As much as we love to say that things never change in Hollywood, one can always tell a great deal about a specific era based on the films that were produced in it. Though it’s hard to think of the early and mid 90s as the past, one can already easily note the vastly different character of mainstream films’ sensibilities towards race and sex between then and now. Case in point is Jade, a film whose audience had already vanished by the time it was released and is somewhat perplexingly being released on Blu-ray. Released the same year as such other triumphs of moderate budgeting and sensible plotting as Cutthroat Island, Showgirls, and Waterworld, Jade is a relic of a Hollywood in flux between the testosterone and sex-fueled 80s and the franchise and spectacle-driven 00s.
David Corelli (David Caruso) is a detective in San Francisco assigned to investigate the bloody murder (bloody - done with an African hatchet - but also one of the least convincing dead bodies in film history) of a major bigwig in the art scene. While going through the man’s room, he discovers photographs of the governor (Richard Crenna) cavorting a woman far too young to be his wife (Angie Everhart). As tends to happen with mysteries and things written by Joe Eszterhas, following this connection leads him back to his powerful lawyer friend Matt Gavin (Chazz Palminteri) and his wife Trina (Linda Fiorentino), with whom Corelli has been in love for a long time. Will there be drama based on conflicting allegiances? Huge houses? Gratuitous nudity? I’d be surprised if you don’t know the answer.
It’s pretty much impossible to discuss Jade without also discussing Basic Instinct, the film whose plot and success this tries to replicate nearly beat for beat. Both are part of a subgenre that emerged in the late 80s for people who thought that they were too intelligent and classy for the then-dying slasher genre, but were actually just as prurient, perhaps more misogynistic, and completely self-satisfied that what they were watching was psychological in nature because the characters live in high rises rather than the suburbs. Basic Instinct (and Fatal Attraction before it) felt like the culmination of a decade of aggressive male dominated films, where the Rambos and Schwarzeneggers finally turned their gunsights away from the communists and criminals and towards the women who had been perceived as an intangible threat for too long, damn it. Instinct looked upon its female characters largely as sexually rapacious succubi who threatened the male-dominated order of things if they were not controlled, but Jade is not about be outdone - it extends its fear to pretty much everything that isn’t male or white. Jade, as a character, is the unnamed mysterious figure who is implicated in all of these murders, and is represented only by an African hatchet and mask and Chinese lettering (because all other cultures are essentially the same, really). Even though there isn’t a nonwhite actor in any major role, the film uses various symbols and objects so far out of context that it casts nearly everything outside of this small enclave in a spectral, menacing light, almost as if the mere presence of anything that wasn’t all-American was enough to throw any red-blooded man into a sexual frenzy, rocking the very basis of our civilization.
It’d be heartening to attribute Jade’s failure at the time solely to a shift in public sentiments and mood, but that would be a little disingenuous. The fact is, no matter what people thought David Caruso was capable of in film, it’s hard to think that anyone ever thought of him as a suitable replacement for Michael Douglas. The film’s choppy editing and constant use of The Rite of Spring (the dinosaur music from Fantasia) don’t help either. Granted, most of the other actors (particularly Fiorentino) do their best, the sheer ridiculousness of the film’s central concept is too much to allow any of them to make a purse out of a pig’s ear.
Strangely, that might be the best reason to see the film nowadays. Showgirls, Eszterhas’s other great contribution to society, has already taken its place as an enduring camp classic, aging better than a number of a considerably more successful films from that era. It’s unlikely that Jade will ever gain that sort of notoriety, it’s a more than worthy companion piece for a double feature.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
None.
"Jade" is on sale April 6, 2010 and is rated R. Thriller. Directed by William Friedkin. Written by Joe Eszterhas. Starring Angie Everhart, Linda Fiorentino, Michael Biehn, Richard Crenna.
