Jack Durant was a small-town gambler with loose ties to Vegas racketeers. He had a big, obstreperous personality; owned our city’s most successful restaurant; was listed among the FBI’s most dangerous men in Phoenix. Jack liked women, eavesdropping on patrons of his restaurant bar, and golf. He might have seen one or two people being murdered.
None of this makes for grand opera— or even, as it turns out, an especially entertaining movie.
"Durant’s Never Closes," an independent feature just out from local filmmaker Travis Mills, is a stylish post-noir profile of one of Phoenix’s bigger characters.
I really wanted to like this movie. I admire Mills, and the fact that he is making commercial features right here in Phoenix. But his new movie plays like a frenetic fever dream, with a rambling narrative that never gets going. The effect is less melodrama than a series of prettily imagined anecdotes about a bigger-than-life character in a smaller-than-life set of circumstances.
Tom Sizemore’s ghoulishly picturesque performance belongs to another movie. He plays Durant with improvisational style, muttering his obviously embellished dialogue. What might have been a laughable caricature becomes instead an extra-human performance as in one scene where he chats up a food critic who has come to visit his restaurant.
"I only give free meals to ball players and priests," Sizemore's Durant says with a note of disgust.
Sizemore is not the only Hollywood royalty seen here. Director Peter Bogdanovich wanders through as a shady character trying to get Jack a spot in the local country club.
A meandering melodrama with neither story arc nor much of a story, the effect of "Durant’s Never Closes" is that of a series of untangled anecdotes with no place to go.
There’s some promise in a recurring reference to the 1976 assassination of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, which may have been planned at Durant’s. Neatly imagined flashbacks about the murder haunt Durant, but ultimately lead nowhere, perhaps because there’s no place to go with this or any of Jack’s other filmed recollections.
Locals will like the tidy recreation of Durant’s velveteen-flocked interior, and will enjoy spotting the local personalities who fill crowd scenes. Out-of-towners and fans of skillful storytelling will want more.