"Fingers" is now generally regarded as James Toback's best film; Jacques Audiard clearly liked it enough to remake it as "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" and with Harvey Keitel in the lead it could sit quite comfortably on a double-bill with Scorsese's "Mean Streets". Keitel plays Jimmy 'Fingers', a gifted classical pianist with a passion for fifties and sixties pop tunes who, rather than using his fingers on the concert stage, acts as a sometimes vicious collector for his loan-shark father, (Michael V. Gazzo), and the movie comes over as a gangster flic with art-house pretentions.
A fairly young Keitel is terrific as always and he makes the psychotic musician a pretty scary figure while the supporting cast sometimes feels like a who's who of the casts of "The Godfather" movies, "The Sopranos" etc. But the film itself is much too loose for its own good and it meanders when it should be gripping us. Still, Toback makes good use of his New York locations and the whole thing is just weird enough to make an impression. It was never going to be 'popular' but it has cult movie written all over it.
A fairly young Keitel is terrific as always and he makes the psychotic musician a pretty scary figure while the supporting cast sometimes feels like a who's who of the casts of "The Godfather" movies, "The Sopranos" etc. But the film itself is much too loose for its own good and it meanders when it should be gripping us. Still, Toback makes good use of his New York locations and the whole thing is just weird enough to make an impression. It was never going to be 'popular' but it has cult movie written all over it.