Blood and Wine. 1996. UK/USA. Directed by Bob Rafelson. Screenplay by Nick Villieras, Alison Cross. With Michael Caine, Stephen Dorff, Jennifer Lopez, Jack Nicholson. DCP. Screening materials courtesy of Jeremy Thomas. 101 min.
After a series of flops, Michael Caine was thrown a lifeline by Jack Nicholson, “who persuaded me to come out of retirement and, in *Blood and Wine*…also gave me the vehicle to do it with. It was a turning point in my career when I was down and almost out.” Reuniting Nicholson with writer-director Bob Rafelson, Blood and Wine has an easy, sinister charm thanks to the knowing performances of its lead actors. The film involves a jewel theft gone horribly wrong, with tragic consequences for the families involved. It’s populated with the kind of sordid, overheated types one usually finds in Carl Hiaasen crime novels set on tumescent Florida beaches (including a young Stephen Dorff and Jennifer Lopez), and as Roger Ebert admiringly writes, “Michael Caine, who can sleepwalk through bad movies, can bring good ones a special texture. Here he is convincing and sardonically amusing as a wreck of a man who chain-smokes, coughs, spits up blood and still goes through the rituals of a jewel thief because that is who he is. He is capable of sudden violence (pounding Nicholson with a golf club, he observes, ‘That was an acupuncture point’). But he almost inspires sympathy as a crook who has labored a long time at a hard profession and has nothing to show for it.”