POOLMAN, THE DIRECTORIAL DEBUT from star Chris Pine, is a sort of movie I sometimes think of as a “pseudo-noir.”
Defining film noir is notoriously tricky; as Eddie Muller wrote in the author’s note of his visual history of the subject, Dark City, “Essayists argued over what it was and which films qualified. Was noir a genre? Was it a style? Academics tried to pin it down and dissect it. In the process, they managed to drain the life’s blood out of the films.” Suffice to say, when we think of noir, we think of smoky, black-and-white city streets; angular, suffocating cityscapes; labyrinthine plots; and gunslinging gumshoes and femme fatales. Whether or not one considers The Maltese Falcon or Touch of Evil or Nightmare Alley (the 1947 original) noir or noir-adjacent or noirish, they all gave off similar vibes.
“Conventional wisdom has branded [noirs] bleak, depressing, and nihilistic—in fact, they’re just the opposite,” Muller wrote. “To me, film noirs were the only movies that offered bracing respite from sugarcoated dogma, Hollywood-style. They weren’t trying to lull you or sell you or reassure you—they insisted you wake up to the reality of a corrupt world.”
No wonder that the neo-noirs would appeal to filmmakers steeped in the ideals of the auteur theory in which noir played such a key role. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye suggested there was no one you could trust, not friends, not even doctors. Rian Johnson’s masterpiece Brick transported all the trappings—murder, lust, drugs, betrayal—to the world of high school. The Coens honed their rust-red humor on Blood Simple, the ultimate comedy of errors. And then there’s Chinatown. The archetypal neo-noir, a film that’s likely as influential as any proper noir. Roman Polanski’s story of incest and water tables is a key influence on several of the films I would categorize as pseudo-noir.
All of these things are tricky and fluid; I do not offer a concrete definition here, more a tilt of burned-down cigarette gesturing toward an idea sheathed in the shadows of a venetian blind. But a pseudo-noir is a film that borrows some of the trappings and the ideas and the ideals of the noir while keeping a foot firmly in another genre. A movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is undoubtedly noirish, borrowing heavily from Chinatown, but it’s also a cartoon farce, a meta-comedy about the role of animation in Hollywood. The Big Lebowski is arguably a neo-noir but could fit here as well, given the Coens’ subversion of noir tropes in the service of stoner humor. Under the Silver Lake is part neo-noir, part paranoid conspiracy thriller, part pop-cultural commentary.
Poolman, I think, falls into this category: It is a film that very much has the trappings of noir but is less hard-bitten, less cynical, more amiable than the genre typically entails. Pine stars as Darren Barrenman, who is, you guessed it, a poolman. He’s also a boyfriend to Susan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an amateur documentarian alongside Jack (Danny DeVito), a devotee of the philosophical stylings of both Carl Jung and Erin Brockovich, and a concerned citizen of Los Angeles, having appeared at hundreds of consecutive city council meetings in an effort to spur preservation of classical buildings and the installation of more trolley lines.
It is with the city council that Darren has beef, and soon he is entangled in a tale of corruption, vice, and woe. City Council President Stephen Toronkowski (Stephen Tobolowsky) is Darren’s foe, and when his new secretary, June (DeWanda Wise), suggests she has evidence that Toronkowski is accepting bribes on behalf of a local developer, well, everything starts to spiral out of Darren’s control.
But the noirish mystery at the heart of the film—which eventually echoes both Chinatown and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a film shamelessly riffing on Chinatown itself—is not really the point here. This is a hangout picture, the portrait of a Los Angeles burnout who never quite got his breaks, who never quite settled down, who never quite developed the spark needed to get out there and get things done. It’s about Darren’s life with his friends, and it helps that the cast here is top notch: Pine, DeVito, and Leigh are joined by Annette Bening, John Ortiz, Clancy Brown, and Ray Wise, and they all do an outstanding job bouncing off Pine’s alternating irritation and innocence.
The humor in this film is dry and works in the deliveries rather than the writing: “Apologize to the hand-carved wainscoting,” Pine howls at one point, annoyed that someone has brought him coffee from a purveyor who bulldozed an architectural treasure for a corporate HQ. “Things change,” another character tells him, to which he curtly replies “Well they shouldn’t,” and it’s not a great joke or anything, but it’s still very funny. There’s a dual exasperated exclamation of “Dickhead!” at one point near the end that prompted vocal guffaws from me and the only other guy in my theater yesterday.
Darren’s NIMBY fussiness is a fantastic bit of characterization, at least insofar as Los Angeles’s propensity to bulldoze its history is one of the city’s defining traits. His aversion to this creative destruction both sets him in the city and apart from one of its central characteristics. Darren is both insider and outsider simultaneously, and thus the perfect patsy for the devious trap set for him by the city’s powerbrokers. And his problems are, largely, internal: accepting who he is, who he loves, who loves him, etc. When I think of the pseudo-noir, this is perhaps the key element: yes, there may be a conspiracy, but solving it doesn’t bring resolution. Resolution comes for Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when he accepts his role as protector of toons and lets go of his brother’s murder. Resolution comes for Sam (Andrew Garfield) in Under the Silver Lake when he learns that the rich do communicate in secret code, that they have built tombs under Los Angeles, and he accepts that this secret knowledge has nothing to do with his own sadness, his own aimlessness.
I’m a little surprised by the overwhelmingly negative response to Poolman; it doesn’t entirely work and the success or failure of a hangout movie will always depend on how much you enjoy hanging out with the folks on screen, but it’s a pleasant, occasionally silly 100 minutes, and a fine actors showcase. Pine has assembled an incredible cast here and, importantly, isn’t doing that thing so many actors do the first time they get behind a camera: he’s not deploying every trick he’s seen every other director use. His framing is straightforward; there are no big camera moves, no weird angles. It’s a simple story about a “simple and tragic” man, simply told. One hopes it will find an audience once it hits home audiences, as is frequently the case with the successful pseudo-noir.