THE VELOCITY OF GARY (NOT HIS REAL NAME)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Next Millennium Entertainment Director: Dan Ireland Writer: James Still Cast: Vincent D'Onofrio, Salma Hayek, Thomas Jane, Chad Lindberg, Olivia d'Abo, Shawn Michael Howard, Khalil Kain, Danny Arroyo, Ethan Hawke, Tzi Ma.
There's more than one way to photograph the lower depths of an urban nightmare. Joel Schumacher chooses the most lurid path by portraying the area of male hustlers, porno merchants, and general sleazeballs of Los Angeles in "8mm." There is no redemption for any of his characters save, perhaps, the obsessed hero, Tom Welles, who ultimately gets over the sordid grip of that sphere of squalor. Snuff merchant Eddie Poole goes up in flames while Dino Velvet and Machine get their comeuppance in the end. In his new film "The Velocity of Gary (Not His Real Name)," Dan Ireland finds a poignant humanity residing in the shadier areas of New York, quarters for groups of transsexuals, porno movie houses, male hustlers and homeless people--the sorts that most middle-class and suburban humanity would look right through and never dream of getting involved with. If director Ireland's view appears Panglossian to us, his movie is filled with creative touches, merging past and present in a roundelay of sequences to familiarize us with some of these colorful personalities. James Still, who bases his screenplay on a true story, is nothing if not pro-family. For Still, redemption comes when isolated individuals break through their detachment from genuine human feelings and extend their reach. They find contentment and purpose and hope for the future in the embrace of home and hearth.
"The Velocity of Gary" centers on a triangular romance with all the joys and jealousies that such an arrangement can provide. At one point, the female third of the group, Mary Carmen (Salma Hayek), reveals some advice she once received from her mother: "Be dumb enough to fall in love and smart enough to know better." "At least I got the first part right," she murmurs, and the picture takes off from there. Valentino (Vincent D'Onofrio), the love of her life, is a bisexual currently starring in a pornographic movie in New York's Times Square district (actually filmed in downtown L.A.). Valentino is involved as well with a handsome male hustler, Gary (Thomas Jane), who has presumably been thrown out of his house by a disapproving family and has found an instant and powerful chemistry in Valentino's arms. While the male bonding understandably leads to friction between Gary and Mary Carmen, the two rivals for the porn star's affection must patch up their differences when Valentino becomes mortally ill with AIDS. Pooling their funds, they set up housekeeping and become for one another the only real family each has known.
While such a theme could easily copy the template for yet other soap, Ireland does not flirt for a minute with the conventional. Opening his film with a striking portrayal of Gary, who is washing up at a fire hydrant at about the time that a deaf transsexual, Kid Joey (Chad Lindberg) is beaten by punks, he explores both the humanity and the degradation of this largely invisible sub-caste of New York. Salma Hayek looks younger than ever as the volatile waitress who cannot hold even an undemanding job in a donut shop. She spends most of the film in perpetual motion, whether razzing a New Jersey visitor who wants only a glazed doughnut and coffee but gets more than he bargained for, or expressing her joie de vivre in a series of ebullient dances in a local bar or on the spur of the moment wherever she pleases. Vincent D'Onofrio, best known to moviegoers for his role in "Full Metal Jacket" (for which he gained 70 pounds), was even more impressive in the smaller "The Whole Wide World," about author Robert E. Howard---also directed by Dan Ireland. As with "The Whole Wide World," Ireland makes good use of dream-vs.-reality sequences, highlighting the talented D'Onofrio as yet another marginal character--one who convinces us that bisexuality really does exist as D'Onofrio exudes a magnetic relationship with both Hayek and the more passive and well-cast Thomas Jane.
Dan Ireland does not romanticize the lives he finds in New York's lower depths, and in fact the off-the-wall transsexuals played by Khalil Kain and Shawn Michael Howard are both hackneyed and repellent. We pretty much know what Ireland and scripter James Still stand for when Valentino's dog Roland (Bingo) strays from his happy home, becomes lost, bewildered, and frightened as he paces the city streets foraging for food, and recovers his animal joy when reunited with his loving owner. Though the film is not sentimental in the Hollywood manipulation of the term, that scene alone can evoke tears from a responsive audience.
Rated R. Running Time: 100 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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