C&C 28: 25 Years of Zero Effect
The last edition of 2023 looks back at a great Ryan O’Neal performance
When I heard that Ryan O’Neal had passed away earlier this month, one of my first thoughts was this title card from the end of Barry Lyndon (1975).
That concluding judgment from on high remains a devastating coup de grâce. Given my predilections, it’s no surprise that my mind also went to O’Neal’s minimalist turn in The Driver (1978), which has gotten more attention over the years as Walter Hill’s film has entered the neo-noir pantheon.
But my main impression of Ryan O’Neal will always be a late-career appearance in a movie not enough people know: Zero Effect (1998). The film made an impact on me in ways large and small, with at least one being somewhat embarrassing in retrospect. (I’ll get to that.) It took O’Neal’s death for me to realize that the movie marks its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. In honor of his passing and that occasion, I watched it again. And I realized a few things anew.
Keep your Sherlock and your Elementary. This is, hands down, the finest contemporary updating of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective.
It’s also the best modern PI movie.
Shot largely on location in Portland, Oregon, it may be the most Pacific Northwest movie ever.
The writing/directing debut of Jake Kasdan, Zero Effect was dumped into theaters on the last Friday in January. Never a good sign. I was one of the few people to see it on opening weekend; when Elvis Costello’s “Mystery Dance” began blasting over the titles, I knew I was home. Siskel & Ebert sang its praises, but their efforts were to no avail. The movie vanished, except from the hearts of those of us who loved it. I bought the DVD the day it came out, and pulled it from the shelf this week.
The movie’s Sherlock Holmes surrogate is Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman, giving his all in the role of his career). The world’s foremost private investigator, he’s also an eccentric recluse who won’t meet his clients personally. For that, he has attorney Steve Arlo, played by a baby-faced Ben Stiller. Only his Watson doesn’t recount his exploits for the ages in aggrandizing style. Arlo finds his boss deeply weird, even irritating. Many of Holmes’s habits—the cocaine, the violin playing, the penchant for preposterous disguises—are reimagined and intensified in Zero, the cumulative impact pushing his relationship with Arlo to the brink.
Their latest client proves to be the last straw. Casting O’Neal as Oregon timber magnate Gregory Stark is a stroke of genius, as the character is the inverse of O’Neal’s best-known role, Oliver Barrett IV in Love Story (1970). A fair-haired Harvard product all too at ease with his privilege, Stark is quick to resort to bullying. He’s being blackmailed and expects Zero to find the culprit but refuses to reveal what transgression this party holds over him. Arlo ultimately says the case will be the last he works with Zero, in part because he’s tired of aiding the Starks of the world. Zero counters that “these people are the victims of plots and they need our help,” insisting that they’re the good guys. A stupefied Arlo replies, in one of the film’s signature lines:
There aren’t any good guys. You realize that, don’t you? I mean, there aren’t evil guys, and innocent guys. It’s just—it’s just … It’s just a bunch of guys.
Kasdan uses the finest Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” as the script’s framework, which means Daryl Zero must contend with his own Irene Adler. Stark is being masterfully extorted by no-nonsense paramedic Gloria Sullivan, played by Deadwood’s Kim Dickens in a spare early performance that marked her as an actor to watch. Zero prides himself on working with “objectivity and observation, or ‘the two obs,’ as I call them,” but he abandons both principles as Zero Effect becomes a romance between wounded people. “Passion is the enemy of precision,” to cite another Zero maxim.
Pullman was a known commodity by this point—it had been ten years since Spaceballs and he’d already played the President of the United States in Independence Day—but he commits so fiercely to Daryl Zero that he disappears inside the character. In the actor’s hands, every quirky mannerism, even Zero’s habit of christening his capers with names like “The Case of the Hired Gun Who Made Way, Way Too Many Mistakes,” anchors the sleuth in reality. It helps that Zero is blessed with pronouncements that sound like crackpot Zen koans which, like all koans, contain kernels of truth.
Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.
Down to its note-perfect ending, Zero Effect is a small miracle, so naturally it tanked. At least it didn’t hurt Jake Kasdan’s career. He’d go on to direct myriad TV series and the two Jumanji reboots.
SIDE RANT: He’d also make Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), a movie that critics regularly invoke in reviews of biopics, dumbfounded that Kasdan’s parody didn’t kill off certain storytelling tropes. Recent pieces at Slate and The Reveal highlight what sounds like a particularly egregious example in Ferrari. To defend that film, which I haven’t seen yet, Troy Kennedy Martin’s Ferrari screenplay predates Walk Hard by fifteen years, and Michael Mann has never struck me as a laff-a-minute guy who keeps up with contemporary comedy. I don’t understand the belief that once a cliché has been mocked it is rendered powerless, a vampire with a stake through its heart. People have to see the satirical version, for one thing; as funny as Walk Hard is, it remains a cult favorite, its fans dwarfed by the number of people who unironically enjoyed, say, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). And the continuing success of movies like Rhapsody demonstrates that what audiences like cannot be vanquished. When I read a review that sputters, “But, but … Walk Hard!” I don’t nod sagely and lament the current state of screenwriting. I’m more likely to think, “Lazy criticism.”
In a perfect world, there would have been further Daryl Zero films. Astoundingly, Kasdan got the opportunity to revisit the character when NBC approved a television pilot in 2002, which he directed and cowrote with Walon Green (The Wild Bunch). A prequel to the movie, it starred Alan Cumming as Zero. The show wasn’t picked up. The pilot is on YouTube. I will never watch it. I can’t bear the notion of an actor other than Bill Pullman in the role.
ASIDE: That is in no way a knock on Cumming. Marlowe (2023) has surfaced on cable—turn on your TV, I’m sure it’s airing right now—and while the movie is a disappointment, I keep leaving it on to catch certain moments. Chief among them is an extended conversation/interrogation between Cumming’s charming criminal and Liam Neeson’s Philip Marlowe. Cumming relishes every line of his overheated dialogue, Neeson deftly underplaying to him. For a few minutes at least, the movie has the verve of vintage noir. I also recently enjoyed Quiz Lady (2023, on Hulu), a comedy about estranged sisters (Awkwafina and Sandra Oh) who team up in the wake of their mother’s disappearance to earn one of them a spot on a Jeopardy!-style game show. (Trust me, the plot makes sense.) There’s a running gag involving Awkwafina’s neighbor, played by the divine Holland Taylor, and her love of Alan Cumming with a payoff that is hilarious and unexpectedly poignant.
Oh, right, I said something up top about an aspect of my devotion to Zero Effect being embarrassing, didn’t I? After the movie came out, for a longer period of time than I feel comfortable admitting, I dressed like Daryl Zero. I found a baseball cap and jacket much like his and adopted a similar jeans/sneakers combo. The look worked very well in the Seattle weather, I’ll have you know. No one ever tumbled to it being cosplay. I kind of wish somebody had.
What I’m Reading
Speaking of wardrobe, listen to Ted Gioia, fellas. If you want to learn how to dress, “pay attention to musicians.” Specifically, Duke Ellington.
“The only way to remain vital is to take chances.” So many great takeaways in Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker profile of screenwriter Scott Frank, like the welcome news that not only is Frank now adapting his dream project—Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest—but his cowriter is novelist Megan Abbott. Also, I would absolutely see an opera built around songs by The Killers.
Finally …
As the year draws to a close, my thanks to all of you who subscribed to the newsletter. I hadn’t planned on being here when 2023 began, and I appreciate everyone who has tagged along for the ride. May 2024 be easier on us than we expect it to be.
I also saw Zero Effect in the theater, and liked it very much. I need to watch it again.