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Robin Williams is in his edgily desperate mode as a Queens car salesman whose life is in turmoil. He's fooling around with someone else's wife, his marriage is on the rocks, and he has to sell 12 cars in 12 days or he will lose his job. He's so desperate that he even tries to pitch a sale to a widow at a funeral. As if he didn't have enough problems, the crazed husband (Tim Robbins) of one of his coworkers bursts into the car show room with an automatic weapon and takes everyone hostage. His wife has been cheating on him (not with Williams) and he's ready to go postal unless he finds out who's been sleeping with her. It's up to Williams to try to keep everyone from getting killed. But as hard as Williams and Robbins work, they can't make this film more than sporadically funny--and that's only because Williams is at his most spritzingly frenetic.
--Marshall Fine
This shaggy comedy about a Queens auto salesman is full of small, accidental-seeming pleasures-the joys of resourcefulness. It's a movie of bits and pieces, a patchwork of motions and wayward inspirations, and it probably shouldn't work at all. But it's more than funny enough to wear down our resistance. The screenwriter, Ken Friedman, has peopled his story with more than a dozen vivid characters, and the director, Roger Donaldson, has given the actors plenty of room; everyone in this movie makes an impression. As the salesman, Joey O'Brien, Robin Williams is brilliant throughout, and he's surrounded by strong actors in sharply written roles-each one gives him something different to react to. Joey, whose passions are sex and selling, has an ex-wife, a teen-age daughter, and two girlfriends; he owes twenty thousand dollars to a mobster; and he's in danger of losing his job. Fran Drescher is hilarious as one of the girlfriends, Joy: she combines sexy wheedling and flat-out nagging in a completely original way. And Pamela Reed, as Joey's ex-wife, is splendid. Funniest of all is Tim Robbins, who plays Larry, the jealous husband of the dealership's receptionist (Annabella Sciorra); halfway through the picture, he drives his motorcycle through the showroom's plate-glass window and takes everyone hostage. Robbins' acting is explosive-totally unpredictable; watching the way he moves and listening to how he reads his lines, we keep asking ourselves, "Where did that come from?" Wherever this performance comes from, it's sensational. Also with Lori Petty, Paul Guilfoyle, Zack Norman, Lauren Tom, and Elaine Stritch. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
