Robert Cettl’s review published on Letterboxd:
Harvey Keitel has long been one of the more daring actors in Hollywood. Known, like Robert DeNiro, for his early work with famed director Martin Scorsese, Keitel often took out of the way and unusual roles outside of the mainstream to balance his mainstream work. Always a character actor rather than a star, Keitel lent his presence to two raw depictions of troubled, despairing and sexually tormented humanity. The first of these was director James Toback’s Fingers and the second was director Abel Ferrara’s bleak Bad Lieutenant. These two films are the cornerstones of the actor’s career. Although both films are cult favourites, Fingers especially is something of a landmark in the development of American independent cinema. It is an assured debut by Toback, and a film that can stand alongside Scorsese’s more celebrated works of the period, playing on Keitel’s performances in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and his obsessive man of tortured honour in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists. Yet for the bleak vision of sexual despair that is Fingers, Toback was able to convince Faberge, the perfume company, to produce it.
Fingers tells the story of Jimmy (Keitel) a pianist who aspires to Carnegie Hall, but lives a violent life as a debt collector for his loan shark father. One day, he sees a woman (Tisa Farrow) outside his apartment, listening to him play the piano. He pursues her, intent to prove him a sex machine, but awkward and ill at ease with the performance he must put on. It is clear that he is a sexually unstable figure. Things go astray when he attends an audition at Carnegie Hall, and his world starts to crumble as he descends into a form of sexual psychosis. Farrow eventually shuns him as inadequate, but he follows her to her lover, a towering Afro-American (Jim Brown) who is clearly the sexual dynamo that Keitel perhaps fantasizes himself as. Keitel is unable to prevent his humiliations. His father urges him to uphold his honour against the gangster refusing to pay his debt, but he is now reluctant.
The film has been hailed as a complex “psychosexual nightmare” and as that it is a truly fascinating film examination of a man unsure of his own sexual inclinations and yet desperately trying to prove himself a sexual presence. He lives in a limbo. His life as a pianist contrasts to his violent side as he uses his fingers to make music and brutality. He is sexually drawn to men but pursues women in denial. Forever trapped between opposites, he exists in a desperate, psychological netherworld and the film expertly segues from his violence to his musical interests, almost as if he needs the music as a balancing factor. Hence he carries a tape recorder with him wherever he goes, playing his favorite music lest the harsh world overwhelm him – music is an ecstatic escape from the everyday, an escape he would perhaps like to find through sex but cannot. It is a sign of neurotic obsession rather than the passion of an artist, hence his audition problems. He cannot make the leap and escape his limbo, his private trap between high art and the low street. This man of contradictions, of violence and compassion, of tenderness and sexual violence is bound to explode and implode, and Keitel and Toback expertly and subtly chart his psychological collapse, making the film a truly absorbing character study.
On one level, Keitel fears inadequacy and is forever putting on a front, willing himself to violence and what he considers sexual aggression. He needs force to define himself, but although capable of violence, is also uncomfortable with it, however much it fulfills his need to appear dominant. Farrow and Brown see through this, resulting in his sexual humiliation by Brown, who is capable of dominating women with commanding force and sudden brutality. For Keitel, sex and pain seem forever bound, and the film equates his discomfort as a sexual expression, culminating in his prostate examination. Heterosexual sex is a form of role-playing for him, and he is finally unable to fulfill his fantasy image of himself as a lover or a pianist. Ironically the only opportunity left him is his father’s pleas to express himself in violence and murder. Personal and sexual failure send him in a spiral towards violent, vengeful and homicidal madness, turning him into a caged, naked, trapped animal, forever isolated and consumed by his own private demons. Fingers is thus a complex, despairing study of psychological disintegration and its sexual manifestations and impetus. It provides Keitel with his most daring role until Bad Lieutenant expanded on the sexual psychosis explored here.