2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1996 Dave Cowen
The fact that this film's own promotional materials and private reviews provide almost constant comparisons to PULP FICTION didn't keep me away from 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is pretty sad: a comparison with PULP FICTION is nearly as much a kiss of death these days as knowing that a film was not shown to critics for review. Perhaps MGM was trying to recreate the promotion of GET SHORTY, a tepid film that through the constant comparison of Elmore Leonard's dialogue with Tarantino, along with the presence of the ubiquitous John Travolta, made the film a commercial success. The only link that 2 DAYS has with Pulp Fiction is that there are small-time gangsters, and occasionally those gangsters do funny things. To that end, I offer my own comparison: "It's like PULP FICTION with PRATFALLS!"
James Spader plays hit man Lee Woods, a man obsessed with a single unit of time, and who, with the help of Swedish sex bomb Helga Svelgen (Charlize Theron) and small-time thug Dosmo Pizzo (Danny Aiello) murder the ex-husband of Becky Foxx (Teri Hatcher). Soon after, an unsuccessful writer/director (Paul Mazursky), a snobbish art-dealer (Greg Cruttwell), and a homicide-department wannabe (Eric Stoltz) fall into the mix.
What grounds 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is the mistaken sense of sentimentality it presents: director/writer John Herzfield tries to evoke as much sympathy for these characters in as broad a manner as possible -- Mazursky's suicidal writer can't bring himself to kill himself because of the stares of his lovable dog, Aiello's small-time thug also happens to be a great cook, Stoltz's character doesn't want to bust a massage parlor because of his affection for one of the massage-girls. Too many scenes play as being ridiculously maudlin: the characters are those good-hearted sensitive types who get things wrong at first but redeem themselves at the end. You know the kind of character I'm talking about -- and if you're like me, you've never met one in real life.
Not only has this film been compared with PULP FICTION, but also Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS. While Short Cuts offers an entirely unsentimental look at the same community -- offering a glimpse into the lives of real people and the way they are interconnected and then cutting off from them without resolution -- 2 DAYS is compelled like a bad TV movie to wrap everything up neatly in the last few frames. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, everyone gets over their neuroses by carrying around guns and dropping their hairpieces for two days.
The film isn't entirely irredeemable, however: Greg Cruttwell's performance is lifted directly from his performance as the overpowering, abusive Jeremy in Mike Leigh's Naked, and his over-the-top histrionics are a lot of fun throughout the first half of the film. Ultimately, though, the schtick is played for too long and his character is dumped violently from the script by the end of the movie. Also suddenly dumped, puzzlingly, is the partner to Eric Stoltz's character... who leaves the story in a strangely unsympathetic way.
Throughout the film, the Mazursky character talks about his film "Lights Out", which was supposed to be a drama, but then suddenly introduced an elephant into the mix for comedy. The pratfalls in this film seem equally overwheming: the comedy doesn't blend with the rest of the film. Amazingly, the comedy is not the kind of smirking Gen-X pop-culture humor we see so much of these days... it's actually worse! It's bonafide physical humor lifted from a million bad films from the 50's, with double-takes, mistaken identities, crazy animals, and every other old trick in the book. Some of it works: Danny Aiello goes "UHHHH!" and almost shoots a sculpture of a dog with the face of Greg Cruttwell's character when entering a room. Most of the rest of the comedy is, amazingly enough, much more broad and little of it works at all. Did I mention Danny Aiello's hairpiece keeps falling off?
It's not PULP FICTION, and it's not SHORT CUTS -- and it's nowhere near the calibre of those two films. It's really pretty bad. I wanted to give up long before these 2 DAYS were over.
Dave Cowen (davec@execpc.com)
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