Assassination Tango
Grade: A
Cast: Robert Duvall, Luciana Pedraza, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker, Frank Gio, Katherine Micheaux Miller
Director: Robert Duvall
Rated: R, for language and violence
Running time: 113 minutes


BY PHILIP MARTIN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
It could be argued that Robert Duvall ought, at this point in his career, occasionally be allowed to make of his private enthusiasms a quirky, discursive little film. After all, he is one of our best and most durable actors, one of those reliable national treasures whose appearance interrupts the monotony of the even the most marginal of films. For sure Duvall has played great roles in great movies, but his larger service to the nation of moviegoers may consist in his partial redemption of so many lesser films — aside from the resigned dignity of Duvall’s Robert E. Lee what reason exists to see Gods and Generals?
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Duvall’s career behind the camera as a rich character actor’s hobby. Duvall has directed but four films since 1975, but taken together they offer a consistently interesting perspective on the world as it is, as opposed to how it is remembered or recreated by Hollywood. The three films Duvall has both written and directed (his first directing effort was the documentary We’re Not the Jet Set, about family farmers in Nebraska) evince an almost Cassevetesian sensibility in their fidelity to the rhythms of domestic experience and the banalities that accompany even unusual work.
So it is hardly surprising that Assassination Tango turns out to be something much different than the sexy crime drama the capsule synopsis seems to promise. John J. Anderson (Duvall) is an expert whack artist, a prideful hit Coney Island-based man who imagines himself the best in the business.
But that is not all he is — he’s a ballroom dancer, a habitue of a rundown Brooklyn dance hall. He’s also the live-in boyfriend of a Maggie (Kathy Baker) and a surrogate father to her 10-year-old daughter Jenny (Katherine Micheaux Miller). Maggie works in one of several downmarket beauty shops owned by John J. and she’s apparently content not to know the full details of the business that, from time to time, takes him out of town. Besides he’s really good to her kid.
Maybe too good to the kid. Though nothing inappropriate occurs, we can divine an uncomfortable charge to John J.’s relationship with the little girl, perhaps something sublimated and unconsidered; Maggie’s a good woman, but Jenny’s the emotional center of the makeshift family. “She’s my world, my soul,” he says.
She may be all that’s holding this seedy, senior hitman together — a recovering alcoholic, John J. splashes whiskey in his hands, rubs his palms together and sniffs it. He’s vain about his age, applying wrinkle cream every morning and going off on a friendly police detective who makes an innocuous remark about the inevitable ravages of time. He mutters to himself and generally seems just a bit too tightly wound for just delicate work. For the time being he’s still competent, even masterful but we’ve given the sense that his nerves are beginning to ever so slightly fray.
So we understand from the beginning that his latest assignment — an “in-and-out” job in Buenos Aires — won’t be uncomplicated. John J. is engaged to take out an Argentine general, about whom we’re told little other than he did some bad things under the old regime. (Though acquainted with Argentine history can probably imagine the nature of the general’s crimes, but such information is extraneous to one’s enjoyment of the movie). But before the wet work can take place, the general is hospitalized, requiring John J. to hang around a few extra weeks.
Bored, he explores B.A. and discovers a low-rent tango salon and a young dancer Manuela (Luciana Pederaza). John J. is smitten, as much by the scene as by the pretty woman herself. He is drawn into the dancers’ world, into the history and myth of the tango.
In a remarkable, improvised scene in a cafe, certainly one of the year’s most memorable movie moments, Manuela makes it clear that she’s kind of sweet on the old fool. But Maggie and Jenny are back in Brooklyn — and despite his coldest profession John J. retains an illusion of himself as an honorable man.
Much has been made of the fact that Pederaza, whose previous experience before the cameras consisted of television work and modeling in Argentina, is Duvall’s real-life girlfriend and that the tango is his real-life passion. (Pederaza says Duvall actually got her started dancing the tango.) Even some friendly critics have therefore dismissed Assassination Tango as a “vanity project.”
It’s really not. While Duvall has been talking about making a “tango movie” for years, Assassination Tango isn’t “about” tango anymore than it’s “about” assassination. Instead, it is the kind of movie we don’t see much anymore, a throwback to the pre-Star Wars days when movies could investigate the peripheral territories surrounding normal human experience. John J. is an interesting character but not a remarkable man, and in the end the choices he makes are not terribly different from the kinds of choices most of us make during our lives. Should he stay or should he go? Which woman is the right woman? How can we live with the choices — the regrets — we necessarily make?
Robert Duvall needs no one to defend him or his movie but it seems churlish to — and vain — to spurn this lovely movie because it is unwilling to provide us with the easy platitudes and assurance we have come to expect from the movies. That seems more our problem than his.

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