ABOUT ADAM
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Miramax Films Director: Gerard Stembridge Writer: Gerard Stembridge Cast: Stuart Townsend, Kate Hudson, Frances O'Connor, Charlotte Bradley, Rosaleen Linehan, Tommy Tiernan, Alan Maher, Brendan Dempsey, Cathleen Bradley, Roger Gregg
When I got home after the screening of the adorable Irish film "About Adam," the first person who asked about the story line was my 22-year-old doorman. When I told him that the movie was about a guy whose success with women was based on his intuitive calculation of what each one wanted from him (an ability that seems to have eluded Dr. Freud), he said, "What's the big deal? Doesn't every guy who wants to be liked adjust his personality according to the person he's with?" "Well, yeah," I agreed--but the title character of this movie, played by the appealing Stuart Townsend (who emerges as well as the scholar Dov in Ben Hopkins's sometimes surreal drama "Simon Magus"), does so with a vengeance...he psyches out each woman in seconds and from then on alters his manner the way a chameleon changes its skin and stays in character every minute he's with the object of his affections. No fights, no real arguments, no hostility.
Adam's opinion of women is not unlike that of Richard Gere's Dr. T., who considered each one of them a saint. Adam loves women. What looks like cynical manipulation in the way he connects with them according to their character is just his way of giving them something. Indeed, each of the three women from the same Dublin family--and even one of the young men in the story--changes after being liberated by by this lad whose mother must have named him Adam because she suspected that he would fulfill the statement in Genesis 3:12, "And Adam said: The Woman you put beside me, gave me fruit, and I ate." Adam does metaphorically take the fruitful offerings and indulges at least as much as he is indulged.
The distinguished online critic from Dublin, Harvey O'Brien, calls Gerard Stembridge's tale "notable for being among the first Irish films to lack interest in 'Irishness'," and by this I believe he means since Dublin is now a swinging cosmopolitan city, the action could really occur anywhere in the western world. The dialogue is understandable even to Americans (unlike another Irish romance that made the scene this year, Kieron Walsh's "When Brendan Met Trudy"). There is no trace of the poverty present in Alan Parker's "Angela's Ashes," and in fact the action centers on a middle-class family presided over by the free-spirited Peggy (Rosaleen Linehan) who brings up a trio of daughters who are so different from one another they appear to come from different countries. Adam gets to meet them when he embarks on his first date with the sprightly and assertive Lucy (Kate Hudson), whom he dazzles when he realizes that someone of her disposition prefers to lead and would probably go for a young man on the shy side. When he notes that Lucy's repressed, bookish sister Laura (Frances O'Connor)--who, by the way, is the one I'd have chosen were I to be introduced to the brood--he quotes poetry to her, which charms her particularly since he recites lines from a her favorite writer, one who is not a household word in Dublin. Running into their sophisticated married sib, Alice (Charlotte Bradley)--who is unhappily married to a boorish car salesman--he has no trouble engaging her attentions and affection and, most amusingly, even sexually turns on the family's arrow-straight brother, David (Alan Maher), who had approached Adam for advice on how to make it with his reluctant girl friend.
How did Adam acquire the vintage Jaguar in which he drives the women about? Who knows? Each date gets a different story depending on what he thinks each wants to hear. Adam seduces the three women, of course, but writer- director Stembridge wisely puts the whole string of episodes into an amoral framework, refusing to condemn Adam's prevarications. And why should we? True enough, he commits what, in a stretch, could be called an incestuous turn, but given the happiness he has given to the young people in the family, we're pleased to let him get away with his knavishness.
The story line becomes most impressive when Stembridge photographs Lucy's public marriage proposal to Adam three times, from the perspectives of diverse people who are sitting at a table with him in a hip Dublin night spot.
Tech credits are fine with the exception of a single scene photographed on the outskirts of Dublin, when the color of Bruno de Keyzer's lens strangely gives the spectacular view of the city a faded look and the hills become affected with black spots. The song that informs the soundtrack at the conclusion of the picture that begins, "God help the mister/ who comes between me and my sister," must have been used ironically, as Adam, unlike his biblical counterpart, seems in no way destined to be expelled from Eden.
Rated R. Running time: 100 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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