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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sirens of success, ghosts of failure, December 12, 2002
I didn't go to this movie expecting that much, but I got a very nice surprise. George Hickenlooper's movie has some marvellously deft touchs which are only occasionally marred by heavy-handed directing.This movie is about sex and creativity and commerce. It's also about dealing with failure and while younger people may not feel like this is a particularly useful thing to comtemplate, most of us on the other side of J. Lo will recognize something of Byron Tiller, here played extremely well by Andy Garcia, in our own pasts (and one hopes, inshallah not our presents). Byron is a writer whose initial critical success is met with stunning commercial failure. There follows a long slow spiral into a creative desert where, shut out by the business-people who actually run the show, Byron is tempted (like St. Anthony in the Hieronymous Bosch painting) by a saturnine and suitably time-worn procureur, Luther Fox (played to a T by Mick Jagger). Fox offers Byron a way to make some money, and more importantly get closer to the creative action by providing intimate services to Andrea (Olivia Williams), the wife of a famous and eminently well-published novelist Tobias Alcott (James Coburn). Left to pick up after the emotional trainwreck is Byron's wife (Julianne Margulies) and Byron himself. The most effective parts of the movie are those which deal with the destructiveness of pride (or its second cousin, desire for success), the seductiveness of art and the way in which many many of us labor under the fear that we are not nearly as good as others think we are and that failure is just around the corner. Certainly this movie is a riff on Faust but one where willfull blindness plays an overwhelming role. And here one is confronted with what seems initially to be the biggest logical holes in the script: How can Jagger's louchly polished Fox still have illusions of emotional intimacy with his long-time trick, Jennifer (easily and finely played by Anjelica Huston)? How can an experienced writer like Byron NOT insist on a contract with Alcott when the two (in one of the movie's more predictable but nicely performed turns) decide to co-author Alcott's final novel? Still, the fact that in real life, otherwise intelligent people get conned all the time suggests that reality is much closer to the world that Hickenlooper brings to life so deftly than most of us would like to think. In fact, con men (like advertisers) know that the way to pull off a con is to promise the mark something that he or she already desires (the illusion of being inside the loop, the illusion of illicit gain, the illusion of imminent success) and Hickenlooper -and Olivia Williams' deliciously Macchiavellian Andrea know this too. We're left to wonder at the self-deludedness of both Fox and Byron both of whose faces crumble heart-breakingly as they realize the scams that they have led themselves into. I'm reminded here of the work of a couple of colleagues of mine who have worked with female sex workers and their male clients. What my colleagues report is that the men almost invariably cast their relationships with the prostitutes in other than economic terms, -for the men, it's about lust or virility or even companionship, or emotional attachment- while the women have no such illusions. Some of the best dramatic work in this movie comes from the interactions (always short, interestingly) between Garcia and Margulies and between Garcia and Jagger. The cameos with Huston and Jagger were gems also but lacked (as indeed they perhaps should have done) the intensity of the other interactions. Jagger in particular deserves a great deal of praise for his performance here, it is a delight to watch, and his role as interlocuter via voice over is handled well too. One gets the feeling that this a very good British movie in some ways which is certainly a point in its favor. Indeed, this movie would have been one of the most thought-provoking movies of the year for me if the ideas behind the movie had not been overwhelmed in places by hysterica; action: Byron ransacking the escorts' dressing room was one of these (does the red-blooded American male have to attack the furniture in order to show frustration or rage?), as was the contrived chance encounter between Byron and his wife in the hotel. Nevertheless, we can forgive Hickenlooper's hinting at a hopeful ending to Byron's story, even as it recycles the strange Protestant idea that suffering will lead a person of genius to creativity and thus redemption. Movies that have the courage to even creep close to the abyss of fear and failure that we older folk know is out there, deserve a certain amount of forgiveness for their sins and appreciation of their good points -at least in my book.
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DVD ~ Andy Garcia
DVD ~ Andy Garcia
DVD ~ Andy Garcia
DVD ~ Andy Garcia
DVD ~ Fred Asparagus
