Drug rehabbed

David Rabe takes Hurlyburly from the stage to the screen

by Steve Vineberg

HURLYBURLY Directed by Anthony Drazan. Screenplay by David Rabe, based on his play. With Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Robin Wright Penn, Garry Shandling, Meg Ryan, and Anna Paquin. At Cinema 320.

Given a cast that includes Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Robin Wright Penn, Garry Shandling, Meg Ryan, and Anna Paquin, who wouldn't have high hopes for Hurlyburly? Maybe anyone who saw it on Broadway with William Hurt, Christopher Walken (or Ron Silver, who replaced him), Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver, Jerry Stiller, Judith Ivey, and Cynthia Nixon, since they couldn't make it work either. On stage it was nearly four hours long -- the movie is half that length -- and reportedly the author, David Rabe, was unhappy with director Mike Nichols's take on the material; he insisted that he'd intended it as a comedy of manners set among the Hollywood rich of the late '70s, while Nichols recast it as a cautionary tale of sexual and drug excess. So Rabe staged it himself in LA with Sean Penn in the Hurt role, a coke-addled producer whose apartment is the play's setting, and it was that production that inspired the movie, which has the playwright's blessing. Filmmaker Anthony Drazan does move away from Nichols's high moral stance, and theatergoers like myself who puzzled over the New York staging can finally see the justice in Rabe's claim for the play as an extremely dark high comedy. But winding the movie more tightly around the characters and dissolving the moralizing tone don't redeem the play or make it any easier to sit through. The fact is that Rabe's characters are so unappetizing that you couldn't care less about them if Hurlyburly were positioned at a great height looking down on them.

Rabe seems to want his audience to have an ambivalent attitude toward Eddie (Penn) and Mickey (Spacey), his roommate, and toward their friends, Artie (Shandling) and volatile Phil (Palminteri), who are equally free with substances and equally misogynistic. It's easiest to explain what goes wrong by using an analogy. In Barry Levinson's wonderful 1982 Diner, we're both drawn into the world of the overage adolescent protagonists and appalled by their attitudes -- at least, we're made to see how severe their limitations are as they get shoved into the adult world they've been hiding out from. But Rabe doesn't have the variety of tone or the generosity of spirit to give us a similar experience in Hurlyburly. Whatever his complaints about Mike Nichols, he himself is too much of a moralist at heart to make Eddie and his friends appealing; on some level he must find them despicable. And yet he refuses to comment on them, offering no real alternatives to the closed, privileged male world they represent. (That's the role Ellen Barkin's Beth plays in Diner.) There are no normative characters in Hurlyburly to mitigate the repugnant things these men say and do, so although you might not make the mistake of thinking he sides with them, the movie is so steeped in their macho attitudes that not only women are likely to find it a turn-off.

The female characters with whom the men interact include Darlene (Wright Penn), who sleeps with both Eddie and Mickey and doesn't show a strong preference for one or the other, and Bonnie (Ryan), who shows up wherever dope is plentiful, allows strange men to treat her however they please, and reportedly went down on a TV actor in a car while her daughter watched from the back seat. These women are excluded from Eddie's world in crucial ways but appear to lack any sort of point of view about it. Donna, the teen runaway Artie discovers, screws, and passes on to Eddie as a casual present, is naïve and baffled and already damaged, but she's the closest the movie comes to depicting an attitude counter to the prevailing (male) one. At least she has the capacity to be hurt by Phil (and to feel sympathy for Eddie), though Anna Paquin, who's quite touching in the role, may be supplying some of this normal emotional response reflexively. Rabe would probably say that he's being fair-minded in refusing to make the women superior to the men, but a viewer may feel morally at sea.

Rabe is enormously clever at crafting dialogue for actors, which is probably how he drew so many gifted ones to the project, but there isn't much for them to work with. (It doesn't help that Anthony Drazan is a lousy director.). On stage William Hurt was mesmerizing as Eddie, but I had no idea what the hell was going on inside him. Sean Penn's certainly holds the camera; when doesn't he? But he isn't much more illuminating than Hurt was, and he's more mannered than he's been in anything since The Falcon and the Snowman and At Close Range. As the eruptive Phil, whom Eddie idolizes for reasons the script never clarifies, Chazz Palminteri is really awful -- shrill, monotonous, fakey. The rest of the actors are competent; only Paquin and Kevin Spacey are more than that. And you can see Spacey is getting by on that glittering knife-edge irony of his, a style he can probably do standing on his head. The actors seem to be engaging each other more than they engage us, anyway; the movie, which is repetitive even at two hours, feels like an extended acting class, a series of improvisations on chic, druggy Hollywood. You may need to take a breather somewhere in the middle.