User Reviews

****SPOILERS**** Outlandish motion picture that tries to cover too much ground and in the end gets buried under it. Harvey Keitel, Jimmy "Fingers" Angelelli, comes across as a borderline psycho who's about to explode, which is just what he does at the end of the movie. Jimmy is pressured by wanting to become a Carnegie Hall caliber Bach playing pianist and at the same time doing his job for his dad Ben, Michael V. Gazzo, a Mafia loan shark.

Jimmy who's very sexually active with the ladies he even seems to be interested in men as well. We get to see Jimmy early in the film making eye-contact with an obviously gay waiter at a restaurant as if he wanted to pick him up. Jimmy unfortunately has a very severe prostate condition that becomes inflamed and unbearable when ever he has sex. It turns out that having sex for Jimmy is more like rape and his prostate condition drives him almost out of his head.

I did like the brutal mobster, debt collector, contrasted by the sensitive artist, pianist, angle of the movie. This contradiction stems from Jimmy's gangster father Ben and pianist mother Ruth, Marian Seldes, who we later see in a hospital ward suffering from a mental breakdown. Writer/Director James Toback seemed to add something in "Fingers" straight out of the movie "Taxi Driver", which Harvey Keitel also stared in, into the story.

We have Jimmy falling in love and then wanting to save Carol (Tisa Farrow) who's, when we first see her, a sculpture. Later when we meet Carol's boss or pimp Dreems, Jim Brown, we realize that Carol is hooker which makes her a combination of both Iris & Betsy in "Taxi Driver".

You begin to think that Jimmy like Travis Bickel in "Taxi Driver" will in the end dispatch Dreems and his henchmen and save Carol from her life of sin and have her back living with her parents and family. Instead the movie just can't make up it's mind and as it comes to it's brutal conclusion Carol and her pimp Dreems are totally written out or forgotten about! It's as if they were put in the film just to fill in some time to make it a full-length 90 minutes motion picture!

I felt that Jimmy's unrestrained brutality in the movie was more due to his failure to become a concert pianist then to his painful sexual experiences due to his prostate condition. Since his prostrate is treatable with medication but his failure as a concert pianist isn't. It's just that Jimmy can't mentally get it all together whenever he's on stage playing th piano and being judged by music critics.

We see Jimmy in action early in the film when he cold-cocks the massive and powerful pizza store owner Luchino, Lenny Montana, who owed his lone shark dad Ben money that he lent him. But as the movie goes on it's obvious that Jimmy is getting more and more out of control because his both uncontrolled and painful sexual urges. Jimmy virtually rapes Julie, Tanya Roberts, in order to intimidate mobsters Riccamonza's, Tony Sirico, girlfriend who also owes Jimmy's dad money. Later Jimmy forces himself on Carol who you thought up until then he was trying to rescue from a life on the streets and practically rapes her as well. The worst and most sickening act by Jimmy is when as an act of revenge he savagely beats and murders Riccamonza who had Jimmy's father killed. Jimmy murders Riccamonza by blowing his eyes out of his eye-sockets like he said that he would do earlier in the movie; luckily for Riccamonza he was already dead when that happened!

As the movie "Fingers" ends we see Jimmy stark naked playing the piano in his apartment with absolutely no musical skill at all and obviously insane. All alone in the world, everyone that he loved and cared for have either died or left him, Jimmy is just waiting for the men in the white suits to take him away in handcuffs and a straight-jacket.

A dour character study featuring what may very well be Harvey Keitel's best performance. Keitel is a would-be concert pianist torn between the world of art and crime. His institutionalized mother wants him to play Carnegie Hall, while his father, a low-life Mafioso, wants him to continue as his bag man. Keitel's performance here is ferocious. He's sensitive and clearly artistic while at the same time ruthlessly (and violently) loyal to his father. In the end, all he wants is love and without it he can't respond to anything or anyone, including his would-be girlfriend (Tisa Farrow). Writer-director James Toback has had a spotty directing career over the years and has yet to fulfill the promise he displays here. Though there's limited action and only a few (brutal) spurts of violence, FINGERS is extremely exciting, harnessed by Keitel's brilliance. The strong supporting cast includes Michael V. Gazzo as Keitel's father, Jim Brown as a very nasty pimp, Danny Aiello, Marian Seldes, Tanya Roberts and Dominic Chianese in a very unlikely role. Filmed in New York with great cinematography by Michael Chapman.

Jimmy "Fingers" Angellelli (Harvey Keitel) is an aspiring concert pianist, but also a debt collector for his father who is a small-time racketeer. In addition Jimmy has enough sexual conflicts for a dozen men - sometimes he is shy, sometimes overly aggressive, most times attracted to women, sometimes attracted to men, but always sexually confused. And all of this is complicated by a serious prostate problem that makes the sexual act problematic in any case (be prepared for the most graphic prostate exam ever filmed).

Jimmy's personality split between his better nature and being a thug is by implication handed down to him by his parents. His artistic side came from his mother, who was a pianist (now institutionalized) and his baser side came from his father Ben (Michael Gazzo). Ben is past his prime and depends on Jimmy to do his dirty work. In many ways Jimmy, who is a man in his thirties, is still a child. He is still trying to please his parents and make sense of his sexuality.

Interesting themes, but I didn't buy a lot of what is presented. If Jimmy really had a shot at performing at Carnegie Hall, he would need to have been practicing six hours a day and studying with a mentor. We see scant evidence of that, so I just didn't believe in his talent as a pianist. Keitel is so obviously not playing the piano in those scenes where he is supposed to be playing Bach that it is disconcerting; his fake emotionalizing at the piano is embarrassing. Plus he is not very protective of his hands, to say the least.

Michael Gazzo seemed to be able to talk only in an irritating shout. His overacting got on my nerves every time he made an appearance. And how was it that such a crude man was ever married to a classical pianist? Jimmy's sense of duty to his father did not seem well grounded. How can you have much allegiance to a father who tells you, "I should have strangled you in the crib"?

However, Keitel gives a powerful, nuanced performance and that is the main attraction.

This is the story of a man who is torn in so many directions that you are pretty certain that the ending is not going to be pretty, so don't expect to be uplifted when it's all over.

This was essentially remade in France in 2005 as "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté). I think that film is more subtle and the personalities more well developed.

This late 70s film is nicely filmed and looks very good. Now, if I were going to follow the adage of "if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all", there would nothing else I could say about Fingers. Since I'm something of a bitter prick, there's a whole lot more to this review. This aimless mess is fully of caricaturish performances and scenes that look like outtakes accidentally left in the movie. When watching it, I frequently couldn't believe what writer/director James Toback was offering to me on screen and spent much of the last half of Fingers laughing at the gaudy, overwrought, nonsensical nature of it.

Jimmy (Harvey Keitel) is a man in his late 20s who desperately wants to be a concert pianist. He practices relentlessly and childishly mouths along with the notes as he plays. Jimmy is also an obviously disturbed young man with an explosive temper and a needy desire for the opposite sex. He's got a mother in a mental ward and a father who's a loan shark. This story concerns the thoroughly disconnected strands of Jimmy getting a chance to audition for Carnegie Hall, his fixation on a woman he sees out on the street one day and his father asking Jimmy to collect on two outstanding debts. Along the way we see a scuffle over Jimmy's 1970s purse-sized portable radio and cassette player, a rectal exam, a bathroom sexual encounter that resembles a man trying to squeeze under a limbo bar and football great Jim Brown portraying the forerunner of South Park's Chef.

This film is just ridiculous. It appears to be an middle class take on a Taxi Driver-ish breakdown with an undercurrent of homosexuality thrown in, but it's so meandering and parts of it are so exaggerated that it's hard to know for sure. There are moments in this movie that come out of nowhere and then vanish back into oblivion. The three separate plot threads are so fragmented and halting it's as if the script were written longhand by someone with Parkinson's disease. It's kind of difficult to accurately describe Fingers because there are so many odd moments that are played completely seriously when they actually belong in the gag reel as the end of one of Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run movies. I mean, writer/director Toback literally spends the better part of a minute showing a couple of white chicks sucking on Jim Brown's nipples. What do you say about that?

Harvey Keitel is…well, Harvey Keitel and yes, he does end up naked at one point looking into the camera with a "What do you want me to do about it?" look on his face. He does a nice job with the symptoms of Jimmy's personality disorders but there's nothing whole or coherent about the role he was given. Tisa Farrow as the woman Jimmy's obsessed with speaks and moves in a monotone. As for the rest of the cast, all you can do is play "Spot the future member of The Sopranos".

When talented creators do crappy work, their admirers often feel compelled to pretend otherwise. That's about the only explanation I can come up with for why this thing made it to DVD. It's astonishingly poor storytelling put to no good use.

"Fingers" looks almost as if the screenplay were written by a person who began by imagining a half dozen really odd characters and then set about putting them all in some kind of movie. The end result was Fingers.

Kietel plays a violent, none-too-bright young man, Jimmy, who likes music almost too much. He also plays classical piano. He is the movie's odd character #1. His father, odd character #2, loans money to almost anyone who asks, which of course is a problem. Jimmy meets odd character #3, a young woman named Carol. Jimmy yearns to have Carol for his girlfriend although they have almost zero communication and best I could determine, she is something of a prostitute. Carol is at the beckon call of odd character #4, an ex-pugilist, Dreems, played by Jimmy Brown. I'm not sure if Dreems is Carol's pimp or some alternate-style boyfriend. The oddity of the characters made that kind of hard to figure out.

I gave the film a 6 for no real good reason other than I made it all the way through to the end. Maybe it deserved a 5 or a 4, all things considered.

Dear Harvey Keitel,

your performance was the best thing about Fingers - a film about a tough young man torn between his loyalty towards his gangster father (Michael.V.Gazzo) and his ambition to become a piano player. The scenes where you're playing the piano were really intense and beautiful. You must have worked your ass off. You were also at your very best in the scenes where you're collecting debts for your father and living the gangster life. The film is a very deterministic character study about a young man struggling to escape his roots.

Made almost ten years after the Manson killings, it is also about the dark side of sexual liberation when a mixed race threesome ends in violence (an alpha male black gangster smashes together the heads of two white women when they refuse to kiss each other). There is also a funny scene when you literally jump on a woman in a restroom and indulge in casual sex.

Michael.V.Gazzo is a very talkative and cunning gangster, not too different from the role he played in Godfather 2. Jim Brown is effortlessly menacing and nasty as the black gangster. Spike Lee almost certainly based Radio Rahim in Do The Right Thing on your character who walks around playing loud songs on a tape recorder. There was one remarkable bit of editing when a scene of violence cuts straight to you playing the piano, Harvey.

Best Regards, Pimpin.

(8/10)