The Usual Suspects (1995)

The greatest trick The Reluctant Patient ever pulled was convincing himself he didn’t need to see a doctor.

The Usual Suspects is a 1995 crime thriller centred around the interrogation of a physically disabled small-time con man, Roger “Verbal” Kint, following a massacre and fire aboard a ship in the Port of Los Angeles.

Verbal tells a long and complicated story about five criminals who meet after being brought together for a police line-up, and a mysterious crime lord called Keyser Söze. Nobody seems to know what Söze looks like – or even whether he really exists.

At the end of the film, Verbal is allowed to leave the police station.

The detective who has been interrogating him, Dave Kujan, looks around the office and starts noticing things. Names and details from the elaborate story he’s just been told are staring back at him from objects around the room.

Verbal has been using them to construct his story.

Meanwhile, as Verbal walks away from the police station, his limp gradually disappears and his disabled hand straightens.

Then a fax arrives containing a facial composite of Keyser Söze, drawn from the description given by a survivor of the massacre.

It looks remarkably like Verbal Kint.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for readers of The Reluctant Patient. Verbal Kint is an unreliable narrator. He tells us what happened from his perspective and we spend most of the film accepting his version of events.

I’m not suggesting that The Reluctant Patient is Keyser Söze.

But these stories are told from one person’s perspective. They’re what I remember happening, what I thought was happening at the time, and what I’ve subsequently pieced together. Someone else in the room might remember things rather differently.

And sometimes it’s only afterwards that you realise which apparently insignificant details actually mattered.

The line-up

One of the most memorable scenes happens much earlier in the film, in a flashback to six weeks before the massacre.

The five suspects are brought together for a police line-up and made to repeat the same line.

The scene was supposed to be serious.

Unfortunately, the actors couldn’t stop laughing.

They were already struggling to keep straight faces, but apparently Benicio del Toro wasn’t helping matters. Gabriel Byrne later recalled that del Toro farting broke the tension and set them off again.

Eventually, what wasn’t working as a serious scene turned out to work rather well as a funny one, and the laughter and corpsing became part of the finished film.

The line-up is also where the five men meet, ultimately setting in motion the events that lead to the massacre aboard the ship.

Perhaps The Usual Suspects has another lesson for The Reluctant Patient, then.

Sometimes things don’t go according to plan.

Sometimes the apparently unimportant details turn out to be rather important.

And sometimes the story you end up with is better because somebody farted.

The greatest trick The Reluctant Patient ever pulled was convincing himself he didn’t need to see a doctor.

From the Case Files