Hurlyburly: Revisiting the 80s

HURLYBURLY

Directed by Anthony Drazen

Starring Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Meg

Ryan, Anna Paquin

Anthony Drazen's Hurlyburly is not another disillusioned vision of Hollywood, nor a freakshow of selfish misogynistic jerks, nor just an ensemble performance showcase. Hollywood's output is its own best indictment, and playwright David Rabe, who adapted his play for this screen version, intended more than just to show what hateful souls guys or these guys can be when being just one of themselves.

The most valuable aspect of the movie is the ontological crisis casting director Eddie (Sean Penn) undergoes. One could argue that you don't need a screen version of this play to figure this out, but really this movie can be seen as another attempt at a definitive stage version: Rabe strongly disagreed with Mike Nicholas' 1984 Broadway version, revised the play after directing it himself in 1988 and now finally takes another crack at it with this screen adaptation of beautiful downtown 1998. Many of Rabe's revisions heightened the themes of destiny and accident (e.g engineered or semi-engineered, whether Ryan's Bonnie or Anna Paquin's waif), which help point us toward the films philosophical crises and away from the emotional ravages. We don't have to excuse or condone the behavior of Eddie and the other rats to appreciate the central struggle Penn's character embodies.

So between this emphasis and the movie's other major sticking point--the challenge of genuinely articulating our existence--a key event becomes Eddie's reaction to a certain note left behind by a friends who, well went away for a long trip. The note is one sentence long and sounds like a poorly translated fortune cookie or other mocked epigram of your choice. Eddie reads it, rereads it, challenges fellow Hollywood exec Mickey (Kevin Spacey) with it, parses it, looks up the dictionary definitions for its component words, angrammizes it, does virtually everything but paper his walls with it and make a website for it. Penn looks most frighteningly and convincingly insane at this point, even compared to the histrionics of other scenes. The obsession the note holds for him reminds one of starving or parched cartoon characters for whom everything they lay eyes on turns into a rump roast or bottle to be uncorked.

The movie (and play) demonstrate throughout an irreverent playfulness with language as if it were an assumed meaningless jargon. Spacey's Mickey clarifies the distinction between "flip" and "sarcastic"; Chazz Palmenteri's actor-99.44 percent consisting of repressed fury--seeks some solace in the exact conceptual phrasing of "karma"; and then there's Eddie's kabbalistic Merriam-Webster romp. Some bits are even a little reminiscent of a Coen screenplay, the way the guys repeat and throw this or that phrase around like an exotic football.

Naturally, Eddie also gets agitated by the television, its sheer glut and ridiculous range of information from sitcoms to disasters to Ginsu knives. One shot isolates this inhuman condition of having a secondary reality at one's fingertips: Eddie's remote-control-enabled hand alone on the glowing background of the electronic hearth. How to distinguish anything in this white noise? Reduce everything to a series of zeroes and ones, of equivalences and otherwise? In perhaps the screens' best-ever depiction of date realism, Eddie pigheadedly refuses to allow the don't-mind answer of Darlene (Robin Wright Penn) to two dining options. He wants specifics, he wants the truth, a clear connection or relation, even where it isn't relevant or existent.

Only connecting and talking about experience dissolve into resorting to a pixellation of language and the mind, a crippling of human interaction worsened by the vacuum of decency in Eddie and his milieu--these perhaps can be the more trenchant and symptomatic takeaway for this stage-bound hit parade of misogynistic characters.