Kevin Spacey in "The Usual Suspects," Gramercy Pictures, 1994

''The Usual Suspects'' (1994)

When Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey) talks to U.S. customs agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), he appears to have no reason to lie. He’s already been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony about an incident involving a fire on a boat at a California pier. Kint has cerebral palsy and is easily intimidated by Kujan’s interrogation tactics. By the end of the film, Kujan (and the audience) believe he’s coerced Kint into revealing the full truth about the boat caper, one he'd previously kept from investigators. In fact, the story Kint tells Kujan, in the form of the flashbacks that make up the bulk of "The Usual Suspects," is largely a work of fiction designed to obscure the fact that Kint is the real mastermind, legendary underworld figure Keyser Söze. Hiding in plain sight, meek little Verbal, with his tacky clothes and haircut, seems like the last person capable of controlling a criminal empire. Which is exactly the point, one Kint even hints at when describing Söze (actually himself) by telling Kujan “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist." The film plays its own tricks; it masquerades as a neo-noir about a criminal fraternity, but it’s really a movie about (and a movie as) a con, with the audience's stand-in Kujan as the ultimate mark.

Alexander Payne made a few key changes to Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel, ''Election,'' when he and co-writer Jim Taylor adapted it into a film of the same name: he changed the setting from New Jersey to Omaha, Nebraska and the ending to something decidedly more bleak. What Payne did retain was the book’s unique deployment of multiple first-person narrators, all of them, to some degree, unreliable. In the film, we hear Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) and Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) giving their side of the story in voiceover narration, while Payne’s visuals often undermine what is heard. “Senior year was very productive for me,” Flick says, in a chirpy Nebraska accent, while we watch her bully, chide, and otherwise alienate her befuddled classmates. Rather than foster a sense of objectivity, the alternating points of view only serve to underline the essential impossibility of any one truly reliable narrator.

The granddaddy of all unreliable narrators, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert has been realized twice on film, once by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and then in a 1997 adaptation by Adrian Lyne. While Kubrick's version of ''Lolita'' uses occasional voiceover, mainly over shots of Humbert writing in his journal, Lyne uses it more freely and as a narrative counterpoint, so that we hear Nabokov's famous opening lines over the image of a distraught and bloody Humbert (Jeremy Irons) weaving through traffic in his car after the novel's final fiasco has played out: "Lolita, love of my life, fire of my loins." In the next sequence we are shown a flashback to Humbert's first, tragic love, at the tender age of 1 -- a girl named Annabel who died young. Humbert primes us for sympathy: "The shock of her loss froze something in me... The poison was in the wound, you see, and the wound wouldn't heal." Lyne's version opts out of much of the book's wickedly parodic edge, with Humbert as more of a pathetic sad sack than a deluded, acerbic demon lover, although both films' opening shots of Lolita sunbathing in the grass have the same provocative, leering intensity, suggesting a scheming temptress at work rather than a teenager lolling on the lawn. Suggesting, in other words, the unreliable motivations ascribed to her by one Humbert Humbert.

Bruce Campbell makes a convincing old-age Elvis in “Bubba Ho-Tep,” but Don Coscarelli’s cult hit is amusing in part because it keeps its thankyouverymuch-drawling protagonist’s true identity fuzzy. In an elderly care facility where his boil-afflicted genitals receive regular treatment, Campbell’s character vehemently claims to be the one and only King, having switched places years earlier with an expert Elvis impersonator so that he might retire and live a quiet, un-famous life. The veracity of these claims is called into question by his advanced age -- the notion that he’s merely a dementia-addled impersonator always at the fore, thanks to the film’s nursing home setting and its disbelieving staff -- as well as by the fact that his best friend, Jack (Ossie Davis), claims to be JFK despite being African-American (a detail addressed with some fanciful “skin-dying” explanation). Are these two coots really who they say they are? Or are they just, you know, old coots? To “Bubba Ho-Tep”’s credit, Coscarelli never makes it clear, thus establishing a current of absurdity only heightened by the duo’s eventual, central battle with a centuries-old mummy.

It's Sissy Spacek's teenage Holly who provides the flat narration to Terrence Malick's debut film about a couple on a cross-country killing spree -- she meets Martin Sheen's handsome, sociopathic garbage man Kit while out twirling her baton, and from there events escalate to grand passion, murder and fleeing from the law. Or so Holly tells it. Proclamations like "He wanted to die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms" don't exactly gel with the aimlessness we see, with Holly and Kit contemplating commemorating their first time together by crushing their hands with a rock, the actual consummation of their relationship having been anticlimactic in more ways that one. Holly describes her affair with Kit in the purplish language of a bodice-ripper or a swooning studio romance, but the reality is that their lives are defined by disconnect and boredom, absent not only of the heights of emotion they think they should be experiencing but of any emotion at all. We being to realize that Holly's voiceover is as much an attempt to excuse her complicity in what happened, with certain images, like that of her tossing her pet fish out to die in the backyard ("the only thing I did wrong"), lingering as a reminder that she's just as troubling a character as Kit.

The granddaddy of unreliable narrator films, Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" provides four conflicting accounts of a fateful event in order to highlight a fundamental inability to ascertain definitive truth. At a dilapidated gatehouse during a rainstorm, a priest and a woodcutter tell a commoner about the contradictory reports given by a bandit, a samurai, his wife and a woodcutter about an incident in a forest clearing, during which the bandit reportedly killed the samurai and raped the wife. Is this secondhand story true? And, even if it is, which of the four witnesses to the crimes -- three of whom sincerely profess to be the murderer -- is accurate? Devoid of any "Psycho"-style explanatory exposition that might tie up the action with a nice, neat bow, Kurosawa's classic eschews resolution of its various narratives, allowing their subjectivity to be the film's very point -- left only with "he said, she said," there's no way to truly know how the events in question unfolded. As a result, "Rashomon" isn't simply a film with an unreliable narrator; it is, fundamentally, a treatise on the potential unreliability of all narrators.

[Additional Photos: "American Psycho," Lionsgate, 2000; "Detour," Producers Releasing Corp., 1945; "Mad Detective," IFC Films, 2007; "Fight Club," 20th Century Fox, 1999; "My Best Fiend," Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1999; "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Goldwyn Distributing Co.; "Election," Paramount Pictures, 1999; "Lolita," MGM, 1962; "Bubba Ho-Tep," Vitagraph Films, 2002; "Badlands," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1973; "Rashomon," Daiei Motion Picture Co., 1950]

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Adam Lippe

I covered the same subject a while ago, though I included Naked Lunch, along with the more obvious examples of My Best Fiend, Fight Club, and The Usual Suspects.

You can read it here: http://www.regrettablesincerity.com/?p=2408