A Lazy Saturday with the Pope of Greenwich Village

The Saturday before Super Bowl Sunday, I had a boozy lunch with my ninety-year-old mother at a place called Burger Dive. Afterward, I took to the couch and browsed Amazon Prime for an old movie I could watch for free without ads. What I found was The Pope of Greenwich Village. I'd seen the movie three or four times over the years, but it had been a while, just unfamiliar enough to be very entertaining. I'd forgotten that it was one of the best films ever made.

A bit about craft: I think every good story needs to have an emotional arc—the protagonist needs to undergo a process where they have a personal internal change. To simplify my writing life, I whittled down the essential emotional arcs to two: finding or losing family. Those are the two I discover in just about every story I read, listen to, or watch. Most romances are about two people falling in love and creating a family; a coming-of-age novel is about a person losing or overcoming family; and a tragedy usually involves losing family. Family can take on different forms—a tribe, a friend group, a sexual orientation, a community, a religion, an army platoon, and a political activist group are all families of a sort. So, how does that finding/losing paradigm work in The Pope?

The story is about two friends, Italians who grew up in the mid-twentieth century neighborhood of Greenwich Village in New York. Micky Rourke, playing Charlie, is best friends with a mook named Paulie, played by Eric Roberts. Their relationship is complicated. Charlie is supposedly the smart one with ambition who's the maître d at an upscale Italian restaurant. Paulie is a waiter. The two steal from the owner by cheating on guest checks, and both get fired. Now, out on the street without a job or money, Paulie talks Charlie into committing a robbery. Paulie doesn't tell Charlie that the safe they plan to bust into contains mafia kick-back cash for the NYPD. The heist goes sideways.

Charlie actually has a life and a family of sorts. He lives with his girlfriend, Diane, played by the beautiful Daryl Hannah, and the two seem genuinely in love. They plan to move away from the streets of NY, start a restaurant in the country, and have kids. Dianne looks all the more beautiful, sexy, because, in every scene, she's in a skimpy leotard or just wearing panties and a bra. Then, in the one scene where she finally does put on clothes—pulling on a sweater dress—she promptly strips it off to try on something different. I thought the director, Stuart Rosenberg (who also directed Cool Hand Luke, another best-film-ever-made), played this a little over-the-top—though you could say that about the entire movie. Unfortunately, Charlie listens to Paulie more than Dianne, and she splits when the heist goes sideways. End of family—but it's not the end of the movie.

There are some priceless scenes with great actors, way too many to describe here, but I want to do one shoutout to the actress Geraldine Page, who plays Mrs. Ritter, mother to the NYPD cop who walks in during the robbery and is accidentally killed. So the robbery goes sideways, but Paulie, Charlie, and the safe cracker walk out with the money. Now, the NYPD bad guys want their money back. Two of them, one played by M. Emmet Walsh, confront the tough Mrs. Ritter as to what she knows about her now-dead son. She sits there in her stuffed leather chair, viciously puffing on a cigarette that never gets more than six inches from her face, talking with her foul-mouthed NY accent through a cloud of smoke. Every so often she kisses the cross of her rosary. She tells them in a four-minute scene to go fuck themselves. Watch this on YouTube—it will blow you away.

Eric Roberts, playing the mook Paulie, is masterful. A mook is a fool, an incompetent person who's funny but they don't know it. Charlie and Paulie are like Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis, or Laurel and Hardy. The way Roberts forms words, smokes a cigarette, plays with his hair, lies none too well, and pees (he's got some kind of bladder control problem—possibly a metaphor for his running mouth) are mesmerizing. When the mob finally catches up to him, the mob leader—a guy affectionately named Bed Bug—has Paulie's left thumb amputated. There's the famous scene and line, "Charlie, they took my thumb!"

So, back to the ending and the losing/finding family thing. Daryl Hannah walks out on Charlie, Paulie loses his thumb to the Bedbug and then, of course, gives up Charlie as the third accomplice in the robbery. Paulie is forced to be a "coffee boy" at the local Italian Social Club and serve Bed Bug his espresso with three sugars. It's then that the Bed Bug tells Paulie that he's going to take in retribution Charlie's entire hand. Paulie spikes the Bug's espresso with lye, and that's the end of him.

The final scene is Charlie and Paulie walking down the street with Paulie holding Charlie's elbow as if he were being escorted down the aisle to an awaiting bride. (Get it? Getting married? Finding family?) They plan to go to Miami together. The ending is kind of sad when you think of it. Charlie has eschewed his own family (and it turns out Diane was pregnant before she split) to make a new family of sorts with the mook Paulie.

You know this will not turn out well.