Pauline Kael

"I became ill last January, just as I was about to praise Everybody Wins, in which Debra Winger went further with the kind of liquid acting that made audiences at An Officer and a Gentleman stare at her and smile with pleasure. Practically no one saw her performance in Everybody Wins, or even heard of it, because the thriller, directed by Karel Reisz from a surprisingly cool, quirky Arthur Miller screenplay, was opened without press screenings and was generally taken for a dud. It disappeared almost instantly and hasn't returned, but it's available on tape, and I wouldn't want to let the year close without urging you to see it, and shouting that, despite The Sheltering Sky, Winger is one of the two or three finest (and most fearless) screen actresses we've got. . . .

"The movie is set in a (fictional) small, decaying industrial city in New England. (The exteriors were shot in Norwich, Connecticut.) A prominent doctor has been murdered, and his young nephew has been convicted for the crime. Winger plays a local girl, a seductive sometime hooker named Angela Crispini, who persuades a private investigator, an outsider (played by Nick Nolte), to look into the [murder]. She claims that the youth is innocent and that “everybody” knows who the real killer is. The movie asks, What’s going on? Why have the town officials conspired to convict the wrong man?

"The mood-swinging Angela is the chief mystery: Can anything she says be believed? She's always acting things out on a stage of her own creation. She's out of control, and Winger makes her irrationality passionately real. Winger's Angela is soft and boneless and appealingly whory, with an automatic pretty smile. She wears slips and has breakdowns; she's all femininity and formlessness--she can become anything at any time. (The director seems to let the actress set the film's rhythms.) Winger warms up her voice: it's less husky than usual--more maternal. Her sexuality is never hyped; she doesn't have to prove it--it's just there. Angela switches of personality seem natural and defensive; she gets haughty and temperamental whenever she's challenged.

"You can see why the investigator . . . becomes her lover and her patsy. He's the literal-minded male who wants to know what's going on. She's maddening: she behaves in contradictory ways, and he can't pin her down. She keeps him off balance and in a courting position. . . . Tom is tenderhearted and inexperienced--a lug. Drawn into an erotically charged game, he always catches on to Angela's emotional manipulations too late. Angela is as anxious and deceitful and bewildering as Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller has lived in Connecticut a long time and has carried Monroe in his head a long time. Writing this script, he put together his exterior life and his interior life—his An Enemy of the People conscioiusness and his Marilyn Monroe problem—and they fuse in a way that cures him of rectitude. This may be the least prosecutorial writing he’s ever done. When Tom asks Angela what her interest in the case is and she rattles on, saying things like “Everything’s just one step away from a dream,” she’s avoiding his question, but her likably odd cadences tell us that she’s also answering it.

"For a brief period in the late sities and early seventies, moviegoeres seemed willing to be guided through a movie by their intuition and imagination; if this slyly funny picture about the spread of corruption had been released then, it might have been considered a minor classic. It’s satirical in an odd, hallucinatory way. There are fresh (often startling scenes, with Frank Military as the kid who’s fallling apart in prison and becoming suicidal; with Kathleen Wilhoite as a stoned gir whose mentor (Will Patton) knuckles her on the head when she tries to join a conversation, and then comforts her . . . . Except for the innocent kid, practically every male character we meet has had carnal relations with Angela. By the end, we know why she has to save him: she's tormented by her sense of justice. It may be her only torment that she can do anything about. The picture is a classically constructed detective story, with a mysterious woman who lures the fact-oriented man into something that ramifies in every direction and is way over his head. (But he's dogged.) Maybe the only reason Winger's performance hasn't been hallowed is that it hasn't been seen."

Pauline Kael
December 17, 1980