“Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” at first glance looks like another
stereotyped adventure thriller set in Latin America, but it turns out to be
quite interesting, for me at least. The
2004 film is directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman and is based on the 1990 novel
by Robert James Waller, supposedly based on a word-of-mouth tale from his wife
(so maybe reality-based), with the subtitle “The Run for El Norte”. It’s a bit like a Cormac McCarthy story and
movie, played straight out as a thriller – but it could have been done in
Hitchcock or Coen Brothers style and made funny. The film gets its title from a resort town on
Mexico’s Pacific, a long way from any border.
Really, the movie tells two interlocking stories. Danny (Craig Wasson) is a former American
journalist with a local girl friend Maria (Giovanna Zacarias). They witness a street murder, which seems to
be a complicated hit with international ramifications. Pretty soon, they are accosted by Clayton
Price (a sinewy, scarred Scott Glenn) and practically compelled to let him
hitch a ride with him to the Rio Grande, that on a map would be many hundreds
of miles away. The movie tells us about
Price through his dreams, particularly of accidents and grotesque crimes happening
on circus high wires. Slowly, the movie
fills in a puzzle of his background, a former Marine badly let down behind
lines in Vietnam, who has become a mercenary, perhaps on the underground
payroll of the CIA, perhaps looking for cartel drug dealers. There are misadventures, like an accident
where the car goes over a bank and stays upright and landing on a road
below. In one town, Price encounters
some thugs and sets the chest of one of them on fire after throwing lighter
fluid on his T-shirt and igniting it. I
don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of bodily “attack” before in the
movies. They encounter the poverty of
village life, including animal trading opportunists. Price is upset by a man who keeps a beautiful
serval in a cage and wants to pay the man to let it go free (anticipating
Richard Parker in “Pi”).
The other story concerns another veteran CIA agent Walter
McGrane (Harvey Keitel), who is training a young covert military intelligence
officer Neil (Jonathan Brandis) to track down Price for him. Apparently the US government (either Clinton
or Bush) wants to get rid of Price to cover something up. Neil, slender and clean-cut, is quite
attractive, and there are some hints that he might be gay. It’s not clear whether he is still formally
in the Armed Forces. (Did he leave the
uniform and join a civilian service because of DADT?) Throw into the brew the element of corrupt
local Mexican police, and you have the ingredients for a showdown and a
surprise ending (and relationship).
In my own novel manuscript (“Angel’s Brother”), there is a
fortyish CIA agent, masquerading as a history teacher and leading a
conventional family life in Dallas, paired up with a gay college student about
to graduate with an ROTC commission (maybe), but recruited by the intelligence
services for unusual abilities to solve unusual problems (a bizarre epidemic
with elements of alien or extraterrestrial origin). With all the military background, in my own
book, there is little use of guns – no battles and very little actual violence
(the one attack is actually a way to deliver intelligence).
The film was produced by Art in Motion and released on DVD
in 2006 by New Line. But I seem to
recall a short theatrical release then (maybe early in the year), maybe at the
Courthouse here in Arlington. But I
missed it then, and watched the Netflix DVD. This is a long film, listed as 118
minutes. But the DVD ran up to about 123
minutes before reverting back to minute 114 to start the end credits, so I’ve
never seen that done before. Vikki Carr sings a very familiar number (disco?)
in the end credits.
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