Billy Bathgate (1991)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) At first glance, Billy Bathgate looks like the kind of slam-dunk entertainment that 1990s Hollywood made so well—a mixture of coming-of-age drama set within a fascinating gangster context, with a little bit of romance to sweeten the whole thing. Throw in the 1930s period recreation, a bestselling source novel written by EL Doctorow, a strong cast of actors, plus story elements so familiar that they become comfortable, and Billy Bathgate looks like a ready-made audience pleaser and potential awards contender. Except that it didn’t turn out that way.  Production of the film was marred by endless rewrites, significant cost overruns and Doctorow distancing himself from the adaptation. Things didn’t get better upon the film’s release, as critics savaged it and audiences ran away. Now a largely forgotten relic of a decade now long past, Billy Bathgate has become a curiosity. It hasn’t improved with age—the blend of coming-of-age drama with gangster thrills is still awkward, and curious creative decisions keep haunting the film and making it duller than it should be. On the other hand, it does have some nice period detail, a fun episode set in a small upstate New York town, a rather amazing cast made of then-known names (Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Bruce Willis) and people who would later become far more prominent (Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi), as well as far more nudity from Kidman than you would expect from the nature of the film. For film reviewers, it’s not a bad idea to go back in time to see not only the classics, but also the failures like Billy Bathgate. Decades past the media pile-up that often happens in such cases, it can be instructive to look at the wreckage and wonder—well, what happened here?