Pacific Heights (1990)

(On TV, August 2021) As much as Pacific Heights tries to stack the deck in making us sympathize with its young couple of protagonists (they’re in love, they’re in debt, they’re expecting a baby!), I’m not sure that a thriller in which we’re meant to side with the landlords is going to find much of an audience in a twenty-first century defined by unaffordable housing. Ah well — 1990 was at the end of the ultra-capitalistic 1980s and renting was the ultimate achievement for middle-class bourgeois. Not that Pacific Heights particularly cares about the plight of the common man or even simple plausibility: not when the antagonist is a consummate conman who’s able to manipulate the laws of California to his advantage. Step one is getting the apartment; step two is doing whatever he wants, knowing that he can’t be evicted; and step three is ruining his landlord’s lives so that they either go to prison or bankrupt. (Since there are two of them, why not in prison and bankrupt?)  It’s particularly far-fetched, so it’s a good thing that the film has one lawyer character to explain the labyrinthine way in which our protagonists are trapped. It does feel like an unusually conservative film in-between glorifying yuppies, criticizing renters’ rights and justifying extreme violence from the landlords. It doesn’t help that the script is occasionally slapdash — the male lead (played by Matthew Modine) often explodes in violent confrontation in ways that could have been interesting to explore in their own right. I’m really not fond of Melanie Griffith most of the time, so having her become the protagonist of the film didn’t do it any favours. But there’s one bright spot, and that’s Michael Keaton playing the brilliant yet utterly deranged tenant who becomes the film’s deliciously cartoonish villain — Keaton plays against type here and does it really well. It’s not quite enough to make Pacific Heights a good movie, but it does take the edge of what could have been a much worse film.