Scoop's notes

I'm not going to rehash the points made by Tuna and the many other critics who lambasted the film for its stylistic excesses. I didn't much care for the film, which is completely devoid of any human feelings. I will note, however, that style and pacing are largely matters of cultural and generational preference. Critics are mostly male English-speaking graybeards, as are Tuna and I. Younger audiences were much more likely to think that Domino's visual excesses were hip. The IMDb ratings show a powerful inverse correlation to age:

Let's look at those points one at a time.

The conventional wisdom about Domino Harvey (right) is that she gave up her privileged life as a "supermodel," but

• The term supermodel is an ambiguous one, but by any reasonable definition she does not seem to qualify. She doesn't appear to have done any photographic modeling, since there are no known representative pictures of her.

• She doesn't appear to have done any runway modeling, either. Nobody can recall seeing her at any fashion shows, and nobody ever heard of her at the Ford Agency. According to The Guardian:

"Patricia Lagrange, head booker at Ford Models Europe, says she doesn't remember her at all. Patty Sicular, who has worked for the company since 1980, doesn't recall her either."

• The L.A. Times reported: "A mythology grew up that like her mother, Domino was a model and that, unlike her mother, she had turned her back on the glamour of the runway for a fringe existence. But according to several family members and friends, Harvey never worked as a model."

Domino also claimed to have been a student at Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio, but

• "No one who was there remembers her attending a single class, not even Don Fellows, an actor who taught at the Studio from the beginning and knew Laurence Harvey slightly, so would have registered her presence." Fellows taught at Strasberg's L.A. school from the time it opened until it closed in 1996.

And then there was her claim to have renounced her rich, glam life to become a bounty hunter. She did the bounty hunting all right. She seems to have been intoxicated by the thrill, the power, and the danger of it. Harvey worked for the Celes King Bail Bonds agency in south central Los Angeles, spending her days bringing in drug dealers, robbers and the occasional murderer, but

• She didn't choose downscale bounty hunting over upscale modeling. Quite the opposite. She had previously been living in the low-rent district, working as a ranch hand near San Diego and as a volunteer firefighter in tiny Boulevard, California near the Mexican border. The move back to L.A. was a way to move back upscale to her mother's mansion. She applied  and was turned down for a job at the L.A. Fire Department, and she then chanced upon bounty hunting. While working for Celes, she was "living, at least for a time, in opulence with her mother." (As shown in the film.) In fact, being rich helped her to be a good bounty hunter. Her partner, Ed Martinez, said, ""She had money. She could afford good guns."

Domino claimed to have been involved in apprehending some important felons in big cases.

• As the News-Telegraph pointed out in her obit, "In fact, though, her quarry consisted mainly of small-time drug dealers and hopeless drug addicts, a category into which she herself was steadily descending. When she checked into a Hawaiian rehabilitation clinic in 1997, after selling the rights to her life story, she weighed less than seven stone." (That's 98 lbs. She was 5'9")

Domino said she was a bounty hunter because, "The real satisfaction is putting the sleazebags in jail."

• In real life, she was in it for the visceral thrills, and she WAS one of the sleazebags. In May 2005 she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs, possession, trafficking and racketeering. Put under house arrest pending trial, she was ordered to wear an electronic tag and subjected to a regime of drug and alcohol testing. She had been in and out of heroin rehab for nearly a decade. She would have faced up to ten years in jail if she had been convicted, and had yet to enter a plea when she was found dead, OD'ed in a bathtub, Jim Morrison style. The Los Angeles County coroner reported that she had died June 27, 2005 from 'acute fentanyl toxicity.' Fentanyl is a painkiller 80 times more potent than morphine.

 

Domino's Stories versus the Film

As if Domino's stories weren't already wild enough, the film script added layers of embellishment. First Domino gets out of an armed stand-off by giving a lap dance. Then, after the first thirty of forty minutes, the film turns into Natural Born Killers 2, a satire on the media's obsession with all things tawdry. Domino becomes a reality TV star. Other friends of the bail bondsman become Jerry Springer guests, making up words like Chinegro, Japanic, and Blacktino to define the new racial mixtures of America. The story takes additional side-trips into the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, mysticism, sex addiction, and more. Many have noted that Tony Scott's direction was surreal, but few mentioned that its surrealism was matched by the script. The cast includes characters like "underwater mobster "and "Bishop goon."

It's all fictional characters in fictional situations, many of them completely unrelated to the main plot, all held together only by the glue of a first name which belonged to a real person: "Domino."

All of this, which I presume to be satire, forms what is, in essence, a self-defeating argument. The strongest case against the film's point is the very obscurity of Domino's life, despite her ongoing attempts at self-aggrandizement and legend-building! If the media really were so obsessed with such sleazy matters as a rich white chick working as a bounty hunter, then why did they, in reality as opposed to in the movie, have virtually no interest in Domino Harvey at all?  Perhaps because the general consensus among those who knew Domino is that she rarely told the truth about anything. As you read more and more about her, the recurring theme is summed up by sentences like this: "She told me she was completely straight, and when I got there she was stoned out of her tree." In the last analysis, Tony Scott was the only one really gullible enough to believe her and to think her life was as dramatic as she claimed it to be, or dramatic enough to merit a film treatment. As the Telegraph wrote in the article linked above, "The real story of Domino Harvey's mixed-up life and tragic death would have been too prosaic, and pathetic, to interest any Hollywood studio." Yet Scott reportedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rights to her version of the story. All of this proves not that the American media are obsessed with violence and celebrity, but that Tony Scott is!

Bottom line: to be honest, the film has almost nothing to do with Domino Harvey's version of her life which, in turn, has almost nothing to do with reality. The only relationship between this film and her real life is the pitch: "Movie star's daughter turns bounty hunter."

End of story.

Does that have any bearing on whether it is a good movie? No, none at all. Everything I have written may be true of a brilliant movie as well as of a bad one. But it may have some bearing on your perceptions of it.