JUST LOOKING
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Jason Alexander Writer: Marshall Karp Cast: Ryan Merriman, Joey Franquinha, Peter Onorati, Gretchen Mol, Amy Braverman, Ilana Levine, Rich Licata, Patti LuPone, John Bolger, Robert Weil, Alex Sobol
What does a 14-year-old think of every other minute of his day? School? Ha. Sports? Yes, every alternate minute. You guessed it. Sex. One of the great ironies of our civilization is that the subject most important to adolescents is ignored or repressed by their parents, or at least this was true during the boring ol' 1950s before the old music died to be replaced by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and later by the more hardened forms of rock music. Jean Doumanian, who had produced small, amusing movies in the recent past such as "Small Time Crooks" and "Sweet and Lowdown" carries on her interest in the modest things of life by hooking by with a semi-autobiographical tale by Marshall Karp ("Everything's Relative") who teams up with Jason Alexander as the director of "Just Looking."
This is a diminutive movie that could have barely fit on an old 19 inch TV tube or on an off-Broadway stage but despite its attributes appears lost on the big screen. Nor can too many adolescents in this everything-goes age relate to the story unless they consider it camp and get some chuckles out of the way that a Pleasantville community in Queens, New York goes about its love and work.
Lenny (Ryan Merriman) is at the yarn's center, an appealing young Jewish kid with the buzz cut common to the decade who despises his butcher stepfather Polinsky (Richard V. Licata) so much that he becomes a vegetarian at the nightly dinner table. Nor does he go for the edict of his newly-married mom, Sylvia (Patti LuPone) to send him from his tenement-style apartment house in the Bronx to the "country" borough of Queens during his fourteenth summer to live with his aunt Norma (Ilana Levine) and her Italian- American husband Phil (Peter Onorati). Making friends with John (Joseph Franquinha), he immediately joins John's sex club, which is dominated by the prescient teen Alice (Amy Braverman) and her shy but curious friend Barbara (Allie Spiro-Winn). Since the girls are Catholic, they insist that they do not "do it" but boy, do they love to talk about sex. When Lenny meets the fetching 20-something Hedy (Gretchen Mol), he falls for her and devotes the season to trying to discover her "doing it" with her doctor boy friend, Flynn (John Bolger).
The best aspect of the film is its fifties ambience, one which in Jason Alexander's vision is just like the stereotyped view of the era mined by "Pleasantville." While performing sex is just a dream for the teen boys, some of the more liberated adults such as the lovely Hedy indulge freely (though in my own view as one who came of age during this period, one didn't go all the way until marriage). Ryan Merriman is the sort of kid that any parent would enjoy: cute, curious, appealing in every way, willing to work hard, socialize freely, and absorb the lessons taught to him by his parents, his relatives, his friends and his love interest. In short, "Just Looking" bears looking at if you keep your expectations narrow and do not expect the screen to be splashed by the likes of Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
Rated R. Running time: 97 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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