Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Madonna and Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo, Nancy Ferrara, Reilly Murphy, Victor Argo, Leonard L. Thomas, Christina Fulton, Heather Bracken. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Alex Tavoularis. Film editing: Anthony Redman, Shivo Andrew Stewart. Music: Joe Delia. 

Oscar Wilde's dictum that life imitates art gets a workout in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game. At the beginning we see movie director Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) taking leave of his wife (Nancy Ferrara) and child (Reilly Murphy) to fly from New York to LA, where he is making a film. There's a little tension at the departure, but nothing extreme. The extremity begins when he starts shooting about a marriage violently on the rocks with method actor Francis Burns (Joe Russo) and rising star Sarah Jennings (Madonna), who seem to dislike each other as much as the characters they're playing do. And it intensifies when Eddie's wife and child suddenly arrive just as Sarah has left his bed. From then on, what Eddie is trying to put on film begins to echo what is happening off-screen, not only with Eddie and his wife but also between his two stars. Even though it contains one of her best performances in a movie, Madonna bad-mouthed Dangerous Game when it was released. Not without reason. Though the performances are solid, it's heavy-handed and one-note, with a narrative so poorly constructed that there's no satisfactory way to end either the film being made or the one about its making. 

Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993)

Madonna in Body of Evidence

Cast: Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Jürgen Prochnow, Lillian Lehman, Frank Langella. Screenplay: Brad Mirman. Cinematography: Douglas Milsome. Production design: Victoria Paul. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Graeme Revell.

Perhaps the only effective performance and convincing characterization in Uli Edel's Body of Evidence is that of Lillian Lehman as the judge presiding over a tawdry trial, who is rightly pissed off at the nonsense taking place in her courtroom. The film was a vanity project, designed to make Madonna into a major movie star. She plays Rebecca Carlson, a gallery owner in Portland, Oregon, who indulges in BDSM but winds up on trial for murder when one of her partners, a wealthy older man, dies after having sex with her after, leaving her $8 million in his will. Rebecca's sexual tastes are "explained" by a passing reference to childhood abuse, but her anything-goes approach to sex seems to stop short at bisexuality: She broke off with another partner when she found him in bed with a man. It would take an actress more adept at nuance than Madonna to make sense of such an ill-conceived role. There are some fine actors in the movie, including Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Frank Langella, and Julianne Moore (who has expressed regret at taking her role in the film), but the screenplay, filled with "surprise twists" that land with a thud, does them no good. Body of Evidence bombed with critics and audiences, and it holds favor today only with die-hard Madonna fans.