Ray Liotta’s Unique Talent Wasn’t Intensity — It Was Capturing the Different Aches of Regret
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The post Ray Liotta’s Unique Talent Wasn’t Intensity — It Was Capturing the Different Aches of Regret appeared first on Consequence.
“It’ll be fine,” Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton) tries to assure his father, Big Jim (Ray Liotta) in AppleTV+’s new series Black Bird. Jim isn’t having it, though. Tired and gravel voice, his hand draws a sharp line through the air as he replies, “No, it won’t. It won’t.”
They’re specifically talking about Dad showing up as himself at a prison where his son is supposed to be undercover. A big-time but largely nonviolent drug dealer, Jimmy’s agreed to cozy up to serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) to find out where Hall buried his victims, in return for a sentence commutation. Big Jim’s arrival immediately puts that in jeopardy, less than 24 hours after Jimmy started the operation.
White hair rings Liotta’s face, his tracksuit covered in tones of white, grey, and tan. His skin, not so much wrinkled as topographic, seems constantly tightened in stress and blends into his hair and clothes. Big Jim already looks like he’s already begun the process of becoming a ghost in advance of his death.
His eyes are watery, barely holding back the tears motivated by his bone-deep end-of-life regret. It’s the sort of regret that comes from knowing yourself better than anyone and knowing it’s too damn late to fix the problem. His voice remains strong, but he gets lost in his own words, the consequence of a recent stroke. When he says, “It won’t” be fine, he’s not talking about the mistake directly in front of him. He’s talking about a lifetime of failing as a dad. Jimmy is forgiving him for the mental lapse of an aging man recovering from a stroke, but the actor knows Big Jim’s self-admonish carries the weight of years.
In this way, Big Jim is a character on familiar ground for Liotta. While he tends to be most often associated with a fierce intensity, his ability to inhabit regret has played an equal part in his career. From nearly the first time he was on camera, he built a filmography of characters who seem intimately familiar with that emotion. Time and again, he’s found different corners of it to present and explore.
Take, for example, his breakthrough role as Ray Sinclair in Something Wild. The actor received praise mainly for his frightening charisma in the film, and rightfully so. Still, he brings Sinclair’s regret to the surface in his nearly wordless final moments: Accidentally impaling himself on a hunting knife in the formerly milquetoast Charlie’s (Jeff Daniels) hands, all Ray’s rage and wounded entitlement immediately drain away.
His eyes go wide, but it isn’t fear or shock they register. Instead, it’s the look of a man realizing he’s finally made a mistake that he’s not slick, strong, or dangerous enough to erase. It’s the sorrow of a man who screwed up too badly to get away with it this time.
In Field of Dreams and Goodfellas, coming in back-to-back years, Liotta would return to that kind of regret from the perspective of men who lived to tell the tale. Dreams’ Shoeless Joe speaks poetically about it, comparing the pain of losing baseball to a phantom limb. He’s not mad at the world, baseball, or even himself. He’s just deeply sad. The kind of sad that you carry past the grave into a magical ballfield in Iowa. He never confesses his sins, but the viewer can read them on his face, in his body language.
On the other hand, Henry Hill is experiencing the same distress but refuses to accept any sense of responsibility. For him, the regret doesn’t come from doing wrong and derailing his perfect version of life. It comes from getting caught. There’s no remorse for the sin, only that he didn’t keep getting away with it. It’s all underlined by Sid Vicious’s bratty cover of “My Way” and Liotta’s half-hearted attempt to conjure Hill’s shark’s grin of contentment.
Gary Figgis, Liotta’s corrupt police officer-in-hiding in Cop Land, is almost Hill’s mirror opposite. Figgis is a man who can’t live with his sins but almost certainly will get away with them. The actor brings his gift for anger to bear here as a shield. As long as he can stay mad, he doesn’t have to contemplate what he’s done. Only the higher level of corruption of everyone around him and Sheriff Freddy Heflin’s (Sylvester Stallone) newfound dedication to the law forces him to literally and figuratively stop running from his mistakes.
Anger competes with regret again in the mostly forgotten but surprisingly enjoyable Heartbreakers. Liotta’s Dean Cumanno is a small-time thug who talks every bit like he runs the mob himself — tricked by the con artist mother/daughter team of Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt) into marrying the mom and cheating with the daughter, he seems like just another sucker.
However, he’s so head over heels for Max that, despite his unfaithfulness, his guilt leads him to abandon his entire life to find her. It’s only when he realizes he was a mark that the anger rises. Still, the actor never lets the audience forget how terrible he felt about losing Max. His anger never entirely obscures how desperate he is to “fix” things.
At times, Liotta would wield regret like a weapon. In Narc, he uses his own over his inability to save an undercover contact from an addiction to cut a bloody swath across the city’s drug trade. In Marriage Story, he taps and curdles Charlie Barber’s (Adam Driver) sorrow over his collapsing marriage — and years of similarly remorseful clients — to stop Barber from settling for a place between “reasonable and crazy.”
In other efforts, such as Shades of Blue and Many Saints of Newark, the actor projected a wounded, resigned sense of sorrow. His characters weren’t so much experiencing it as carrying it. Their existence is reduced to a place where regret has pushed out nearly everything else. Even as Salvatore Moltisanti (Liotta) remains mentally limber enough to see through Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), there’s the sense that he’s doing it uphill with weights on, so heavy is a life of past mistakes.
Ray Liotta’s Best Roles
That kind of regret is close to where Black Bird’s Big Jim dwells, but Liotta finds new shades within it. Jim’s is the sorrow of a man who can’t stop seeing how he’s failed despite everyone telling him otherwise. His new wife and son reassure him he is and was a good father. However, the counterevidence stares him right in the face.
He knows Jimmy loves him, knows his son and namesake idolizes him. That only serves to make the guilt sharper, harder to process. What kind of father lets his son become a drug dealer and benefits from it? How do you call yourself a good dad when you know your advice sent your child to jail for a decade instead of five years?
It’s a strong performance divorced of context, but when you know it’s his final television work, it takes on further depth. For a man who seemed to understand the pain of mistakes you can’t take back so well, there’s a certain poetry to going out on one of his rawest, most vulnerable performances. Ray Liotta remained a chronicler of regret until the end.
Black Bird premieres Friday, July 8th on Apple TV+. Check out the trailer below.
Ray Liotta’s Unique Talent Wasn’t Intensity — It Was Capturing the Different Aches of Regret
Tim Stevens
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