by Susan Ellis
wo Girls and a Guy makes me laugh. It isn’t a comedy, though it
does have its moments (chief among them being when Robert Downey
Jr.’s philandering character gets confronted by one of his girlfriends
with, “You’re a lying, mugging, misogynistic, unemployable, short,
loft-inheriting, piece-of-shit fraud,” to which he replies, “So,
I’m short now?”). What’s so funny is writer/director James Toback’s
comment that he hired the then-jailed Downey because he felt that
the actor needed the job. Within the past six months, Downey’s
been in U.S. Marshals, The Gingerbread Man, and One Night Stand.
Even with all of his troubles, Downey has not been hurting for
work. What’s more, as is made obvious in the movie, Toback needed
Downey, rather than the other way around.
The premise behind Two Girls and a Guy has Downey as a New York-based
actor named Blake, who, upon his return from an unsuccessful audition
in L.A., discovers that both of his serious girlfriends have found
out about the other. This plotline has had a lot of mileage over
the years in sitcoms. Usually, it involves one night, one guy,
two dates, a costume party, and a swinging kitchen door. The film
is a bit more staid and less fanciful, though Blake does come
onto the scene singing opera.
Natasha Gregson Wagner, Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham.
In the moments before, Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and Carla (Heather Graham) stood at the stoop of Blake’s apartment building waiting to surprise him on his return. A brief exchange leads them to realize that they’ve been sharing Blake for the past 10 months. And after they break into his loft, they further find that they’ve been sharing a lot more – his endearments, his neurosis over his sick mother, his vows, word for word, of love. Just as they’re enumerating all the ways Blake is a jerk and thrown out some consideration about physical harm, their boyfriend enters the apartment and they hide. Secreted away, they hear Blake first call his mother, then Carla, then Lou, and then his agent, who offers him a job in the Catskills.
When she can’t stand it anymore, Carla reveals herself and peppers Blake with a series of leading questions. Blake, more concerned about how she got into his loft, explains that any attempt at intimacy with another is so repulsive that he would vomit. This latest indignity causes Lou to burst forth, and the cuckolded pair get down to business.
For a film, Two Girls and a Guy is rather stripped-down; it feels more like a three-act play. In the first act, sensitive, collected blonde beauty Carla meets the cute, spunky riot grrl. Their first exchanges are awkward and not natural at all, like they’re taking turns with their lines, rather than actually talking to each other. Here, the actors are actually upstaged by the set, a fabulous loft, with shiny wood floors and spare, mismatched furniture. In the second act, though, when Blake arrives, there’s a target the women can aim at, and they loosen up as if Downey possesses an infectious professionalism.
It’s in this second part that Toback throws out the puzzle of why this particular character, and why people in general, cheat. All Blake can muster up – after he’s told the women that he resents the assault – is that he’s an actor, so they should expect him to lie. But the women won’t leave it alone. They stay, they pick at him, they drink, they wander around – they won’t leave. Haven’t they ever watched Oprah? They don’t have to take this.
In the third and final act, Blake gets his comeuppance. As for why this character is such a rat, sometimes it boils down to human nature.
Director John Sayles is one of film’s foremost storytellers. He’s taken on subjects as diverse as a 1920 miners’ strike (Matewan, 1986) and a little girl’s discovery of magic (The Secret of Roan Inish, 1994). In 1996, after years of plugging away and gathering critical appreciation and one Academy Award nomination for 1992’s Passion Fish, Sayles earned widespread attention and another Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for Lone Star, a tale of small-town corruption and racial prejudice.
His latest film, Men With Guns, also deals with corruption and prejudice. Set in an unnamed Latin American country and using subtitles, Men With Guns follows a wealthy doctor’s search for meaning. After his wife’s death, Dr. Fuentes (Federico Luppi) decides to use his vacation time to visit the students he trained to work with the Indians who live in remote villages. At each stop, he finds no doctor and villagers unwilling to speak to him. But those who do open up tell him a variation of the same thing: the doctor he’s sent to them has been murdered and the villagers terrorized either by guerrillas upset with their dealings with the army or by the army upset by its dealings with the guerrillas.
Along the way, Dr. Fuentes picks up a runaway soldier, an orphaned boy, and a onetime priest. As the bad news mounts, the doctor continues to go deeper into the jungles and farther up a mountain to find the students he calls his “legacy.”
As in his other films, Sayles demands that you stay with him, endure the cruel cycle in which the doctor’s embroiled, then fully appreciate the dramatic impact. This is tough going at times, as the doctor makes his way through the salt people, the sugar people, the coffee people, all to the same dismal, hopeless conclusion. That’s the point. Men With Guns is not meant to be an easy film.
In True Lies, the physical impossibilities of Jamie Lee Curtis hanging onto a jet while in midair are not discussed. Nor is there any elaboration as to how Leonardo DiCaprio can emerge with not so much as a zit when his facial bonds are removed after years in The Man in the Iron Mask.
The Big Hit, however, has some explaining to do. Toward the end of this hit-man comedy starring Mark Wahlberg, two “disaster reenactments” are offered up to show how one bad guy could survive a brutal car crash and how the hero could make it out of a bombed building. This hardly ever happens in movies; the audience is made to simply get over it. Yet, for some reason, The Big Hit feels the need to show the whys and hows, as if the audience will probably be so lame that they can’t even be counted on to suspend belief.
Yet The Big Hit does leave something to the imagination. I, for one, never dreamed I would find this movie even slightly entertaining. And as much as I hate to admit it, I did, because The Big Hit is truly the tackiest movie I’ve seen in ages.
Wahlberg plays Melvin Smiley, a contract killer who has a problem saying no. As the first body-flying shooting spree goes down, Melvin does all the capping himself, but then forgoes his dead-guy bonus when his coworker Cisco (Lou Diamond Phillips) claims he was the trigger man. In his personal life, he’s being walked over as well. He’s got a fiancée (Christina Applegate), who’s just loaned all of their savings to her gambling- and plastic-surgery-addicted mother, plus another girlfriend (Lela Rochon), who demands he pay the bills on her big house and expensive car and then pockets the cash. Melvin’s explanation? He wants everybody to like him.
Melvin’s desire to be liked, along with his high-cost lifestyle, leads him to accept a freelance assignment masterminded by Cisco. The plan is to kidnap the daughter of a rich businessman in order to collect a big pile of ransom money. Trouble is, the businessman is broke and, furthermore, he’s good friends with Melvin and Cisco’s boss. Also complicating matters, Melvin’s fiancée has invited her parents to stay with them so that Melvin has to shuffle them around so they don’t discover the kidnap victim.
The Big Hit plays out like the bastard spawn of Pulp Fiction and Grosse Point Blank and Dumb & Dumber. It combines the workaday life of a hit man like the former two with the potty humor of the latter. First of all, the businessman has gone broke producing a movie called Taste the Golden Spray. Secondly, there is a running joke about one of Melvin’s coworkers who’s recently and happily discovered masturbation. Creepiest of all, however, is the relationship between Melvin and the plaid-skirt-clad Catholic schoolgirl he’s kidnapped. Not all of the humor goes that way, and some of it is fairly amusing. For instance, the girl is made to read a typo-filled ransom letter, and there’s another running joke involving a video clerk who keeps calling Melvin and threatening to kill him over an overdue tape.
Consider The Big Hit a guilty pleasure. n