Everybody Wins

(UK - US)

Recorded Picture. Director Karel Reisz; Producer Jeremy Thomas, Ezra Swerdlow; Screenplay Arthur Miller; Camera Ian Baker; Editor John Bloom; Music Mark Isham, Leon Redbone; Art Director Peter Larkin

Debra Winger
Nick Nolte
Will Patton
Judith Ivey
Jack Warden
Kathleen Wilhoite

Everybody Wins is a very disappointing picture. Repping Arthur Miller's first feature film screenplay since The Misfits in 1961, the Karel Reisz-helmed film noir is obscure and artificial.

Overladen with pompous and frequently dated dialog, Miller's script (developed from his 1982 pair of one-act plays, Two-Way Mirror) is essentially a routine whodunit. Nick Nolte plays an investigator called in by seeming good Samaritan Debra Winger to get young Frank Military out of jail for a murder she claims he did not commit. Nolte doggedly pursues various leads, interviews odd people and discovers a web of corruption engulfing a small Connecticut town.

Winger as a schizo femme fatale copes uneasily with Miller's overblown dialog, which has her alternatively putting on airs to a bewildered Nolte or handing him non sequiturs. Not helping matters is the lack of chemistry between Nolte and Winger in their sex scenes.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1990. Running time: 97 MIN.

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