From the cutting-room floor: Matchstick Men

I enjoyed this film. The conclusion packs an unexpected punch, and portions of Han Zimmer’s score certainly qualify as suspenseful jazz ... but those portions are fleeting. When it became necessary to trim my final two manuscripts, both of which had outgrown their word-count limits, the logical (and easiest) deletions involved scores that are only partially jazz ... no matter how entertaining the story. After all, my two volumes focus on action jazz scores, not the films themselves.

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Caper films with truly surprising twists are hard to pull off these days, at a time when pre-publicity hype is laden with spoilers. One wonders if the never-saw-that-one-coming climaxes in The Sting, Sleuth and The Usual Suspects would have remained secrets — and therefore pleased as many viewers — in today’s instant-gratification Internet age. Still, a good plot remains a thing of beauty, and director Ridley Scott obviously saw great potential in Matchstick Men, because his 2003 film adaptation came out only a year after Eric Garcia’s fiendishly clever novel debuted. The story concerns con artists Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage) and Frank Mercer (Sam Rockwell), veterans of telemarketing scams and other small-potatoes grifts, who decide to target a flashy sucker (Bruce McGill) with a more lucrative currency exchange swindle. Things are made more interesting by the fact that Roy is riddled with phobias and obsessive/compulsive tics, and often unable to function in public; to further complicate matters, his sympathetic psychiatrist arranges to introduce Frank to the 14-year-old daughter (Alison Lohman, as Angela) that his long-divorced wife concealed from him.

The story is an intriguing mix of larcenous behavior and wary parent/child dynamics, with Roy’s peculiar behavior often played for nervous laughs. The result isn’t really a drama, nor is it really a comedy: a difficult balancing act reflected in Hans Zimmer’s eccentric score, which shares screen time with well-placed pop tunes by Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, the Tijuana Brass and others. On the larkish end, Zimmer’s music frequently quotes Nina Rota’s main theme from La Dolce Vita, and the tango-esque cues written to accompany Roy’s trembles and convulsions are pure comedy (notable “Weird Is Good” and “Ticks and Twitches,” on the Varèse Sarabande soundtrack album). But then Zimmer switches things up with sassy jazz tracks highlighted by a smokin’ walking bass and plenty of sweet sax work. Roy’s ill-advised decision to share his tradecraft with Angela unfolds against the sort of classic caper cue — titled “Roy’s Rules,” on the soundtrack album — that would have been right at home in many of the 1960s-era, jazz-hued films discussed elsewhere. So while the album isn’t quite jazz, that makes perfect sense for a film that isn’t quite serious, and isn’t quite funny.