The January Man Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		1.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

The January Man Blu-ray Movie Review

A Fascinating Wreck, Poorly Presented

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 10, 2015

The January Man is a mess, but it isn't boring. One can glimpse the outlines of what the film might have been amidst the wreckage. Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley and producer Norman Jewison had triumphed both critically and commercially two years earlier with Moonstruck, which had a similarly off-beat script peopled by equally eccentric characters—and that film was nominated for six Oscars and won three, including for Shanley's screenplay.

But Moonstruck had the benefit of Jewison's seasoned direction, which kept a tight rein on the performances, ensuring that everyone occupied the same movie. With The January Man, Jewison was busy prepping In Country, his drama about Vietnam veterans, and he relinquished the director's chair to Irish helmer Pat O'Connor, who had never before made a film set in America. That turned out to be a serious error, because The January Man needed Jewison's delicate touch even more than Moonstruck, especially with a cast that included such disparate temperaments (and strong personalities) as Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Keitel, Alan Rickman and Jewison's old pal, Rod Steiger. The only cast member with whom O'Connor clearly had rapport was Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, whom he married the year following the the film's disastrous release.

Like every film, The January Man has its fans, and I happen to be one of them. Some of the scenes work, and Kevin Kline's lead performance makes a weird kind of sense (or, rather, it would make sense, if the movie around it matched what Kline was doing). The worst scenes are Steiger's and Danny Aiello's, but they have a train-wreck fascination, as you wonder how any director could have uttered the words "Print it!" after that particular take, or an editor of Lou Lombardo's experience could have cut in those scenes without trimming the excess ham. There are rumors of alternate versions, and one has to wonder whether Lombardo, a veteran not only of Moonstruck, but also of The Wild Bunch, one of the most tightly edited features of the 20th Century, was fully responsible for the film that was ultimately released.

The prospect of having this white elephant on Blu-ray was exciting, but unfortunately the release by Kino Lorber is a letdown. One of the best elements of The January Man is its lively score by the late Marvin Hamlisch, which was provided in full-bodied stereo both theatrically and on DVD. Kino's Blu-ray offers only a dull-sounding mono track. Even the lossy DVD version sounds better.

Shanley's script uses the framework of a police procedural to pursue one of his favorite dramatic techniques, which is to send a bunch of outsized personalities pinging off of each other in various combinations. As in Moonstruck, family and romance are major elements, but The January Man expands the canvas to include crime and big city politics.

A serial killer has terrorized New York for eleven months, preying on single women living alone. His latest victim, claimed on New Year's Eve, is Alison Hawkins (Faye Grant), a close friend of Mayor Flynn's (Steiger) daughter, Bernadette (Mastrontonio), who said goodbye to Alison just before she was ambushed and strangled in her apartment. Stung by the endless stream of bad PR and shaken by a death so close to home, the mayor orders Commissioner Frank Starkey (Keitel) to reinstate his brother Nick (Kline) as a police detective. Nick Starkey resigned from the NYPD two years earlier under a cloud of suspicion relating to bribery and graft and has since become a fireman. Before that, he was considered the most gifted investigator on the force.

The Starkey brothers have major baggage. Nick suspects (with good reason) that he was the fall guy for Frank's misconduct two years earlier. And Frank is now married to Christine (Sarandon), who used to be Nick's girlfriend. Indeed, Nick makes it a condition of his return that Christine have dinner with him—his delight in preparing odd dishes is a running joke—so that he can confront her about her choice of husband. One of the many problems in the finished film is that Christine Starkey remains too vaguely defined; it's hard to see how she and Nick could ever have been a couple.

Nick's former captain, Vincent Alcoa (Aiello), is outraged that Starkey has been restored to duty. "Nick Starkey is not a policeman!" shrieks Alcoa. "He's got a beatnik mentality!" Under Norman Jewison's direction in Moonstruck, Danny Aiello gave a restrained and subtle performance as a comical mama's boy, but in The January Man he routinely bellows out his lines at top volume, either because he was emulating Rod Steiger or because director O'Connor thought that was how an NYPD captain should talk. Either way, his scenes are jaw-droppingly bad. But the line about Nick Starkey's "beatnik mentality" is accurate. Nick rejects the office he's been assigned at police headquarters, picks a different one that has better "light" and insists that Alcoa hire his neighbor Ed (Rickman) as Nick's assistant. A starving painter from the Village who really does have a beatnik mentality, Ed promptly sets about illustrating Nick's new office to create a more suitable atmosphere for creative insight.

Nick Starkey's solution of the case is a memorably wicked satire not only of Sherlock Holmes but also of every overly elaborate serial killer mystery since The January Man—or rather, it would be memorable, if it weren't buried under the rubble of various subplots swirling around it. The one that works best is the romance between Nick and the much-younger Bernadette, which sparks immediately after the funeral of her friend, Alison, and proves to be a catalyst both for Nick's thought process and for his finally escaping the grip of his old feelings for Christine. Other storylines, including a copycat killer and murky revelations about Frank Starkey's past, aren't nearly as successful.

Kevin Kline excels at playing oddballs, and he acquired the nickname of "Kevin Decline" for routinely turning down parts that didn't appeal to his sense of the offbeat. His portrayal of Nick Starkey aptly catches the character's dissociation from everyday life, which is what makes him unsuitable for following orders and adhering to routine but allows him to home in on obscure details that no one else would notice. One of The January Man's best sequences occurs at the end, after Nick has correctly predicted the elusive killer's next target and surprises the fiend in the act. The chase that ensues strikes exactly the right balance between danger and absurdity. Unfortunately, by that point most viewers have long since tuned out.

The January Man Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The January Man was shot by Polish cinematographer Jerzy Zielinski (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story). Much of the film was shot at night on location in New York, with interiors filmed in Toronto. Kino's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was created from a master supplied by MGM, for which Kino assumes no responsibility other than encoding for disc.

MGM's transfer is serviceable, with decent blacks, adequate detail and a palette that doesn't leap off the screen but accurately represents New York City in the late Eighties, before its major renaissance. The presentation won't wow anyone, but neither will it disappoint. The image has a natural grain pattern, and occasional shots may strike some viewers as excessively grainy, especially at night, but that is the nature of analog film. Video noise has been held to a minimum.

Kino has mastered The January Man with an average bitrate of 23.93 Mbps, which isn't great but is decent enough for a film that doesn't have many action sequences. A moment here or there looks iffy, but otherwise no compression issues presented themselves.

The January Man Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The audio track is where Kino's release falls down. The January Man was released theatrically in Dolby Stereo, and MGM's 2002 DVD also contained a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track. Kino's Blu-ray provides only a mono track, encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. According to Kino, this is how MGM provided the film to them so that, technically, the omission of a stereo track is not an error and does not mandate any correction or "fix". Kino has also said that the disc is not selling well enough to indicate any interest among consumers in a corrected disc.

The mono track on Kino's Blu-ray is certainly adequate, with clear dialogue and sound effects and acceptable dynamic range for the playful score by Marvin Hamlisch, which does more than any other element in the film to establish a consistent tone and hold the disparate elements together. However, in direct comparison, the DVD's lossy DD 2.0 track sounds so much better than the Blu-ray's lossless track that it demonstrates once again how the source is more important than the encoding format. Played back in stereo through a surround decoder, Hamlisch's score exhibits clear separations and expands into the room with a kind of brassy authority that mimics the free-roaming nature of Nick Starkey's imagination. The dialogue is better separated and prioritized, and the sound effects are clearer. Despite its relatively low bitrate (192 kbps), the stereo soundtrack on the DVD is louder, livelier and more dynamic, simply by virtue of being in stereo. Kino's lossless soundtrack is serviceable at best and fails to replicate the theatrical experience.

The January Man Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making-Of Featurette (480i; 1.33:1; 6:24): Featuring interviews with most of the principal cast, as well as Shanley and Jewison, this vintage featurette attempts to put a good face on what was, by all accounts, a troubled production.



• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 1:28): "Murder. Corruption. Comedy. What a way to start the year."

The January Man Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

After the disappointment of The January Man, Shanley tried his hand at directing his own material, and the result was the underrated Joe Versus the Volcano, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The film's weak reception prompted Shanley to leave Hollywood and return to his roots as a playwright. Except for several book-to-screen adaptations (including 1995's Congo), which he did primarily to earn a living, Shanley did not return to Hollywood until 2006, when he directed his own adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt. He was still writing eccentric characters, but the craftsmanship was more refined. The Shanley of today probably wouldn't write The January Man or would write it so differently that it would be unrecognizable. The film remains a curiosity from an earlier moment in the career of both the writer and many notable actors, worth experiencing for individual scenes but less than the sum of its parts. It's too bad that Kino's Blu-ray presents it so poorly.