Overnight
Overnight portrays Duffy as a sort of indie-film Caliban, ranting about the treachery of the movie business and raving about the vastness of his talent. Perpetually clad in bib overalls, a six-day beard, and a baseball cap with a Boondock Saints logo, he never misses an opportunity to remind his little entourage that he’s the golden goose. “Success has nothing to do with how you live your life or how you treat your friends, really,” he says privately at one point. “If you’ve got the goods you’ve got the goods, no matter what kind of a fuckup you are.” When things start to go wrong he foams at the mouth, vowing revenge on the powers that be and dressing down his scruffy pals as they cower in silence. Ironically, he succeeds as an object of sick fascination where he failed as a filmmaker and musician; he’s the whole show, and Smith and Montana were simply in the right place at the right time.
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The video opens with giddy excitement as Duffy’s deal with Miramax becomes front-page news in the Hollywood Reporter and USA Today. His friend Chris Brinker, a studio assistant, had asked to represent his script, and The Boondock Saints had caught the attention of Harvey Weinstein, the fearsome Miramax mogul who’d discovered Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. Weinstein bought the script for $300,000, giving Duffy a $15 million budget, casting approval, final cut of the picture, and permission to record the score with his band. He even pledged to buy J. Sloan’s, the West Hollywood tavern where Duffy had been tending bar, and make the young screenwriter a co-owner. That last arrangement was an example of Weinstein’s PR genius, a fantasy element (“Now I’m the boss!”) that became a surefire news hook, though the deal was the first in a string of promises that never panned out.
Miraculously, The Boondock Saints did get produced. The independent Franchise Films offered Duffy a budget of about $6 million, and the movie was shot on a brisk 32-day schedule with a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Billy Connolly, and potbellied porn star Ron Jeremy. A macho bloodbath with a lot of juvenile humor and fake Catholic mysticism, it stars Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus (a good actor damned to a career of crummy movies) as immigrant Irish brothers in South Boston. Inspired by a priest’s sermon, they decide to rid the city of “evil men” and begin staging elaborate slaughters of underworld figures. Dafoe is a gay FBI agent who struts around the crime scenes in a four-button jacket (though his sexuality is excused because he’s a tough SOB who dismisses one lover as a “fag”). The movie collapses into burlesque near the end, as Dafoe shows up in drag during one of the brothers’ raids, and climaxes with the brothers ritually executing a mob boss in the courtroom where he’s just been acquitted.
The Boondock Saints became a cult favorite on video, and Duffy promises on its Web site that he’ll soon begin production on Boondock Saints 2: All Saint’s Day. Whether the release of Overnight will sink that project or guarantee its completion is anyone’s guess. But if this documentary finds an audience I wouldn’t be surprised to see Duffy make a comeback as an actor, playing the heavy in low-budget action movies. He certainly gives a jaw-dropping performance here. One can easily imagine him seething at the thought of his two former employees exposing his boorishness and egomania to the world. But in a tale filled with perverse twists of fate, the most perverse may be that Overnight, not The Boondock Saints, is Troy Duffy’s masterpiece.
