The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Usual Suspects
Dir. Bryan Singer. Wr. Christopher McQuarrie.
Gramercy Pictures, 1995. Rated R (violence, strong language)

Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie--friends since high school in New Jersey--collaborated on one previous film Public Access, which shared the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Festival. This team reinvigorates the genre of film noir in The Usual Suspects, which Newsweek critic Jack Knoll acclaims “the best, most stylish crime movie since Stephen Frears’s 1990 The Grifters.” Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers calls it “the freshest, funniest and scariest crime thriller to come along since Pulp Fiction.” While Quentin Tarantino parodies film noir in his gangster film Reservoir Dogs (1991), Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspects captures the “seductive mood and narrative fascination” of classic noir, through the brutal “fusillades of language” scripted by McQuarrie, the “succulent photography” (Kroll) and “formal wide-screen beauty” of Newton Thomas Sigel, and the “whiplash editing” and “richly evocative” musical score of John Ottman (Travers). Rolling Stone’s “10 Best Movies of 1995” rated Usual Suspects number 6 as the year’s “freshest and wittiest thriller, with performances by Kevin Spacey and Benicio Del Torro that must be seen to be believed” (“Usual Suspects”).

For many viewers, one of the most compelling aspects of the film is the “brilliant acting of an irresistible ensemble (Kroll). “The cast carries the emotional ball. The Usual Suspects is acted to sweet perfection” (Travers). The five “usual suspects” are “parodies of fictional gangster, tough guy,
and hit man,” a “roundtable of dirt bags” who have made this film “a cult classic” (Fried).

Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollack): “gritty explosives expert from Queens” (Fried)

Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin): “tough guy with an itchy trigger finger” (Fried)

Fred Fenster (Benicio Del Torro), McManus’ partner, “the Latino hustler with the Brando accent” (Fried). “Newcomer [Benecio] Del Toro is a star in the making, using slurred speech and spastic body movements to nail the jitters beneath Fenster’s studly bravado. Whatever this guy’s doing, you can’t take your eyes off him; he’s electrifying” (Travers).

Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), “the rakish anti-hero,” “an ex-cop, gone bad, gone good, and apparently gone bad again” (Fried). Gabriel Byrne, “brooding and brutal, turns [Dean] Keaton into an enigma as hypnotic as Keyser Soze” (Travers).

Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey) with “game leg and hand,” a “shifty confidence man who tells rather than shows in order to get himself in and out of jams” is “not heroic at all” (Fried). “Just for the record, Suspects is [Kevin] Spacey’s show. It’s Verbal’s torrent of words and the flickers of fear and cunning dancing in his stoolie eyes that keep us riveted as the plot goes its Byzantine way” (Travers).

Classic + Post-Modern Film Noir

“For many true movie fiends, [film] noir is the key American movie type, and the most fun when it’s done right. The Usual Suspects is done right,” an “intelligent movie, with no special effects, no infantile charades of violence” (Kroll).

One important formula for crime film is the heist or “caper,” which Jack Cawelti maintains has become “one of the dominant forms of popular culture” in the last two decades (cited in Orr). As critic Stanley Orr explains, the heist caper typically features a criminal mastermind “faced with the Sisyphan task of coordinating a complicated criminal operation.” Audiences are drawn to this criminal protagonist—even when the operation fails, as is frequently the case in film noir—because s/he enacts a universal drama of “the human consciousness struggling to impose order upon an irrational world” (Orr). But Usual Suspects departs from the classic heist formula and its focus on the criminal-hero’s existential dilemma. Instead, it joins other post-modern noir films like Reservoir Dogs (1991) and Killing Zoe (1995), in centering “the process of fiction-making itself” (Orr).

The Usual Suspects is "the most convoluted film noir plot since
William Faulkner confounded audiences 50 years ago with The Big Sleep” (Travers)

At the center of critical comment and controversy is The Usual Suspects’ “convoluted” story line. Christopher McQuarrie earned the 1995 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his “taut, wickedly twisted” (Travers) and “meticulously crafted” script, which creates “a self-reflexive spin on the neo-noir thriller” (Fried). As Cineaste critic John Fried points out, “unlike recent film noir remakes and dark thrillers which focus on the casual coolness of gangsters, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects focuses more on the conventions of the genre, forcing the audience, like the detectives in the film, to consider how we put together a story and piece together clues.”

“You have to pay close attention to this film, to listen hard to its cross-fires of dialogue,” to follow the “convoluted” story line (Kroll). But these requirements constitute the film’s main appeal for many viewers. “[P]utting the pieces together is a kick” (Travers). The film’s primary narrator is Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey)—a “whiny two-bit thief,” self-described “cripple” and “gimp” (Brown), and sole survivor who seems anything but the criminal mastermind of the film’s central heist caper. A reluctant witness who “talks too much” (McQuarrie), Verbal Kint tells his story in flashbacks, under the bullying interrogation of U. S. customs agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) in the cluttered office of Rabin, another federal agent. Conspicuous in our visual introduction to the setting of Rabin’s office is his cluttered bulletin-board: screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie describes it as “a breathtaking disaster of papers, wanted posters, rap-sheets, memos and post-its,” the confusing debris of decades that suggests no system of crime detection and probably baffles Rabin himself (23). Tracking shots of the bulletin board, extreme close-ups of a lighter or a coffee cup may or may not be cryptic clues needed to solve the puzzle or simply insignificant details used to create a realistic setting. Only in retrospect do viewers fully appreciate deceptive art of the camera, quietly pointing out the raw materials from which Verbal Kint brilliantly improvises his stunningly twisted tale.

Agent Kujan’s conviction that Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) is the ring-leader who got away, proposes an alternative version of events that challenges Verbal’s insistence that Keaton is dead. Thus, at least two possible narratives initially emerge from the conflicted interrogation and complicate the puzzle. “[T]he audience is challenged as to whose [story] they can trust, while the answer for those who look is evidently before their eyes. Such narrative minefields are the stuff of the grimmest film noir, which is chock full of fallible story-tellers with tales as twisted as their hearts” (Francke).

At breaking point, Verbal insists that the real master-mind is Keyser Soze, a shape-shifting monster of a criminal, who has pulled the devil’s greatest trick: “convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.” Keyser Soze, an exotic “composite of Genghis Khan and Fu Manchu” (Orr), is “the grand poobah of gangsters,” a “mythical bad guy” who “becomes the elusive protagonist of the film” and “sends the pulses of even the hardest criminal racing at the mention of his name” (Fried). If this exotic arch-villain strains credibility, Verbal’s account seems verified by the independent testimony of dying witness Arkosh Kovash. Still, Usual Suspects offers us “little beyond what Verbal chooses to tell us” (Orr). Unlike classic film noir, Usual Suspects offers viewers no “privileged glimpse into any ‘objective’ reality” (Orr)—i.e. no authoritative representation of what “really” happened independent of Verbal’s tainted version of events. Verbal’s mesmerizing tale ultimately persuades and, thus, deceives Kujan and (I think most) first-time viewers. We are caught up in the cunning web of wicked Verbal magic—until the “surprise” ending, that is. Kujan’s revelation that the “truth” of what “really” happened lies elsewhere, comes too late—and it comes in a closing cinematic thunderclap, a flurry of images artfully juxtaposed to suggest an entirely new pattern of connections and, thus, a radically different solution to the “convoluted” plot puzzle. The final rapid-fire image montage representing Kujan’s reconstructed point-of-view also present images of retreating Verbal Kint dropping his feigned disabilities and smiling enigmatically as he effects an elegant escape—images which, at the least, confirm that Verbal is not what he has seemed to be.

The “surprise” ending of Usual Suspects thus invites viewers to begin again. “A whammy of a surprise ending makes you want to see the film again to see if Singer pulled a few fast ones to make the pieces fit” (Travers). “See it once, see it ten times, you may still be left in the dark, but it’s the kind of disorientation that leaves you feeling deliriously giddy” (Francke). “[Usual] Suspects rewards multiple viewings because the slippery characters and shifting points of view add up to a film of hypnotic and haunting resonance” (Travers).

Works Cited

Brown, Georgia. “Great Pretenders.” Village Voice 22 August 1995: 45. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9509170738.

Francke, Lizzie. “The Post Tarantino Heist Movie.” New Statesman & Society 25 August 1995: 29. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9510021204.

Fried, John. “The Usual Suspects.” Cineaste 22.2 (June 1996): 53-54. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9608080718.

Knoll, Jack. “Crooks, Creeps and Cons.” Newsweek 28 August 1995: 58. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9508257585.

McQuarrie, Christopher. “The Usual Suspects” (script). Culver City, CA: Blue Parrott, Inc., 1994.

Orr, Stanley. “Postmodernism, Noir, and The Usual Suspects.” Literature Film Quarterly 27.1 (1999): 65+ (9 pp.) EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 1829522.

Travers, Peter. “A Summer Sleeper.” Rolling Stone 7 September 1995: 75-76. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9509051934.

“Usual Suspects.” Rolling Stone 28 December 1995: 134-137. EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite Article No. 9512295132.

Handout prepared by Cora Agatucci
for the Fall 2001 Detective & Crime Movie Series,
organized by Greg Lyons, with the support of
COCC Humanities Dept. & Westside Video (Bend, OR)

Available online handouts for films shown in Fall 2001 "Detective & Crime Movie" Series:
Brighton Rock (1947). Dir. John Boulting.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/brightonrock.htm
The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Dir. Michael Curtiz.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/kennelmurdercase.htm
Murder, My Sweet (1945). Dir. Edward Dmytryck.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/murdermysweet.htm
The Usual Suspects (1995). Dir. Bryan Singer.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/usualsuspects.htm

See also Popular Culture Video List (2000).
Detective | Science fiction | Travel | Film noir | Spy thriller | Western
Greg Lyons, comp. COCC Library & Humanities Dept. video holdings, 2000.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/courses/film/popculture.html

Return to Film Studies - Index of Online Resources
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/index.htm

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Last updated: 26 May 2003
Cora Agatucci ~ E-Mail: cagatucci@cocc.edu
Copyright © 2002-2003, Cora Agatucci
Humanities Department, Central Oregon Community College