BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY A film review by Kevin Romano Copyright 1988 Kevin Romano
Having heard that BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY had major flaws encouraged me to let it slide. I do that with too many films -- being loathe to support fluff masquerading as substance. However, my daughter wanted to see it so I went with her and my wife to one of the $2 houses over the weekend.
It is a paean to the present anti-cocaine hysteria. The main character, Jamie Conway, portrayed by Michael J. Fox, is a young fact checker and would-be fiction writer at a staid magazine. However, he spends most of his waking hours snorting coke and debauching himself. He is abetted in these pursuits by Keifer Sutherland, who plays Tad Allagash, his coke-sniffing side-kick. They live and work in Manhattan, but mostly they just snort coke.
It turns out that the movie gets into Fox's relationships with women and this starts to lift it out of its "coke kills" message. His wife has left him and gone on a modeling assignment to Paris. She tells him she will not be back soon. He is not sure what that means. His cocaine activities get him peripherally involved with female moral degenerates, but also with two women rescuers -- an older co-worker who feeds and comforts him after he loses his job through his coke compulsion, and the young college co-ed cousin of his side-kick. She is the wholesome, morally-upright counterpart to his wife, who seems to have done nothing but use him to launch her career. Another important relationship, and one which is exposed through flashbacks, is one with his mother who has died from cancer a year previously.
These nascent relationships would seem to give the moviemakers a wealth of material upon which to draw, but, unfortunately, this movie is so concerned with the cocaine message that resolving the problems with the relationships or even developing them well enough so that we can fully understand them is crudely sacrificed. These intriguing relationships are immolated to a simplistic and Hollywoodesque public service message that drug abuse is no good.
On the other hand, one of the few reasons for the present-day drug epidemic is given by one of Fox's alcoholic co-workers played wonderfully by Jason Robards. At a liquid lunch he says something to the effect that Fox should get an MBA and write about money, instead of trying to write fiction. "Money -- greed is the latter-day poetry," he says. However didactic this may seem, in context, it works.
The major flaw with the premise for this movie is that you can't just bring up relationships, get the audience interested in them, and then leave them all unresolved, even if that is part of the "message." These relationships proved more interesting for me than the perforated septum Fox's character gets near the end. I wanted to know more about them than about his obsessive and disgusting habit.
But, with all its faults, BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY is worth seeing. Fox shows that he really may have some genuine acting ability and the character actors that populate the recesses of the movie are simply wonderful. Although the direction leaves lots of room for improvement and the the James Bridges revamp of Jay McInerney's script has its share of faults, all in all, it's worth seeing, especially at the $2 houses where it is presently making the rounds. If it weren't trying to go in two directions at the same time, I think this movie could have hit big.
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