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There are, broadly speaking, two Ridley Scotts.
There’s Big Ridley, the visionary filmmaker of large-scale epics who has spent nearly 50 years creating some of the most indelible worlds in modern movies. He’s the Ridley who unleashed a xenomorph aboard the Nostromo in “Alien” (1979), conjured the dystopian Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” (1982), resurrected ancient Rome in “Gladiator” (2000) and plunged American soldiers into the chaos of Mogadishu in “Black Hawk Down” (2001). Big Ridley commands armies of extras, builds enormous sets and deploys cutting-edge visual effects to create places that no longer exist — or never did. His movies have grossed roughly $5 billion worldwide.
Then there’s Small Ridley.
Small Ridley is the director who brings the volume down and puts the people front and center. Sometimes that means a genuinely smaller movie. Other times the canvas can still be enormous; what’s small is the intimate story Scott chooses to tell within it.
That often-less-heralded side of Scott has been there from his first feature, 1977’s “The Duellists,” which sets an obsessive two-man feud against the sweep of the Napoleonic Wars. Scott’s latest film, “The Dog Stars,” in theaters Aug. 28, is set after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. That might sound like Big Ridley territory but the movie, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, keeps its focus on a small band of survivors, including a pilot (Jacob Elordi) living at an abandoned airport with a heavily armed survivalist (Josh Brolin). With almost everyone else gone, the story comes down to people trying to figure out how to live with one another at the end of the world.
At 88, Scott is still cranking out movies with little apparent interest in slowing down. This fall, the academy will give him an honorary Oscar and he’s got plenty of Big Ridley on deck, including a pirate movie starring Hugh Jackman and, hopefully, his long-awaited take on the Bee Gees.
But with “The Dog Stars” as our excuse, we decided to spend some time with Small Ridley. The seven movies below aren’t a ranking of Scott’s best and they aren’t necessarily his smallest. You could make a case for “Black Rain” (1989), “White Squall” (1996) or plenty of others. But these seven are a good place to start. Some rank among Scott’s most acclaimed films; others are still being argued over. Together, they reveal a vital side of his filmmaking that can easily get overshadowed in a career this big.
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‘The Duellists’ (1977)
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With “Alien” and “Blade Runner” just around the corner, it’s easy to overlook Scott’s astonishingly assured feature debut, which won him the prize for best first film at Cannes. Based on a Joseph Conrad story, the period drama follows two officers in Napoleon’s army (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) whose minor quarrel condemns them to 15 years of repeatedly trying to kill each other. Scott was already unmistakably a visual stylist — these misty landscapes and candlelit interiors often look like paintings come to life — but he also seems keenly aware of the absurdity of it all. Keitel’s Feraud keeps provoking the feud; Carradine’s D’Hubert recognizes its madness but remains too bound by the same code of honor to walk away. Wars come and go, Napoleon rises and falls and these two men remain prisoners of a duty neither seems capable of escaping.
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‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ (1987)
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A box-office flop that divided critics, this sleek, sexually charged romantic thriller remains an intriguing detour in Scott’s career, playing more like an Adrian Lyne movie — think “9½ Weeks” or “Fatal Attraction” — than the kind of film he was known for making. Tom Berenger plays a married Queens cop assigned to protect wealthy Manhattan murder witness Mimi Rogers, while a pre-”Sopranos” Lorraine Bracco portrays the wife he leaves waiting at home. As Berenger and Rogers are drawn into an affair, Scott plays up the contrast between her wealthy Upper East Side world and his working-class life in an outer borough. But it’s Bracco who keeps the movie honest, making the wronged wife more than a stock character and giving the affair consequences the movie can’t romanticize away.
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‘Thelma & Louise’ (1991)
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Scott originally intended only to produce this one, a film built around a female friendship that hardly seemed an obvious fit for him as a director. Callie Khouri’s screenplay takes the traditionally male mythology of the American road movie and hands the keys to two women: Thelma (Geena Davis), a timid Arkansas housewife, and Louise (Susan Sarandon), a more worldly waitress. Their weekend getaway takes a violent turn, sending them into the wilderness in Louise’s Thunderbird. Both Oscar-nominated, Davis and Sarandon play beautifully off each other, funny and loose in one moment, frightened or furious the next. Scott makes glorious use of the open road and the Western landscape, even as Thelma and Louise find themselves running out of places to go.
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‘Matchstick Men’ (2003)
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This offbeat con-man comedy pairs the director with Nicolas Cage, an actor who turns out to be an unexpectedly good fit for him. Cage plays Roy, a gifted con artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose tics, phobias and elaborate rituals have turned his immaculate home into a fortress against the world. Sam Rockwell plays Frank, his slicker, more easygoing partner — he gives Cage’s tightly wound performance someone to ricochet off. Then Roy learns he has a teenage daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman), who throws his carefully ordered life into chaos. The con supplies the plot, but the movie is really about what happens when people who lie for a living start trusting one another.
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‘American Gangster’ (2007)
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At close to two-and-a-half hours with a story that stretches from Harlem to Southeast Asia, “American Gangster” hardly seems like Small Ridley at first glance. But beneath the sprawl, the movie is essentially a two-man character study. Steven Zaillian’s script unfolds along parallel tracks: Fastidious Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) builds his empire while Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the rumpled, dogged cop trying to catch him, builds his case. For a long stretch, it’s like watching two heavyweight fighters circle each other round after round without throwing a punch. Only in the final act does Scott bring Washington and Crowe together and the confrontation we’ve waited for turns out to be two formidable men sitting across a table, sizing each other up.
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‘The Counselor’ (2013)
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Pairing Ridley Scott with Cormac McCarthy for the acclaimed novelist’s first original screenplay sounded like a can’t-miss proposition, especially with a stacked cast that included Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz. What resulted was a chilly, moody crime thriller that critics largely savaged (The Times’ Kenneth Turan called itan “extremely unpleasant piece of business”), though the movie has since found its share of defenders. Fassbender plays a wealthy Texas lawyer whose decision to get involved in a drug deal puts him in the path of a powerful cartel. Much of the movie consists of Fassbender sitting with Pitt and Bardem as they talk ominously about the dangerous world he’s gotten himself into. The bursts of violence are brief. Most of the menace comes from simply listening to these people philosophize about death, fate and the consequences of bad decisions.
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‘All the Money in the World’ (2017)
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Scott had already finished shooting his thriller about the 1973 kidnapping of teenaged J. Paul Getty III when sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Kevin Spacey, whom he’d cast as oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. Rather than shelve the movie, Scott — ever the problem solver — replaced him with Christopher Plummer and reshot 22 scenes just weeks before it was due in theaters. Plummer’s Getty is imperious and withholding, refusing to pay the ransom for his kidnapped grandson and seemingly puzzled that anyone would expect him to. Despite its globe-trotting kidnapping plot, much of the movie’s tension comes down to people in rooms trying to persuade an old man to part with his money. Plummer, then 88, earned an Oscar nomination for a performance shot in just nine days.
Scott was 80 when he pulled the whole thing off. Somehow he made it look easy.
The post When Ridley Scott goes small: 7 movies that reveal another side of the master of spectacle appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
