Jennifer Jason Leigh is brilliant

I see plenty of praise here for Alec Baldwin's excellent performance in Miami Blues and I must agree that it's some of the finest work of his career. But this film also contains one of my favourite Jennifer Jason Leigh performances. I found her both heartbreaking and very funny as this sweet, dumb waif who gets mixed up with Baldwin. Leigh is a fiercely intelligent actress and has played some characters whose smartness is important to the film's plot (The Hudsucker Proxy, eXistenZ, the writer Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), but she's absolutely convincing here as someone so dumb that she knits her eyebrows and creases her brow in frustration trying to follow the simplest thing. Susie is so naive and gullibly trusting that she borders on childlike. Her deadpan line delivery was priceless throughout, but underneath the humour Susie is really a very sad, lost character.

I see Leigh won 1990's Best Supporting Actress award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics (actually it was jointly for Miami Blues and Last Exit to Brooklyn), it's a shame she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it too. Same goes for Baldwin.