Film Reviews	Kielbasa Killer: You Kill Me by M. Faust

Téa Leoni and Ben Kingsley in "You Kill Me"

You could be forgiven for guessing that a film about an alcoholic hitman in Buffalo trying to clean up his act might be based on stories by mystery novelist Lawrence Block, who is from Buffalo and writes a popular series of novels about Matt Scudder, private detective and recovering alcoholic, and the monomial, existentially inquisitive Keller, assassin for hire.

But it’s not. Nor was any of it filmed here: the third of the film that takes place here was shot in Winnepeg and Toronto. (Though it should be noted that the filmmakers did a much better job of approximating our hometown than did the production designers who tried to pass off San Diego as Buffalo in Bruce Almighty.)

Enough of what You Kill Me is not. What it is is a mild return to form for director John Dahl. He started out strong in the early 1990s with a trio of enjoyable low-budgeted neo-noir movies—Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction—before getting caught up in the Hollywood treadmill.

First seen motivating himself to shovel his sidewalk by tossing a vodka bottle from snowdrift to snowdrift, Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) spends more time drinking than he does on his work for his uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall), a Polish mobster who runs the city’s snowplows. When Frank misses one hit too many, Roman and the rest of the family decide he needs treatment. (Theirs is not the kind of business that offers early retirement, at least not in any form you would look forward to.)

Frank is sent to San Francisco, set up with a temporary job at a mortuary, and given a schedule of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The perfect mob functionary, with no interest in anything outside the current job, Frank is initially flummoxed by these meetings where people get up in front of strangers and, after identifying themselves as alcoholics, tell the most astonishingly personal secrets. He starts to come out of his shell, enough to strike up a cozily personal relationship with a businesswoman (Tea Leoni) he met at his day job. Meanwhile back at home, Roman and the family are being rudely muscled out of the way by a gang of Irish upstarts, a situation for which they could use Frank’s talents.

If this all sounds a bit overstuffed, well, it is. There’s a certain shapelessness to it that makes sense when you realize that it was a student script written years ago by two writers who have since gone on to better things. (One of them, Christopher Markus, is a native Buffalonian who has gone on to partner Stephen McFeely to script The Chronicles of Narnia and its upcoming sequel. He apparently got the idea for the script from taking a friend to an AA meeting and being astonished at the things the people there talked about.)

You Kill Me is sloppy in ways that probably would have been tidied up had this been a larger-budgeted Hollywood production. I’m guessing that the script got put into production only to capitalize on the success of “The Sopranos” and the fact that a lot of good actors (Luke Wilson, Dennis Farina and Bill Pullman are also on hand) agreed to be in it as a favor to Dahl, keeping the budget to a low $4 million. So if, for instance, the absurdity of someone like Leoni dating someone like Kingsley’s socially stunted killer seems inadequately explained by a line about her having “boundary issues,” get past it to enjoy what’s good about her performance, and the ways in which she and Kingsley play off of their differences.

The only thing I can’t get past is that, in a movie where the characters are able to pronounce “golebki” correctly, they trip over the word “pollack.” Otherwise You Kill Me is an enjoyable time waster in a season when every other movie reeks of the desperation for a $50 million opening weekend.