“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
It’s always weird for me that a movie like “The Ref” isn’t terribly well known. Saying that, I guess it’s not that surprising, seeing as how it wasn’t successful. It should have been though. I’ve never known anyone who has seen it that hasn’t enjoyed it. On top of it just being a good story well told, the cast is ludicrous. Granted, yes, it was during the time that major movie studios were apparently committed to making Denis Leary a movie star (see also: my piece on Judgment Night). That seemed weird at the time but seems even weirder in retrospect. So, I get it not exactly catching fire at the box office. However, the reason I ended up seeing it was after I watched “The Usual Suspects”, I wanted to track down whatever else starring Kevin Spacey that I could… which included “The Ref”, as it came out the year before. Say what you want about Spacey now. It’s probably accurate. Even with that, his work in the ’90s was uniformly excellent. “The Ref” still stands up as one of my favorite performances of his and he’s not even really the star of the piece. You’d think there would have been more people who love this movie like I love this movie. I hope at the very least that I can convince people to give it a watch now.
I guess I should preface explaining the plot by saying the film is essentially a farce. That’s a term that seems insulting but in the most literal sense, it’s just speaking to comedy that’s exaggerated to what could be called a level of extravagance. Basically, we’re introduced to Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis’ characters of Lloyd and Caroline while they are at marriage counseling. There’s a barely contained hostility between them (it’s not even contained at all for very long) as they work seemingly in vain on their crumbling marriage. Elsewhere, Denis Leary’s character of Gus is robbing the home of an extremely wealthy man in the same town. He’s beaten by the security system and from that point, is just doing what he can to evade capture. He encounters Caroline in a nearby store and takes the couple hostage while he puts plans into place to make a proper escape from the town. The problem is that it’s Christmas Eve. Lloyd and Caroline’s troubled son, Jesse, is on his way back home and Lloyd’s mother, brother, sister-in-law and their kids are also on their way. Finally accepting that there’s no way to cancel dinner and put off the guests (in the time before cell phones) or for Gus to be out of the house before everyone arrives, he poses as the marriage counselor, which ultimately ends up being more fruitful than the actual counseling session earlier.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ’90s were a weird, wild time for cinema. Especially genre cinema. Really though, film in general is incredibly all over the place in that decade. Independent cinema had risen to prominence and studio heads didn’t seem to know what their place was anymore. In certain cases, it seems that in their desperate attempts to stay relevant, they looked to try to find auteurs like Miramax had with Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and the like who were on the come up in the same way. One of the places they seemed to look for the auteurs of the future was to MTV. Enter Ted Demme. Demme’s career arc before proper filmmaking is rather mind-boggling by today’s standards. He worked his way up from a PA at MTV to eventually becoming a producer and creating stuff like “Yo! MTV Raps” while also directing things like interstitials between videos (back when MTV played music videos and needed something to play between them). Some of the most famous were black and white pieces featuring Denis Leary rants. Demme died tragically in 2002, so there’s only like a decade’s worth of his directorial efforts on film but I’ve always felt like his work was underrated. His follow-up to this film especially (1996’s “Beautiful Girls”) makes me understand why studios would hitch their proverbial wagon to him. He can do grittier material while never losing a sensitivity that many doing similar stuff didn’t share. In fact, that sensitivity and attention to character is a large part of why “The Ref” works as well as it does. I’m not sure how much of himself he brought to his direction of the Denis Leary MTV spots or Leary’s standup specials that he directed but there’s definitely a feeling of comfort between them that does come shining through.
In regard to Denis Leary, I guess I should address further cultural context. As Kevin Spacey has moved from celebrated to infamous, Denis Leary kind of had the opposite arc. His stand-up comedy was almost as reviled as it was popular, mostly because of accusations of plagiarizing Bill Hicks. I’ve always been a fan of stand-up and love both men but there’s definitely merit to the argument that while Denis Leary was making his name, if some of his stuff wasn’t plagiarism, it was definitely in the orbit of plagiarism. Most people seemingly weren’t aware of that or didn’t care, so Leary became pretty popular. The fallout of that was that studios thought he was going to be the next Eddie Murphy or something because, throughout the mid-to-late ’90s, he had high profile role after high profile role even though most of the associated films… much like this film, weren’t terribly successful. However, in this film and many of his other major works of the time though, he’s great. He’s still in the process of separating his comedy persona from his actual acting work but what he does in “The Ref”, I’d put among his best performances. Sure, there are occasional moments where he veers off into his trademark rants but it’s so deeply incorporated that it feels like an organic part of the character, rather than the movie stopping so he can get his schtick in.
The rest of the cast includes the aforementioned Kevin Spacey, who gives what I’ve always felt to be maybe his most underrated performance in this film. I admit it feels weird to compliment Spacey these days but he’s never gotten enough credit for the arc his character goes through in “The Ref” as far as I’m concerned. A lot of the dramatic weight of the story is placed on his shoulders but he also manages to be very funny and that’s not necessarily the easiest thing to pull off. This is a film that does seem like a Leary star vehicle from the outside but is completely held together by the three leads in Leary, Spacey, and Judy Davis. Davis isn’t necessarily someone you’d recognize but the fact that she’s worked steadily for four decades isn’t some sort of accident. In this case, she’s saddled with almost being the middle ground between the dramatic weight and comedic fireworks of Spacey and Leary but she miraculously manages to live up to it in the most spectacular way. The reason the film works as well as it does is in no small part due to how well it’s anchored by the three leads. Pretty much all the rest of the cast are there for comic relief, probably the most memorable of which being Christine Baranski as the wife of Kevin Spacey’s character’s brother but there really isn’t a weak link among them.
“The Ref” has been one of the staples of my Christmas season viewing for most of my life at this point. It deserves to be part of more people’s as well. I feel like it could be. I personally look forward to watching it every year. It has everything you could want from a comedy but especially everything you’d want from a Christmas film. As a product of the ’90s, it seems like it should be dripping with cynicism but it really isn’t. There’s a great big beating heart at the center of everything that never lets the events of the film or the characters end up as anything but utterly endearing. In the midst of the wonderful narrative, you have pretty uniformly great performances from the entire cast and legitimate laughs throughout. It’s something that I really can’t see anyone being disappointed by. It’s a Christmas classic.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch