni’s Yosemite Sam, a fiendishly clever trickster who takes great delight in driving his enemies insane while he remains cool as a cucumber.

Get Shorty opens with its hero spinning his wheels and wasting his time in the tacky pastel wonderland of Miami. He’s good at what he does but also finds it unfulfilling. So when Chili finds himself in Los Angeles for business looking to collect a casino debt from schlock movie maestro Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman, smartly cast against type as an utter buffoon), he spies an opportunity to pivot ever so slightly from small time Shylock to big-time movie producer. 

The vehicle for Chili’s cinematic aspirations is an ostensibly Oscar-worthy screenplay called Mr. Lovejoy that the hack scribe behind many of Zimm’s garbage b-movies wrote as a passion project before dying. Harry sees Mr. Lovejoy as his professional and personal redemption, a film of taste and discernment that will elevate him from the seedy, sordid world of horror and science fiction schlock to the highbrow world of prestige cinema and middlebrow Oscar candidates. This is not terribly dissimilar to how William Castle established himself as the king of schlocky gimmicks before producing a seminal “classy” horror movie in Rosemary’s Baby, which was a double Oscar nominee for best screenplay and Best Supporting Actress in addition to being the sixth-top grossing film of 1968. 

But Chili and Harry aren’t the only would-be players with an eye on profiting off Mr. Lovejoy, which Harry describes as his “Driving Miss Daisy”, a comparison that tells us all we need to know about its aggressively Oscar-friendly high-mindedness. It tells us that Mr. Lovejoy will have an air of quality, prestige and art without being any goddamn good at all. 

The always wonderful Delroy Lindo is particularly brilliant as Chili’s primary competition, Bo Catlett, a dry cleaner who invested a substantial amount of money into a Harry Zimm production that never got made and is eager to upgrade his investment by becoming involved with Mr. Lovejoy. 

Like so many of the characters here, he’s a small timer looking to go big time. He doesn’t care how many people need to be killed or hurt to make that happen. Get Shorty gets its name from the target of Chili and Bo and Harry’s furious machinations: top box office attraction and two-time Academy Award nominee (not unlike John Travolta, and, for that matter, Nicolas Cage) Martin Weir (Danny DeVito), the “Shorty” of the title. 

I love the subversion of a movie starring John Travolta, a tall, handsome, wildly charismatic hunk seemingly born to be a matinee idol, and Danny DeVito, the least likely movie star imaginable, a tiny, mole-like creature who has ascended to the rarified heights of movie super-stardom through talent and guile and smart choices, casting DeVito as the big movie star and household name and Travolta as a savvy opportunist hoping to break into movies because it promises to be slightly less shady than being a career criminal.

When playing a pompous movie star with the potential to make people’s dreams come true just by saying “yes”, the tendency would be to go big and broad but DeVito beautifully underplays the small (no pun intended) but pivotal role. DeVito plays Weir as someone who has been famous and powerful for so long that he has completely lost touch of what it’s like to be anything else.

Harry hopes to get Mr. Lovejoy made by securing Weir as its star so he appeals to Karen Flores (Rene Russo), a scream queen and the embarrassed star of many of his productions who happens to be Martin’s ex-wife and consequently an expert on his quirks and eccentricities. 

There’s a wonderful scene where Karen warns Chili and Harry that when Martin eats at a restaurant he invariably orders off the menu and leaves before the food he insisted on having specially made even arrives. 

Sure enough, when Martin gets to a chichi restaurant honored to have a star of his magnitude as a patron he very predictably pulls an audible and insists on food and drinks that are not on the menu, before wandering away before the food comes, leaving his companions to pay for meals they did not order.

We know EXACTLY what is going to happen, and how it’s going to happen, yet DeVito brilliantly  plays the scene as if Martin is improvising and being spontaneous in the moment in a way only truly artists can be when he’s really being, if anything, comically pompous and predictable. Get Shorty is confident enough in its cast and its storytelling and its gags that it essentially tells us the punchline to the scene beforehand and still manages to be riotously funny. 

One of my favorite cinematic moments of the past three decades comes from the end of Batman Returns, when Christopher Walken sees Batman without his mask and asks adorably, “Bruce Wayne. Why. Are you dressed up like Batman?” 

It’s a glorious gag made even more hilarious by Walken’s oblivious delivery but what really destroys is Catwoman’s response, a deeply annoyed, “Because he IS Batman, you moron!” 

In a pitch-perfect performance, Russo brings a similar energy to many of her scenes here. Like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, she is a smart, savvy, tragically under-estimated woman cursed to live in a world of powerful men who are not just stupid and oblivious but arrogant in their stupidity and obliviousness. 

The scream queen gravitates towards Chili because he’s John Travolta at his most charming, obviously, but also because they’re blessed and cursed to be two smart and savvy operators in a Hollywood realm full of fools, phonies and pretenders. 

Watching Get Shorty for what must have been the fifth or six time I found myself thinking that I would happily watch a spin-off featuring literally any character in the movie, right down to the extras. Get Shorty could spin-off its own goddamn cinematic universe of schemers, small time crooks, Shylocks and show-business wannabes.

I would even watch a movie about characters in Get Shorty that are never actually onscreen, like Chili’s ex-wife or the hapless screenwriter of Mr. Lovejoy. That makes it all the more unfortunate that, Hollywood being Hollywood, show-business being show-business, and capitalism being capitalism, this very good movie that does just about everything right and was rightfully greeted as a breezy delight by critics and audiences alike led directly to the making of a very bad movie in the 2002 sequel Be Cool. 

I will have a whole lot to say when we get to that particular boondoggle, which at least has the extraordinary benefit of a magnificent performance by Dwayne Johnson, but it only makes Get Shorty look better by comparison, and it was already looking pretty damn good. 

With Get Shorty, John Travolta was officially back on top, baby! Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty and Face/Off were so successful, and so beloved, and so instantly iconic that Travolta was able to coast on them for a couple of extremely lucrative years before 1999’s Battlefield Earth and a slew of similar, if not quite as egregious or infamous stinkers transformed Travolta from the comeback kid to a fading star desperately in need of a comeback.

Sadly, that seems to be the place he’s at now, and will perhaps remain for the rest of his career until  he snags the next big comeback role.

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