LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (Lions Gate) Starring: John Hurt, Jason Priestley, Fiona Loewi, Maury Chaykin. Screenplay: Richard Kwietniowski, based on the novel by Gilber Adair. Producer: Steve Clark-Hall. Director: Richard Kwietniowski. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 90 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In one scene from LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND, protagonist Giles De'Ath (John Hurt) articulates the film's theme fairly blatantly. A widowed British author who studiously avoids all things modern -- or, more precisely, all things _period_ -- De'Ath has recently had a completely inadvertent life-changing experience. Intending to see the latest E.M. Forster adaptation at the local cinema, he wanders instead into "Hotpants College II." Just as he is preparing to walk out of the teen sex romp in disgust, De'Ath spies one of the film's secondary characters, played by actor Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley). Immediately De'Ath becomes obsessed with the young star, collecting photos, reading fan magazine articles and even purchasing a VCR to watch other Bostock gems like "Tex Mex" and "Skid Marks." It is this infatuation which prompts De'Ath to remark to his agent about "the discovery of beauty where no one ever thought to look for it.
I'm sure that message was not meant specifically for film critics, but it's a shoe which may fit anyway. Much of the humor in the first half of LOVE AND DEATH -- and this is, it should be clear, a very sharp comedy -- comes from De'Ath's embarassment over the object of his interest. He locks his clippings away in a drawer out of sight of his housekeeper; he goes to see "Hotpants College II" a second time yet can't bring himself to utter the title to the box office attendant. The whole business seems even more shameful to a man of letters who should know better than to watch a film described in a critical summary as having "no redeeming qualities whatsoever." Ronnie Bostock, in the popular parlance, is a "guilty pleasure."
It's the whole idea of a "guilty pleasure" which LOVE AND DEATH takes to task. Though it doesn't take a literary scholar to realize that "Hotpants College II" isn't E. M. Forster, it isn't E. M. Forster who pulls De'Ath from his self-imposed exile from the world. When he launches into a tangent on film acting at a lecture, he may simply be swooning over Ronnie, but he is also attacking a subject with a passion. As perfectly geared towards satire as the phony films-within-a-film may be (complete with familiar grainy photography and credits like "A Huck Murphy Film"), you're forced to move past mocking giggles to acknowledging the genuinely intense response De'Ath feels.
The credit for that belongs largely to John Hurt, who gives a career performance. It's a role which must be perfectly pitched to be sympathetic, because De'Ath is, to be frank, a celebrity stalker. His eventual encounter with Ronnie, in which he builds the middling thespian into "a young Olivier," could have come off as the manipulative lies of a man trying to seduce the object of his obsession. Hurt makes De'Ath absolutely sincere, even if he is the only one who could possibly see greatness in Ronnie. In LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND, a man finds greatness in a place he never thought to look, in "Hotpants College II." There's a lesson in there for those who too quickly dismiss the passionate response of others towards an artistic work, especially when they don't share the passion. Such epiphanies are too rare to restrict to the places we're _supposed_ to find epiphanies.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 De'Ath wishes: 8.
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