In any reasonable debate: Fiorentino wins best actress over Jessica Lange

There are some outstanding movie characters who unfortunately get lost to time and that’s a shame, particularly with the one of Bridget Gregory, or should I say Wendy Kroy. I hardly hear anyone talk about John Dahl’s “The Last Seduction” anymore but it is as razor sharp as it is unlike almost anything i’ve seen before. And at its center is Linda Fiorentino, who should have became a major star from it.

Her Bridget is a con woman who has just scammed her way to $700,000 along with her equally duplicitous husband Clay (Bill Pullman). Clay also happens to be an abusive bastard and unbeknownst to him, Bridget has made plans to run off with the money and hide out somewhere low key until she can finalize a divorce proceeding.

She winds up in Beston, a pleasant enough little ‘burb town which has a smokey bar and a bunch of people who feel more anchored to it than proud to call themselves locals. One of those is Mike (Peter Berg), a recent divorcee who tries to pick her up and believes himself the luckiest guy in the world when all she wants from him is “indoor plumbing”.

Bridget winds up settling in the town, changing her name to Wendy Croy, and getting a job at an insurance company, where Mike works. She even keeps sleeping with him, though she seemingly toys with him just enough to keep coming back to her, without giving away too much of herself. While this is going on, Clay will also work to trace her whereabouts.

The way the character of Bridget unfolds is the movie’s ace in the hole and Fiorentino plays her pitch perfectly. Here’s a character who’s gotten so good at dealing in a world of other scumbags that she can smell bullshit and even do it better herself. She’s sexy and sultry and has a killer body and that’s often the best way to hide a killer mind.

This is a performance of such great control, she’s smart and discerning and so good at being manipulative that many men wouldn’t even realize how insane she really is til its too late.

Take the scene where she suddenly springs her idea for a murder for hire plot on Mike to collect insurance money. In a way this is her participating in a sick joke that only she is laughing internally at but the punchline seems to be that men continuously underestimate her at their own peril, and even in the back of our minds, we wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she was capable of murder. Later, it’s also a big laugh when she somehow combines doing a murder with a fear of commitment into one argument.

In a way the film plays as the kind of dark comedy Peter Berg would probably direct later on in his career, but here is very good as the gullible dope who doesn’t seem to realize he’s a guppie and she is a shark. And Pullman is very funny as the left husband trying to catch up to her quick-witted way of thinking.

Not to give too much away but she essentially tries to evade him and keep the constantly doting Mike wrapped around her little finger (for what reason?), plus there’s the little matter of murder that may or may not happen. The thrill here is that she is so good at outsmarting everyone and so uncompromisingly fatal in her machinations that we can tell she’s taking us nowhere good, but at the same time, we’re kinda titillated by seeing how she does it.

No words can express just how great the writing is here- the way the mostly all-white small town reacts to seeing a black guy, and how Bridget is able to use that later is another big laugh- and Fiorentino really got screwed this year. This is a great performance in a year where every Best Actress nominee was weak as can be. The Academy excluding her is some bullshit that calls for some Bridget-style retribution.