Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #246 Grey Lady (2017)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
We are nearly at the end of our journey through the motion pictures of Rebecca Gayheart. After this entry all that’s left is the finest motion picture Gayheart has ever appeared in, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where she plays the doomed wife of Brad Pitt’s character.
There’s something inherently bittersweet and melancholy about endings, even to something as decidedly minor and random as an exhaustive exploration of the film and television projects of an exceedingly minor actress, model and advertising icon like Gayheart.
I will be saying goodbye to Gayheart very soon. We’ll be going out on the best film of her career but goodness knows we’ve had to endure some real stinkers to get to that point.
2017’s Grey Lady, which was written and directed by prolific character actor John Shea, who also has a supporting role as a cop, pairs Gayheart with her real-life then-husband Eric Dane.
Dane is of course best known for his role as Dr. Mark Everett Sloan, AKA McSteamy, on Grey’s Anatomy. McSteamy followed by Patrick Dempsey’s equally hunky McDreamy as well as the extremely unpopular character McStreamy, a doctor who is very unattractive physically but has access to streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.
The real-life couple, who split in 2018, play partners onscreen in love and law enforcement. Dane gloomily plays Doyle, a grizzled Boston detective with a dark past and a closet full of skeletons and Gayheart plays Maggie Wynn, his partner on the force as well as his pregnant girlfriend.
Alas, before the crime-fighting couple can spawn a happy little tribe of miniature detectives, the newly pregnant beauty is brutally murdered. Doyle’s sister was killed a few weeks earlier so he is having a very bad month in terms of loved ones being killed.
The haunted and cursed detective goes to Nantucket, the picturesque Massachusetts island best known for being the home of a legendarily endowed man whose ribald exploits have been chronicled in a series of lewd limericks.
Nantucket is the Grey Lady of the title. In dialogue an actress is somehow able to perform without snorting derisively or rolling her eyes, it gets that nickname both because of the picturesque island’s ever-present fog but also because in Nantucket not everything is in black and white. Furthermore, not everyone is what they appear to be.
If you are impressed by the profundity of those ideas congratulations, you’re gullible enough to fall for the film’s grim gauntlet of detective movie cliches.
In Boston, people close to our understandably depressed hero have a way of ending up dead. That’s true in Nantucket as well.
Doyle seems to bring death and violence and tragedy with him everywhere he goes. It’s in the blood, an essential component of his DNA. He is a man of constant sorrow, a figure of doom and gloom, a sad sack with a black cloud perpetually following him.
The film follows suit. Nantucket is not just the movie’s setting: it’s also its main character and most compelling aspect, if only because the bar is set so dreadfully low. As shot by Andrzej Bartkowiak, a cinematographer whose credits include Terms of Endearment, Falling Down and Prizzi’s Honor, Nantucket is a place of harsh beauty, a perpetually overcast resort town full of secrets and lies.
As if killing his sister and his girlfriend/partner weren’t bad enough, deranged killers are carving the letters of Doyle’s name into the skin of the people they murder. They really do not care for him.
It turns out the murders are connected to a long-ago formative trauma in our hero’s life. It’s a family affair of the bleakest variety as the sins of the father are visited upon their cursed and luckless offspring.
Grey Lady’s name promises something cold and grey and forgettable. It unfortunately more than lives up to that promise.
There is not a single moment of light or levity to be found in Grey Lady. It takes itself terribly seriously despite a screenplay awash in lurid cliches. It’s trash that has deluded itself into thinking it’s art.
It’s the kind of ponderous claptrap where characters spontaneously recite poetry and quote Shakespeare. It was clearly designed to illustrate that Dane could carry a movie on his muscular shoulders, as a very serious vehicle for a handsome television doctor but there’s not much to the lead role beyond grim determination. That’s not much fun to play or to watch.
At the end of Grey Lady, I thought, “Well, that’s 109 minutes of my life that I will never get back.” Grey Lady is a goddamn waste. It’s grim and lifeless and utterly forgettable.
I like to think that I get something out of every movie that I watch and write about. At the very least, watching a movie inherently broadens my frame of reference. I’m not sure I got anything out of Grey Lady, however.
That’s true of a fair number of Gayheart movies I have seen for this curious project. Grey Lady commits the dual crimes of being boring as well as bad. Thankfully I have Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to look forward to. That ensures that we’ll end this rollercoaster ride through the highs and lows of Gayheart’s career with the highest of highs.
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