Dir. Gregor Jordan, US/Germany, 2009, 98 mins
Cast:
Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Jon Foster
Review by Carol Allen
This is adapted by Bret Easton Ellis from his interlinked short stories of the same title, which like the film are set in Los Angeles in the early eighties. While lacking the maturity of Altman's Short Cuts, which brilliantly meshed the characters in Raymond Carver's short stories or the satirical and stylish brilliance of Mary Harron's film of Ellis's American Psycho, Jordan's movie is good looking and holds the attention in the way it effectively captures the feverish, sad and empty nature of the society it's depicting.
Being a multi strand movie, the characters take a bit of initial sorting out. It opens with a trademark eighties wild sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll party packed with young, beautiful and mainly blonde people, including Graham (Foster), Martin (Austin Nichols) and Christie (Amber Heard), the girl, whose sexual favours they are sharing. Also in the story are Graham's estranged parents - his unhappy pill popping mother Laura (Basinger), film producer father (Thornton) and Cheryl (Winona Ryder), the television newsreader for whom he's left his wife. Another member of the young set with parent problems is Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci), who spends most of the film on holiday in Hawaii with his divorced drunk of a father Les (Chris Isaak), whose moral example to the young is as dodgy as that of the rest of the adults. Also on this particular LA scene are visiting British rock star Bryan Metro (Mel Raido), up to his eyeballs in drugs and with an unfortunate taste for underage sexual partners and his manager Roger (Rhys Ifans), while by way of contrast and way outside the world of the spoilt "beautiful people" is hotel concierge Jack (the late Brad Renfro in his last performance), who's being unwillingly drawn by his white trash Uncle Peter (Rourke) into a child kidnapping plot.
Set against the politics of the Reagan era and the growing threat of AIDS, the film has something of the decadent atmosphere of the Roman Empire in decline. It's well acted throughout with Foster, Ryder, Basinger and Thornton shining in particular and elegantly shot as befits the largely luxurious settings. There's not a lot of humour, but it does at times and perhaps not often enough display a sense of the ridiculousness of its characters and their world, as in a sequence where a Hollywood producer is pitching a film idea to Bryan and Roger involving aliens, a rock star, a car chase and a giant tomato. A moral centre to the film eventually emerges in the person of Graham, who realises that what's missing from his young life is a sense of what is good and what is bad and somebody to tell him and the film ends with a sense of regret and incipient tragedy.
|
