Classic Movie Review: Deep Cover (1992)

Deep Cover (1992) 
Directed by: Bill Duke.
Written by: Michael Tolkin and Henry Bean.
Starring: Laurence Fishburne (Russell Stevens Jr. / John Hull), Jeff Goldblum (David Jason), Charles Martin Smith (Carver), Victoria Dillard (Betty), Gregory Sierra (Barbosa), Glynn Turman (Russell Stevens Sr.), Clarence Williams III (Taft), Roger Guenveur Smith (Eddie), Kamala Lopez (Belinda), Lira Angel (Bijoux), René Assa (Guzman).

Deep Cover is one of the best neo-noirs of the 1990s. It’s director, Bill Duke and his writers, Henry Bean and Michael Tolkin, clearly know the genre well – it’s narrated by its flawed hero, Russell Stevens Jr. (Laurence Fishburne), a cop who is assigned to go undercover to infiltrate a drug ring. He doesn’t want to do it – he hates drugs with a passion, having seen his junkie father killed in front of him after sticking up a liquor store for money to buy drugs. But he is convinced by a federal agent – Carver (Charles Martin Smith) – that he would be good at it. Stevens’ psychological profile reads more criminal than cop – he probably won’t last in a uniform, but as an undercover, his flaws become virtues. Stevens agrees, even while knowing doing so will damn him.

What clearly makes Deep Cover different from most film noir of the classic era (the 1940s and 1950s) is Fishburne’s race. Film noir has always been, among other things, about fear of the other – but the language has always been coded. Here, it’s out in the open from the opening scene. Carver uses racist language with all of the potential undercover cops – all of whom are black – to deliberately get a rise out of them. He wants to see them react – and part of the reason he chooses Stevens is because he doesn’t.

In the film, Stevens, under the name of John Hull, heads to L.A. and starts to work his way up the organizational chart. He starts as a street buyer, gets to know the flamboyant and reckless Eddie (Roger Guenveur Smith), and through him meets David Jason (Jeff Goldblum), who is seemingly respectable – he is a lawyer – but will reveal himself to be completely unhinged as the film moves along. His goal is to work his way high enough to build a case against the Latin American cartel leaders. He is all too good as his job.

The film, like all noir, is about the hero wrestling with the morality of what he does. The opening scene – where he watched his father die – haunts the rest of the film. Stevens is a black man, and a cop, who grapples with the fact that cops often commit violence against his own community – and that by taking this assignment, he isn’t a benign figure in this struggle, but being used by it. His race is specifically why they want him – it’s a cover to continue to oppress those who look like he does. The film does more than just suggest – it practically outright states – that the moral thing for Stevens’ to do is to work outside of the system he is a part of. He cannot, and perhaps no one can, fix the corrupt system from the inside. It has to be burned down.

All of this is wrapped in an entertaining noir package. Fishburne has always excelled at moral complexity – at playing characters at war with themselves over the impossible moral choices he is forced to make. This was his first leading role – more than a decade after his debut in Apocalypse Now (1979) – and brings his full force to bare on the role. In perhaps the key moment of the film, when Russell has to kill another black man, because he killed someone who worked for Russell, is unlike most killings we see in movies. Russell hesitates before killing the man – not because he’s scared per se – but because doing so will change everything. And so it does. The other key role is Goldblum’s – and I’m not sure he has ever played a character this unhinged or crazy before. Eccentric has become his stock in trade of course, but recently, it’s usually just used for comic effect. Here, his craziness is downright scary. Victoria Dillard as Betty, an art dealer who allows her gallery to be used to launder money, and then grows closer to Fishburne, is also more complex than most movies of this sort allow female characters to be. She, like Fishburne, is navigating murky moral waters – and has to make impossible choices. Charles Martin Smith is perhaps a little one note – but he’s also a perfect personification of a system that cannot be reformed.

Director Bill Duke is, of course, a fine character actor – the type of guy who shows up in everything, and you immediately recognize, but perhaps cannot quite place. It’s strange to realize he has nearly as many directing credits (67) as he does acting ones (71). He has mainly worked in TV as a director – through the 1980s, he worked on many shows you’d recognize – before, for a few years in the 1990s, he got to try his hand at directing features – before returning to TV work. Deep Cover shows just how great a director he could be – and it’s a shame he wasn’t able to keep making films in this vein forever. Deep Cover is one of the best of its kind – and we need more like it.