Internal Affairs plays by the formula rules: everyone who is supposed to die dies; and everyone who is supposed to live lives, and the good guy and his wife end up more or less where they should be. But this picture has a caged-animal tension that takes it beyond the usual business. It’s a B-movie cover of the part in Othello that everyone remembers: of Iago driving Othello nuts with jealousy, revealing considerably unpleasant inner doubts and resentments. That plot has been re-purposed here as a duel between two cops, Raymond Avilla (Andy Garcia), who’s Internal Affairs (and therefore always introduced with contempt among regular cops) and Dennis Peck (Richard Gere), a sergeant of considerable intelligence and reputation who seems strangely content to remain on the same rung in the bureaucratic law enforcement ladder.
There are typical bits – clueless wives, murdered white-collar schmucks and low-class druggies, alcoholic cops and so forth – but the reasons to see Internal Affairs are Garcia and Gere, neither of whom have been better. They are both playing their respective notes: Garcia, the tightly-wound, intense firecracker with the supernaturally great posture; Gere, the smoothie so untroubled and adjustable to life’s obstacles that he’s a cipher just this side of psychotic.
Garcia does his best acting not so much by changing his thing as by taking his thing as far as it can logically go in a picture more or less intended to be “realistic” (he has a great stare). Raymond is drawn quickly – he’s intelligent, laser-focused, and so efficient as to be nearly inhuman. His Achilles heel is his wife Kathleen (the sexy Nancy Travis) whom he clearly secretly believes to be out of his league, his jealousy, even before Dennis’ arrival, is an issue waiting to detonate. Raymond asks his wife about her tight dress at one of her work parties, and he asks her again about her flirty (clearly obligatory) talk with the other men. One suspects the jealously might be partly racially based (Ray is Cuban), and is probably partially based on the differing blue collar/white collar nature of their occupations. Unless I missed something, the wife’s profession is never fully spelled out, but it involves dinners and drawings on sketchpads, which means it’s in the vague Hollywood school of glamorous. Raymond, who knows he’s uptight, busts “real” cops for a living. Raymond’s perceived impotence (and it’s suggested this is literally affecting things in the bedroom as well) is his strength and his weakness, it keeps him driven, alert; and it also paints a huge bull-eyes on his back.
Dennis, we’re clearly meant to see, is basically Raymond, only on the opposite side of the law (I don’t think its ruining anything to reveal that he turns out to be quite dirty), and with an opposing source of power: his impressive sexual prowess. Aside from Raymond’s lesbian partner, there isn’t a woman in Internal Affairs who isn’t drawn to Gere, and we can see why: his faith in himself is intensely vain, creepy, and compelling. This isn’t the safest role for Gere, as it basically plays to his detractors’ view of him as a callow, empty vessel of narcissism. Most of Gere’s roles are built around that: he learns to think of people other than dreamy Richard Gere. In Internal Affairs, the Gere character is a monster, and we’re never given any kind of orientation into the character – he doesn’t get, or want, his moral turnaround; and as the picture progresses, it becomes clear that Dennis is more than just a self-driven prick – he’s authentically sick: fucking and killing to keep from bursting out of his skin from…what? Some kind of intangible hunger; and this hunger is unsettling, as it nearly tempts you to sympathize with him. Gere even touches his co-stars in character – he rubs them, in a calculated reproduction of intimacy, when all he wants to do is literally (and figuratively) bend them over.
Dennis and Raymond have one another’s numbers immediately. No one’s fooled really, Raymond’s partner (Laurie Metcalf) calls the investigation for the pissing contest it actually is. Raymond sees this infuriatingly confident somewhat older gray buck, and wants to take him down a few pegs. Dennis sees in Raymond someone who sees through his own bullshit, which is scary and also maddening. The script, by Henry Bean, is full of unusually curt, honest tough-guy talk, and Gere is given some of the best, nastiest dialogue he’s ever had, and he underplays it with wonderful contempt. “I’ll fuck your wife for awhile, teach her how to cum, and then she can show you what she likes.”
For an hour or so, Internal Affairs is a strong, confident thriller, it’s stylish and clever and almost mercilessly well-acted, and, then, for about twenty minutes, it’s a great thriller – when Dennis gets around to explicitly baiting Raymond with the implications that he’s had his young, hotsy-dissatisfied wife. There’s a chilling line at the end from Dennis as he dies: “I pushed your buttons…and it was so easy”. The easiness, of course, is the scariest part, as Raymond wanted to blame his wife all along, leading to the most shocking moment of violence: when he slaps her to the ground. Raymond’s blue-tinted fantasies of Dennis and Kathleen getting down are reminiscent of how Kubrick would show Cruise’s internal projections of Kidman’s infidelity in Eyes Wide Shut ten years later – except this picture has an erotic, super-charged hum.
Internal Affairs has something else: it shows you that Raymond and his wife are mutually turned on by Raymond’s intensity and near-bullying. There’s another moment, right after the slap, with Raymond deciding that he should move out – he’s playing the traditional silent male role of eating his responsibility quietly. Kathleen challenges him on this cop-out, she slaps him back and they embrace – violently.
The picture gives director Mike Figgis a clean structure to work out his preoccupations with strong lighting and sexual mind-games. I generally find Figgis more interesting in theory than reality, but Internal Affairs, even more so than Leaving Las Vegas, plays to his knack for melodrama. Figgis’ style can be a mite self-conscious at times (mostly lame slow mo, some ridiculously “tense” blocking, including a scene of a terrified wife framed next to Billy Baldwin’s butt cheeks), but it largely serves the material, which needs to be played without fear of ludicrousness. And the ending doesn’t defuse this picture as it would so many others, because Figgis doesn’t shy away from the implications – one of the animals is dead, but the other is alive, still plagued by his real problems. It is no coincidence that the theoretically happy ending is set in tight, dark quarters, and that the fate of one character remains unknown. Figgis understands that the title has two meanings.
