Absolutely Fantastic

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

A dour character study featuring what may very well be Harvey Keitel's best performance. Keitel is a would-be concert pianist torn between the world of art and crime. His institutionalized mother wants him to play Carnegie Hall, while his father, a low-life Mafioso, wants him to continue as his bag man. Keitel's performance here is ferocious. He's sensitive and clearly artistic while at the same time ruthlessly (and violently) loyal to his father. In the end, all he wants is love and without it he can't respond to anything or anyone, including his would-be girlfriend (Tisa Farrow). Writer-director James Toback has had a spotty directing career over the years and has yet to fulfill the promise he displays here. Though there's limited action and only a few (brutal) spurts of violence, FINGERS is extremely exciting, harnessed by Keitel's brilliance. The strong supporting cast includes Michael V. Gazzo as Keitel's father, Jim Brown as a very nasty pimp, Danny Aiello, Marian Seldes, Tanya Roberts and Dominic Chianese in a very unlikely role. Filmed in New York with great cinematography by Michael Chapman.

This late 70s film is nicely filmed and looks very good. Now, if I were going to follow the adage of "if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all", there would nothing else I could say about Fingers. Since I'm something of a bitter prick, there's a whole lot more to this review. This aimless mess is fully of caricaturish performances and scenes that look like outtakes accidentally left in the movie. When watching it, I frequently couldn't believe what writer/director James Toback was offering to me on screen and spent much of the last half of Fingers laughing at the gaudy, overwrought, nonsensical nature of it.Jimmy (Harvey Keitel) is a man in his late 20s who desperately wants to be a concert pianist. He practices relentlessly and childishly mouths along with the notes as he plays. Jimmy is also an obviously disturbed young man with an explosive temper and a needy desire for the opposite sex. He's got a mother in a mental ward and a father who's a loan shark. This story concerns the thoroughly disconnected strands of Jimmy getting a chance to audition for Carnegie Hall, his fixation on a woman he sees out on the street one day and his father asking Jimmy to collect on two outstanding debts. Along the way we see a scuffle over Jimmy's 1970s purse-sized portable radio and cassette player, a rectal exam, a bathroom sexual encounter that resembles a man trying to squeeze under a limbo bar and football great Jim Brown portraying the forerunner of South Park's Chef.This film is just ridiculous. It appears to be an middle class take on a Taxi Driver-ish breakdown with an undercurrent of homosexuality thrown in, but it's so meandering and parts of it are so exaggerated that it's hard to know for sure. There are moments in this movie that come out of nowhere and then vanish back into oblivion. The three separate plot threads are so fragmented and halting it's as if the script were written longhand by someone with Parkinson's disease. It's kind of difficult to accurately describe Fingers because there are so many odd moments that are played completely seriously when they actually belong in the gag reel as the end of one of Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run movies. I mean, writer/director Toback literally spends the better part of a minute showing a couple of white chicks sucking on Jim Brown's nipples. What do you say about that?Harvey Keitel is…well, Harvey Keitel and yes, he does end up naked at one point looking into the camera with a "What do you want me to do about it?" look on his face. He does a nice job with the symptoms of Jimmy's personality disorders but there's nothing whole or coherent about the role he was given. Tisa Farrow as the woman Jimmy's obsessed with speaks and moves in a monotone. As for the rest of the cast, all you can do is play "Spot the future member of The Sopranos".When talented creators do crappy work, their admirers often feel compelled to pretend otherwise. That's about the only explanation I can come up with for why this thing made it to DVD. It's astonishingly poor storytelling put to no good use.

I love Harvey Keitel as an actor, and I'd read a review of his performance in a magazine, so I thought I'd take a peak to judge for myself. After watching it though, it left a bad taste in my mouth. From that day to this, all that stands out is the rape scene in the bathroom and his demand for the other woman to take out her diaphram before he has sex with her. I wanted to enjoy his performance, but those scenes were too disturbing for me. I don't even remember what the movie was about, since the rest didn't leave an impression on me. Now, whenever I see him in anything else, those scenes get triggered in my memory, and I wait out the shivers it gives me. I'll get over it eventually. In the meantime, I'll watch his other films to wash out this one so I can sleep at night.

It doesn't appear that many people have seen this little gem. "Fingers" is James Toback's first (and still best) film and contains an edgy vivacious performance from Harvey Keitel. The on-location filming in New York City adds to the desperation of the struggling wannabe pianist played by Keitel. Fascinating character study.