TWO GIRLS AND A GUY (Fox Searchlight) Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham, Natasha Gregson Wagner. Screenplay: James Toback. Producers: Edward R. Pressman and Chris Hanley. Director: James Toback. MPAA Rating: R (sexual situations, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There's an inherent problem with the concept of group therapy as drama, one which is pounded home by James Toback's three-character set piece TWO GIRLS AND A GUY. It opens with two women -- Carla (Heather Graham) and Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner) -- discovering while waiting outside a New York loft that they're waiting for the same boyfriend, a wannabe actor named Blake Allen (Robert Downey Jr.). Outraged at his duplicity, Carla and Lou both sneak into Blake's loft so that they can confront him. What follows is an extended exchange of profanities, accusations and excuses, with Blake gradually stripped of his comfortable protective coating of lies.
It should have been a bracing, enthralling experience watching Blake's deceptions -- and his very self-created identify -- crumble piece by piece. Toback, unfortunately, doesn't let the audience in on the process of figuring this guy out. Instead, every possible bit of sub-text is turned into blunt, frequently awkward text. When Lou hears "You Don't Know Me" playing on Blake's stereo, she notes that "it's no wonder that's his favorite song;" when Blake makes repeated calls to his never-seen and supposedly ill mother, the Oedipal theme spills into a soliloquy from "Hamlet" with a jab by Carla at Blake's obsession with Mom. Dialogue becomes a steady stream of diagnosis, a "you need everyone to love you" bouncing off of an "I think you want to believe that." There's even a poster of seminal menage-a-trois film JULES ET JIM on Blake's wall to offer Insight by Conspicuous Set Decoration. Everyone and everything on screen screams at Blake exactly what his problem is, giving us barely a moment to consider what _we_ think Blake's problem is.
That's a near-criminal waste of the complexity and intensity Downey pours into his performance. There are clear parallels between this character -- a charming, self-deluding actor -- and Downey's own much-publicized inner demons, parallels of which Toback was clearly aware when he wrote the script with Downey in mind. The film's two most riveting scenes find Blake alone with those demons. In the first, he adopts a cheesy swagger as he rehearses for an upcoming gig in the Catskills; later, he disintegrates in disgust as he confronts himself in the mirror. As effective as Downey is at Blake's rapid-fire rationalizations and table-turning, he's staggeringly good when he is alone: naked and isolated, using his reflection for an audience because he always has to be performing for somebody.
Sadly, this isn't a one-man show. Graham is solid as the more sensible Carla, delighting in making Blake squirm or working him into a lather in the film's controversial extended sexual encounter. Wagner improves as the film progresses, but her opening lines are delivered with such plastic spunkiness that it's hard to avoid loathing her on sight. Both actresses, however, are victims of a script which never lets them become characters in their own right. They're along to toss around psycho-analysis, to back Blake into a literal and emotional corner and force him to grasp reality. It's baffling that after so much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Toback's resolution seems to be that Blake isn't really such a bad guy -- that he's not all that different from anybody else, that relationships are all about deception anyway so let's give poor Blake a break. I'd conclude that Blake's story is much more interesting if he is an entirely unique sort of sexual animal, but Toback was generous enough to draw my conclusions for me. Given Downey's troubled history, it's sad to see Blake given such a simplistic Freudian out for his behavior. Apparently, Mommy didn't love him enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 loft stories: 5.
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