Scott Caan’s film Mercy (2010) is often described as a
romance, but I believe the film reaches beyond that, and at its heart, is more
rightly understood as one man’s struggle with identity.
While there is a
romance at the core of the film, the crux of the story is an exploration of the
interconnectivity between people and how they understand themselves and their
place in the world. At the center of this exploration is Johnny Ryan (Scott Caan),
a writer of romance novels who doesn’t believe in love. “I write about love as I see it. Fantasy. Fable. It’s called fiction
for a reason it doesn’t really exist.”
But what is fiction
and what is fable comes into question when Johnny meets Mercy (Wendy Glenn) and
falls in love.
The film is divided
into three parts: Before Mercy, With Mercy and After Mercy. All three parts are
woven together in a tangled non-linear structure that gives viewers only
glimpses into Johnny and Mercy’s life together. We see them fall in love. And
then we see Johnny reacting to her absence. How we interpret the missing
pieces, how we perceive in what manner Mercy might have broken Johnny’s heart,
reveals a great deal about the viewer’s own assumptions about what a romantic
narrative looks like and how we expect those narratives to end.
The movie opens
with no words, just a vision of two people obviously in love. It is an idyllic
scene complete with the giving and accepting of a ring. At the same time, it’s
informed by a musical backdrop that dips repeatedly into minor keys, an
indication that while momentous, this particular moment in time is not what the
movie is ultimately building to, nor one that is going to last. The melancholy
undertone the biggest clue that a “happily ever after” most likely won’t be
found here. Even before the romance has started, we’re already anticipating its
end.
The first words we
hear Johnny speak, indeed the very first piece of dialogue in the movie, sums
up Johnny’s feelings about romantic entanglements and sets the stage for his
journey to follow. In reference to the woman who’d shared his bed the night
before, he says, “She left. Good girl. I
love it when they leave.” From the scene before, we already know Johnny is
going to rue the day he ever said those words. But at this point in time,
before Mercy, Johnny bases a woman’s worth on their sexual availability and
emotional detachment. Her willingness to leave when the sex is done with no
expectation of a future.
This scene is
immediately followed by Johnny’s friend Erik (John Boyd) relaying the story of
how he drove through the night to find his ex girlfriend, who he’s positive is
“the one,” in an attempt to put their broken relationship back together. Erik
clings desperately to that which Johnny has disavowed—the notion of true love,
the culturally familiar origin myth as told by Aristophanes in The Symposium that states people spend
their lives searching for their lost other halves. The Yin to their Yang. The
one person who completes them and makes them whole, i.e. the very backbone of
most romantic fiction.
There’s something
important I want to state here. In this film, investment in the trope of
romantic love is not gender specific. Women are not hardwired through their DNA
to be invested in love and marriage. Men do not by nature view marriage as a
ball and chain. Johnny wants no strings attached sex. Erik pines for love. This
may seem obvious. But in my experience, it’s pretty rare to find such open awareness
that these ideas are constructed, not biological imperatives. It is always a
delight to see Caan dive straight into complexities rather than accept the
status quo. And it makes his work far more interesting to analyze than more
mainstream film and fiction.
Johnny is a man who
believes in free choice. His life story speaks to the myth of individualism and
the self made man. As related by his friend Dane (Troy Garrity), Johnny chose to stop drinking. He chose to stop being a menace to society.
He chose to write. He chose success. Johnny believes that men
and women act on their own agency. Their decisions are theirs alone. If a woman
sleeps with him, it’s because she wants to - her choice. In the grand scheme of
things, it doesn’t matter to him if she says yes or if she says no. If she
doesn’t want to, he’ll just move on to someone who will. For Johnny, before
Mercy, life is not complicated.
Johnny never
considers the possibility that it is in fact the actions, beliefs and
influences of others that have spun him down the path he’s walking. It doesn’t
occur to him to dig into the reasons why he prefers to maintain emotional
detachment from women, why, to put it crassly, he prefers to fuck women, rather
than talk to them. Why, as Johnny explains it, women’s speech is garbled
gibberish, unintelligible to his ear. Chris (Alexie Gilmore), Dane’s wife, is
the only woman he appears to engage with on an intellectual level.
Enter Mercy. She’s
unimpressed by Johnny’s suave and wheedling flirtations. She’s assertive and
sure of herself. Uninterested in hooking up and “getting intimate.” And perhaps
most significantly, unapologetic for it.
Caan does not judge
or shame Mercy for possessing these character traits, traits which have,
culturally speaking, often been used to signify a woman as unfeminine, and
therefore unworthy. Traits that have marked that character an easy target for
mockery. But here, Mercy is a benchmark in the film, a guide for the
possibility of what could and should be.
He also cleverly
pokes fun at the cultural unease with women and anger. While Johnny’s latest
romance novel gets rave reviews from the Hollywood trades and major
newspapers—the gatekeepers and purveyors of cultural norms, there’s one bash.
One lone voice that stands out. It floors Johnny even as Jake (Dylan McDermott),
Johnny’s agent, urges him to ignore it.
“Was it written by a woman?” Jake asks.
[He nods knowingly] “It was. Written by
an angry woman.”
There is no easier
way to dismiss a woman than to accuse her of anger. It implies lack of self
control. Dismisses her as overly emotional, unstable, and irrational. It is the
ultimate in verbally shaming a woman into silence.
Except Mercy is not
silenced and it’s Jake who is summarily dismissed as Johnny runs off to face
his “accuser” and ends up listening to what she has to say, even making a “date”
so he can hear more. It may be the first time Johnny has ever made plans with a
woman to simply have a discussion, and no one is more stunned than Johnny himself.
He suddenly finds himself engaging in the very unfamiliar act of
self-reflection.
“Talk,” Mercy prods Johnny. “Who are you?”
And for the first
time Johnny begins to truly explore the underpinnings of his own history. To
tease out the things in his past that helped make him who he is. To understand
that everything from his perception of women to his disbelief in love are
constructions. So Johnny, as he begins writing a new book, begins the process
of rewriting his own life. That process shifts the ground beneath his feet and
makes his life before Mercy one to which he can’t return. Perhaps even more
importantly, one he has no desire to.
Just as Johnny and
Mercy are becoming a couple, as Johnny is tentatively embracing the new path
Mercy has shown him, the movie time shifts. Johnny, who was happy one frame, is
bitter, angry and depressed in the next.
We are given one
cue as to what might have happened. As Johnny’s sitting in a bar, aggressively
interrogating the bartender about his love life, the bartender responds by
guessing, “What happened, your girl left you? Clocking someone else, huh?”
Johnny responds by
assaulting the bartender, landing himself in jail. When Dane bails him out,
Johnny finally breaks down, admitting that he misses her and that he no longer
knows what he’s doing.
This particular
time shift plays with absence, most especially Mercy’s absence and its lack of
context. Her name is never spoken, her existence barely referred to. Where
Mercy is concerned, the voices of Johnny and his friends are largely silent.
The bartender is, in fact, the only character to venture an explanation. And
it’s one that calls back the very origin story of Johnny’s misogyny. Women are
not to be trusted. Love is a lie.
There is no doubt
that Johnny’s life has been shattered. The carefree player we met in the
beginning is gone. But the absence of that Johnny is not something we, or he,
mourns. In fact, if anything, this particular time stamp lays bare the void
that already existed in that life. Earlier in the film we met Heather (Whitney
Able), a cocktail waitress Johnny had been heavily flirting with for weeks, the
culmination of which fell through when Heather witnessed Johnny flirting with
Mercy.
When we first met
Heather, she was “sweet” and “innocent.” What one might generally term a “good”
girl. She was charmed by Johnny’s attention and eventually swayed by his
persistence. But when she realized Johnny’s attention wasn’t meaningful, she
was surprised and crushed. You probably recognize her—she’s the girl who plays
the lead in most romantic narratives, the girl who turns the “bad boy” good.
But when Johnny
runs into her again, she’s a changed woman. She’s fully absorbed the societal
imperative that her value is based solely upon her body and sexuality. Heather
is the woman Johnny had desired, but he’s no longer the man who can enjoy her.
But just as Heather’s value is based upon her sexual availability, so is
Johnny’s, and in this regard, he is sorely lacking. Their attempt at sex is an
utter failure.
Heather is
flabbergasted. In disbelief she mutters, “That’s
a first.”
But when Johnny
turns to her and demands, “What’d you
just say?” Heather stares straight back and says, “Nothing.”
With nothing to say
to each other, Johnny leaves, and turns his back on that version of himself for
good.
It’s at this
turning point in Johnny’s life that he meets Robin (Erika Christensen), a
friend of Chris and Dane’s. Like Mercy she’s assertive and smart. And while
this meeting is most definitely a set up on Chris’ part, it serves a larger
purpose within the film’s narrative, for it’s in Johnny’s reaction to Robin’s
story about the death of her husband, in his outpouring of grief-fueled anger,
that we’re finally given a glimpse of how the gaps within Mercy and Johnny’s
story will be filled.
But Johnny’s
journey isn’t finished. There’s still a wolf at the door. One man who has
haunted Johnny’s story from the beginning: his father. When we are introduced
to Gerry Ryan (James Caan), Gerry has already met Mercy, and it becomes clear
that Johnny has visited his father again with one purpose in mind, to hear what
his father will say when he finds out Mercy is gone.
Introducing Gerry
in the after Mercy timestamp exposes the monster lurking in the shadows. Gerry’s
words call back Johnny’s assertion early in the film that love is a fiction,
and because love is a fiction, women have no intrinsic value.
“To the inevitable,” Gerry says in toast
to Mercy’s absence. “The truth…you did
seem happy. I didn’t want to say anything because I knew sooner or later you
would find out. It’s just not going to work. The funny thing is that I almost
believed you. I almost remembered feeling the way you felt about your mother.
You know the feeling, that everything, one way or another, is going to be just
swell, just as long as we have each other. But yet, here we are. Love is a
myth. Unfortunately it does not exist.”
Of course, Gerry is
not wrong. Love is a fiction, so
overwritten by cultural values that even Gerry’s language is cliché.
Traditionally speaking marriage, children, family: these are the endgames of
romantic love. It is not Gerry’s indictment of love that’s a problem. It’s the
way that indictment was turned against women, as if the collapse of that
mythology was her fault and hers alone.
But it doesn’t question the myth itself. Gerry’s anger stems more from the fact
the myth was stolen from him by Woman’s betrayal than that the myth was never
real to begin with.
In the next scene,
Caan pulls us back into the past to watch the final act of Johnny and Mercy’s
love play out. They are beautiful and their love is beautiful, and Johnny takes
Mercy to meet his father, to show him that he was wrong. That they were wrong.
Love does exist and it’s a beautiful thing, even if Johnny can’t explain it.
“She is the last thing I ever wanted, and since
meeting her I wouldn’t be able to tell you who I was without her.”
Gerry is
unconvinced, but he is charming to Mercy nonetheless. But it’s a charm that has
lost its allure. In the shadow of Gerry’s misogyny, his casual flirtations are
hollow at best. But watching Gerry interact with Mercy is like watching Johnny
before he met her. It is easily apparent just how much Johnny was Gerry’s son.
It brings into sharp relief the power fathers exert over their sons. And how
easy it is to not recognize that one’s identity is not autonomous, but immersed
in the belief systems of those closest to us.
If the movie ended
here, with Johnny giving Mercy a ring, walking down the traditional path of
marriage, we’d still see Johnny turning his back on his father’s misogyny, of
making a remarkable inroad to not repeating the cultural oppressions of the
past.
But it doesn’t.
Mercy dies. And we see Johnny spin in an entirely new direction. Though he’s
angry and confused, he doesn’t fall back into his old life. He is a man without
a mooring, his sense of self completely shattered. Not just facing the question
of whether or not love is a myth, but engaging with the possibility that life
has no meaning. This is the path to nihilism and despair.
When Johnny returns
to his father after Mercy’s death, he’s standing on that crossroads. He’s
looking for meaning.
“The minute you catch yourself thinking that
it [love] does [exist]…well, it’s just a question of time before you realize
the hard fact of life. We just don’t mix. Fuck her son. Fuck her wherever she
is. So deeply filled with sorrow and regret…but… Fuck your mother too.”
When Gerry gives
Johnny’s loss the same narrative structure as his own, it draws into stark
relief its artificiality. Gerry treats his belief as a universal truth. But
here’s the thing: That’s a choice. The fact that choices are rarely free does
not negate that choice exists.
And recognizing
that your choices, your identity, is wholly tied to cultural/personal
influences does not negate the need for identity. And identities are never born
in vacuums. They are bound to language, to names, in the ability to comprehend
the world around us. This is exactly why the systemic displays of sexism and
racism and homophobia are the hardest to combat—because they are the hardest to
see. They’ve been so naturalized and normalized by culture we can’t even
recognize them for what they are: these are cultural constructions that can be
named and refused.
In losing Mercy,
Johnny is unable to move simply from one cultural norm (the misogynistic
playboy individualist) to another (true love and marriage). Johnny moves into a
space that is something else altogether. His life doesn’t end with Mercy.
After confronting
his father he stands on the shore, watching the sun rise, his face bathed in
light. For the first time in his existence he is fully conscious and aware. The
man he was before Mercy is gone. He’s a man who now writes books that demand
people think. He’s done with shallow and popcorn endings. And while there are
plenty of people who have no interest in engaging with a work of depth, there
are those, like Robin, who will. Who want to talk and discuss and communicate.
It is not a given when Johnny and Robin walk off together into the night at the
end of the movie that they are destined to be together. They are two people
engaging in dialogue, and while the pull of the romantic in me is strong, and
the thought of Johnny and Robin together makes me smile, the movie leaves its
characters’ lives a question. And leaves us pondering the narratives that inform
our own lives.
I can’t bring this
to a close without commenting on the powerful performances in the film. There
is not one weak link in this cast, both Caans and Troy Garrity in particular
give standout performances. The film is also beautifully edited and scored, and
the director, Patrick Hoelck, gave the film both the time and space it needed
to reach the depth of the written material.
Mercy is one of those films in which I find new insights with every
viewing. It’s not a film to be watched once and put away to gather dust on a
shelf. Like a good piece of literature, it is something that calls to be
returned to over time.
