300 Words on "The Player" (1992)

There have been many movies which have satirized the oftentimes corrupt and corporate nature of Hollywood. Yet, few have done so with the same pitch-black, bone-dry comedy as 1992’s The Player; part The Big Sleep, part Sunset Boulevard, the result is a film which is fascinating to watch. The Player, though advertised as a comedy, is not a laugh-out-loud movie experience. Its comedy is subtle and not always broadly spelled out. The film’s funniest moments come in the scenes where outrageously bad movie pitches are being sold to executives with the straightest of faces by movie writers. These vignettes are truly the heart of The Player and, curiously, I found myself more interested in the film’s depiction of the studio-system movie-making machine than I was in the movie’s central mystery.

The Player is able to pull this off by being so extremely self-aware. Its final minutes border on the meta and, throughout, it feels as though everyone involved had their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. The movie opens, too, with one of the most beautifully-executed long-takes I have ever seen; complete with references to Rope (1948) and Orson Welles’ similar long take in Touch of Evil. The Player, at once, paints a picture of nearly everything that is great about movies, and nearly everything that is bad about movies.

Today, it seems that the message of The Player is more relevant than ever before, and the moment in which Tim Robbin’s movie exec off-handedly proposes remaking the Italian arthouse film, The Bicycle Thief, feels so incredibly real, it hurts. The Player is a cautionary tale about the nature of artistic integrity and inspiration; a movie which is not afraid to both pay homage to and poke fun at the institution of film. It’s a strange little movie, but it got me thinking, which surely separates The Player from the type of film which it fantastically parodies.