Mona Lisa

at the Harvard Square Theater

directed by Neil Jordan

The lesson to be learned from Mona Lisa is that one brilliantly human and talented actor is almost, but not quite enough to make a brilliant movie. Bob Hoskins' performance (for which he understandably won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival) makes you laugh and cry and hope for him, although you expect a heartbreaking finale of tragic proportions from the beginning of the movie. But Hoskins' role as a stepped on underdog doesn't make room for his near-Shakespearean tragic potential, and you leave the theater feeling cheated.

George (Hoskins), recently released from jail where he was taking the rap for his boss, takes a job as a driver for Simone, a "tall, thin, black tart," (Cathy Tyson) who drags him into her personal tragedy, a desperate search for her friend Cathy, a 15-year-old prostitute and heroin addict.

At first, George and Simone hate each other. Simone, trying to rise above her streetwalker past, resents George's cheapness, the garish clothes he buys to please her, the Bloody Marys that he drinks waiting for her in fancy hotels. Hoskins, an incredibly natural blend of realistic and romantic, who cannot help but see her for what she is, nevertheless tries to protect her and himself from recognizing this reality.

George develops a jealous and possessive affection for Simone, trying to please her aristocratic tastes in a sad, bumbling, endearing way, sipping tea instead of Bloody Marys. In one scene, a waiter approaches him, "Bloody Mary, right?" "No, I'd like a pot of tea," George replies in his wonderful Cockney accent. "Earl Grey or Lapsang Soochong?" "No, tea," he says.

Often, George resembles nothing so much as a big devoted dog. He follows Simone trustingly, dressing in clothes she buys for him, waiting for her patiently. And, every once in a while, he bares his savage teeth, ready to fight to the death to protect his master. As they cruise through the red-light district looking for Cathy, suddenly a man attacks the car. George mechanically grabs the man's head and beats it bloody against the windowframe.

In a scene which exemplifies the relationship between the movie's two main characters, Simone hysterically beats George on the face with a belt, releasing her pent-up frustration at her own past abuses at the hands of her pimp. George stands there, crying, and submits to her rage and pain. When Simone stops, realizing how she's hurt him, she bursts into tears and hugs him as if he were a helpless and confused pet.

In order to show us the other, niceguy side of Hoskins' character, we meet his daughter who grows to love him through a series of secret meetings, and his best friend, a jovial mechanic with eccentric marketing ideas and a penchant for stories of the underworld. George tells his friend stories of his own life, pretending that he has invented them. These relationships are completely gratuitous to the film's plotline, and heighten your sneaky feeling that Mona Lisa is little more than a star-vehicle for Hoskins.

The other characters in the movie have too little substance to really care about, although it's hard not to be bowled over by 20-year-old Tyson's exotic beauty, and Michael Caine as chief bad guy has never been sleazier. Simone's evil sadistic ponce turns out to be a standard slick pimp, and the tragic Cathy is just another spacey blonde waif with a drug problem--and with a hard-to-believe twist, as we discover at the end of the movie.

The plot, although exciting and fun to watch, does not explore the seedy London underworld with as much force or power as other movies of its genre. The grimy teenage prostitutes are sad and pathetic, and the photography of Kings' Cross at night artistically blends darkness, sharp bright lights and soft tawdry neon colors, but the movie is missing the grittiness of Taxi Driver or harsher gangster films.

The movie's ending is its greatest diappointment. It builds to a series of fast-paced dramatic scenes, full of blood and violence and disappointed love, but than deflates all of the fear and pain and passion by killing off the bad guys and letting the good guy--George--just get up and leave.

During the movie, you grow to view George as a tragic figure, doomed never to succeed and always to suffer. But at the end, he walks away from what should be breaking his heart, and finds happiness under a greasy truck, side by side with his friend the fat mechanic. He's too adaptable, too accepting of his fate to live up to the Lear-esque expectations he creates. But expectations aside, Hoskins' performance is so human, so natural, so believable, that it makes this otherwise unspectacular film very much worth seeing.