“Bound”
1996 • R • 1h 49mins • Watch trailer • Rent it • Stream on Prime Video
🌈 Pride Month Pick
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. Tonight everyone’s in a jam and no one’s to be trusted. For Pride Month, it’s the Wachowski’s ’96 briefcase-full-of-money thriller, Bound.
Here’s the plot. Corky (Gina Gershon), freshly free after doing a nickel for “redistribution of wealth”, renovates a condo alone. On the elevator up, she meets Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a couple with a serious power differential and zero feet on the straight and narrow. They’ve been together five years, though for Violet being with Caesar has been a five-year sentence. Corky and Violet vibe instantly. That night, the two have sex at Corky’s place. One thing leads to another and before you know it they’re planning a robbery together.
Caesar handles money for the mob. He’s taking delivery of $2M, which Violet reckons is roughly the price tag on a new life. Corky, a subject matter expert when it comes to heists, fills in the details. But can they pull it off with Caesar, his boss Gino (Richard Sarafian) and Gino’s idiot son Johnnie (Christopher Meloni) nosing around? And can Corky and Violet, who just met, really trust each other? And, you know what, isn’t it time to rearrange the furniture anyway?
Everyone’s in a pickle
Violet knows how to play a man like a Stradivarius but ended up neck-deep in schmucks with no way out
Corky has sticky fingers and a DIY streak a mile wide that turned her into a handyman Danny Ocean
Caesar loves finer things but spends his life counting someone else’s money
Johnnie loves to hit people but lacks the good sense to know when they’re about to hit back
All this sounds tense, and it is. But what makes it fun for twisty-turny crimeheads is that everybody’s pretty sharp. No one just accepts fate. They wiggle in the trap for all they’re worth. Which means everything goes sideways really, really fast. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The Wachowskis’ big break
How’d we get Bound? It took two hungry siblings, one rich guy betting on the little guys, and a cinematographer who preferred fun work to money.
Let’s start with the Wachowskis. They’d written screenplays for years—mostly their own unproduced projects—but this was their first time in the director’s chair(s). Immediately before Bound they wrote the script for Assassins (’95), a bananas action movie pitting Sylvester Stallone against Antonio Banderas as rival (you guessed it) assassins. Blockbuster director Richard Donner took their script and had his pal totally rewrite it. The Wachowskis’ names are only on it because of a WGA technicality. That experience showed them the studio system wasn’t going to help them. Yet.
Time to meet Dino De Laurentiis. The Wachowskis had a script, but studios wanted them to make Corky a man before they’d finance it. They said no. Laurentiis, who’d produced Assassins, gave them $6M and a very long leash. The guy’d been producing pictures for more than fifty years by that point. In the ‘80s and ’90s, he produced edgier projects—David Lynch’s Dune (’84) and Blue Velvet (’86), Sam Rami’s Evil Dead II (’87) and Army of Darkness (’92) and every Hannibal Lecter movie starting with Manhunter (’86) except Silence of the Lambs (’91). He knew what I’ve discovered in writing about movies for the last couple years—cheap genre projects with a real POV are the ones that make money.
Why’d the Wachowskis agree to such a tiny budget? To get into directing, that’s why. They’d already written the script for The Matrix but couldn’t get anyone to bankroll it. They’d have to prove they could make a great movie themselves first.
But how do you make a great movie with a measly $6M? You hire Bill Pope. He’d been making movies for a minute, notably with Rami—Darkman (’90) and Army of Darkness. This was Pope’s seventh picture. The Wachowskis brought him on after their first DP threw up his hands, saying there just wasn’t enough cash to go around. To this Pope said, I know “a bunch of cheap guys”. Pope gave Bound its snappiness, physicality and lean-and-meanness. He’d go on to be the Wachowskis’ guy, shooting The Matrix (’99) and its sequels.
If you pay attention watching Bound, you’ll see quick cuts and tight shots of objects doing things—guns firing, phones redialing, locks being picked. Usually those are medium shots so we see the characters. But Pope’s close-up versions help us understand the universe of objects that lead to each next plot development. After The Matrix movies, he’d be the reason Edgar Wright’s films got even better. The Pope Touch is all over Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (’10), The World’s End (’13) and Baby Driver (’17).
Bogart Would Be Proud
Bound’s neo-noir roots go back to Billy Wilder films like Double Indemnity. Nobody would have let you screen the result, but you could have shot this script in the forties. Everybody dresses and talks like they’re in a Bogart picture. And as for the plot, well, greed is timeless.
The way I figure it, any noir flick worth its salt uses the holy trinity—money, sex and violence. Greed glues it all together. Everyone wants the money, and they’re willing to use sex or violence to get it. But the sizzle comes from how the Wachowskis masterfully subvert genre conventions about femme fatales, wise guys and thieves at every turn.
But what about the kids, you ask? What do youngsters think of this dark world? Not to worry. We never see a kid for the entire movie. No one has one, no one seems to want one. As far as we know, Bound is really a sci-fi film about a world where everyone’s born as a forty-something with regrets and a lotta city miles.
Like a true noir, the grit here is pretty gritty. What happens to Shelly in the bathroom—gross. Makes you squirm. But it does something important: Tells you what could happen. These guys have no limits.
There’s an old Hollywood trick with fake knives. Knives on set are rubber and not too realistic. So how do you make the audience believe a fake knife is dangerous enough cut someone? Put it on a cutting board next to sliced tomatoes. We believe the knife that did that to a tomato could do it to a person too. The brief on-screen violence in Bound makes us watch a dozen other worse acts in our head as we picture what could happen over the remaining running time. The result? Tension, not nausea.
One little thing? I don’t know what Caesar’s job is. Something with money? Counting it, briefcasing it, giving it to various people but not various others. He’s somehow involved in cleaning dirty cash for the mob—money laundering. But! In this movie Caesar actually washes bills covered in what used to be under Johnnie’s thinking cap. In fact, the money he cleaned person stuff out of and hung up to dry gets stolen and dumped into buckets of paint. Might get dirty again! A money launderer who literally has to literally launder literal money. That’s the kind of screenwriting that gets you the green light to make The Matrix.
Love Story
Buried under all the money-chasing and digit-clipping is a love story. Violet and Corky dance around each other, interested from the first moment they lock eyes. The realism of their relationship helps us believe they’re doing bad for good reasons. But the nuance didn’t come from the writers/directors.
That’s where Susie Bright came in. The Wachowskis admired Bright’s writing on sex ed and lesbian relationships in the eighties and nineties. Where the brothers’ script called for vague sex between Violet and Corky, Bright created the details and worked with Tilly and Gershon to realize them. She’s an early example of what we now call an intimacy coordinator, a term popularized by the show The Deuce when HBO began using such a professional on all its shows in ’18. Intimacy coordinators work out choreography, boundaries and safety and advocate for closed sets and the respect of the actors involved.
We care about Violet and Corky because they’re the ones with something to lose. Do we care about Caesar? No. He’s just a mean-spirited middle manager. Johnnie? A goof with the good fortune to be stuck in the body of a young Christopher Meloni and have nepotism on his side. None of them are happy. All of them are replaceable. Violet and Corky activate each other. Together they could actually be happy. Life is a little easier with $2M in the back of your pickup, sure. But it’s each other we don’t want to see them lose.
Caesar and Micky underestimate Violet’s strength and smarts. All they see is lipstick and a cocktail dress. She sees through their silk suits to the frailty underneath. Corky watches them all, sizing these chumps up in a second too. Violet and Corky come out of the caper looking like the future. They survive, toxic masculinity dies.
Success Level: Moderate
Did people like Bound? Well, it wasn’t for everyone. Commercial appeal wasn’t why the Wachowskis made it. It made its money back plus a little—$7M total. Half of that came from the US, half from international. It showed at festivals and won awards from LA Outfest and GLAAD.
Critics dug it, though for a few different reasons. Folks compared it negatively to Tarantino’s work (I’m guessing Reservoir Dogs (’92) mostly) and positively to the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (’84) and Fargo (’96) and Hitchcock’s cannon. Todd McCarthy writing for Variety called it “pretentious” (correct), “stylistic overkill” (the word you’re looking for is “fun”, Todd) and “with no sense of humor” (also correct). I suppose the difference is I don’t think those are bad things in Bound. Others liked seeing a lesbian couple in the noir genre, a rare sight indeed.
Special praise went to Tilly’s, Pantoliano’s and Gershon’s performances. Makes sense, they’re nearly the only people in this. Tilly’s incredible presence and control of every scene she’s in wasn’t lost on reviewers. Joey Pants chews up the scenery as a dumb guy who thinks he’s a smart guy just pretending to be a dumb guy. Ebert called out how well he handled the “trickiest scenes in the movie”. Gershon? She’d been in the doghouse after Showgirls bombed the year before. This was her comeback. Also probably explains why such an important character has so few lines and things to do—hedging their bets.
In the years after Bound, the Wachowskis—who went by Andy and Larry at the time—individually transitioned as Lilly and Lana, respectively. They’ve encouraged fans of their work to go back and see the trans narrative that was always there, especially in The Matrix. Lilly said in ’16, “I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive.”
For Pride Month, that’s Bound, a movie made by two trans sisters about two lesbians who stick it to several men to the tune of $2M. It’s way more stressful than I was expecting and looks incredible even compared to big-budget movies.
Thanks for reading! Next week we’re dipping our toes into dangerous waters with Jaws. It feels like a July 4th movie to me. And? I’ve never seen it! Parts, yeah, but not the whole thing. Next time we’re fixing that problem.
And, hey, if you liked this one, share it with a pal who would too! The walls are so thin they probably heard you reading anyway.
NOTES:
Whoa those opening credits are cool
For the look, the Wachowskis borrowed from Frank Miller’s Sin City books. The comic book-like compositions and color palette limited to black, white and red are very Miller.
Susie Bright appears as an extra in the bar scene.
Meloni is super fun as a jock who grew up but not really.
Tilly says Violet was the best role of her career. Bound is a lot of things, including a Tilly showcase.
“You know what the difference is between you and me? Me neither.” Perfect last line!
They had to cut some of what the MPAA called “hand-sex” from the scene with Corky and Violet. Now that’s a we-don’t-know-what-to-call-this term if I’ve ever heard one.
Producer Dino De Laurentiis is Food Network personality Giada De Laurentiis’s grandfather. He was also multimillionaire and a short king—5’ 4”.
Gina Gershon popped up recently in Emily the Criminal, which is a great watch! Read last year’s review of it.