THREESOME
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, Josh Charles. Screenplay/Director: Andrew Fleming. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I think "The Wonder Years" may be to blame. There was a time when I didn't take particular notice of voiceover narration one way or the other; it was just another part of a movie. Now I'm not sure whether it is the content of the narration or my perception that has changed, but it seems lately that hearing narration at the beggining of a film is enough to make me suspicious. There comes with some narration a pretentiousness that can weigh down a simple story or pummel an audience over the head with a moral. THREESOME has all the elements to be a successful lighthearted character romp, but many of its strengths are obscured by the moments it takes itself far too seriously.
THREESOME opens in the mid-term at an unnamed university, where two new transfers prepare to join a returning student in a three-person dormitory suite. The returning student is Stuart (Stephen Baldwin), a boorish womanizer; his new roommates are Eddy (Josh Charles) and Alex. Much to everyone's surprise, Alex (Lara Flynn Boyle) turns out to be a woman, assigned to the room through a bureaucratic blunder. Tensions are high at first, but eventually the three become close friends. Naturally, romantic attractions begin to get in the way. Stuart is attracted to the fiery Alex. Alex is attracted to the sensitive Eddy. And Eddy, who is just discovering his sexual identity, is attracted to Stuart.
THREESOME is set up almost as a three-character stage play wherein other characters exist only to make observations on the behavior of the three principal characters, and those characters are established with widely varying degrees of success. Stuart is probably the most interesting and fully-rounded character, one who bears many of the marks of a stereotypical college jerk but responds to his roommate's sexual orientation with minimal sturm und drang. Stephen Baldwin is surprisingly charming in the role, spewing forth sexual single-entendre with an infectious enthusiasm. Josh Charles is appropriately tense as the confused Eddy, one of those over-thinkers many of us knew (or were) in college. Still, there comes a point where his heaviness is a bit much for an audience to take. Lara Flynn Boyle, who has gone from looking too old for her part as a high school student on "Twin Peaks" to looking too old for her part as a college student here, does some interesting things with a character who never really finds a center. Alex is part sex kitten, part basket case, and several other parts of several other characters, and it's difficult for anyone to strike the right tone with such a character.
What did work strike a chord with me was the interaction between the three characters, which was extremely reminiscent of relationships I knew. College was filled with people who bantered and sparred, trying desperately to ignore sexual tension, and while the specifics of the relationship between the three characters in THREESOME are somewhat unique, that dynamic is not. The dialogue, while tending toward the unrealistic, is still frequently funny, and I found myself basically engaged in the lives of these three people as long as they weren't navel-gazing about how hard it all was.
And it is on the level of its self-consciousness that THREESOME falls somewhat flat. What could have been a lively and fairly entertaining look at a slightly different kind of romantic triangle instead becomes a film that tries far too hard to be *about* something. The narration, which comes retrospectively from Eddy, is filled with descriptions that could just as easily have been provided visually, and with pseudo-profound pronouncements about that wrong turn that becomes the best part of a trip. There are a couple of three-way love scenes which are handled deftly, but much of Andrew Fleming's direction is leaden. It appears as though he wasn't quite clear that he had a decent little comedy on his hands; it wasn't really necessary to try to turn it into an earth-shaking drama.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 romantic permutations: 6.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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