Queens Logic movie review & film summary (1991)

We share their curiosity, but for at least the first 30 minutes of the movie we’re curious about something else, as well: Who are these people, and what do they mean to one another? The screenplay by Tony Spiridakis introduces a large gallery of characters in no apparent order and then moves casually among their stories. Gradually we begin to know who the characters are and - vaguely, anyway - how they are related. And then, almost insidiously, they grow more and more familiar, until by the end of the film we’re beginning to really care what happens to them.

There’s Al, the ringleader, played by Joe Mantegna, who is seen in a title sequence climbing a rope up the vast bridge that connects Queens with Manhattan. He has always been the madcap comedian, the party animal. He sells fish for a living, but his wife complains he’s not a fishmonger, he’s a lounge act. Al’s partner is Eliot (John Malkovich), who is gay but does not act on that fact, preferring a life of celibate bachelorhood. Al’s wife is Carla (Linda Fiorentino), feisty, proud, ready to move out if Al stays out all night again.

There are others: Ray and Patricia (Ken Olin and Chloe Webb), who are the couple getting married, maybe, and Dennis (Kevin Bacon), who has gone to Hollywood to make it in the music business but hasn’t had any success as yet, and Monte (Tom Waits), who is about to drift away into his own world but shows up for the weekend anyway. Much tension centers around the character of Ray, who is not really sure he wants to marry Patricia. Ray has had some success as a painter, and maybe, he thinks, she doesn’t have the class to be an artist’s wife. She is wiser than he is and tells him, in a key scene, that she is Queens and she will always be Queens and it isn’t her, it’s his own past he isn’t proud of.

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