ONE NIGHT STAND (New Line) Starring: Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski, Ming-Na Wen, Robert Downey Jr., Kyle MacLachlan. Screenplay: Mike Figgis. Producers: Mike Figgis, Annie Steward, Ben Myron. Director: Mike Figgis. MPAA Rating: R (sexual situations, nudity, profanity, drug use, adult themes) Running Time: 104 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The first half of Mike Figgis' ONE NIGHT STAND contains some of the most effective film-making moments to hit American screens this year, yet even at the outset it's obvious that Figgis isn't working at his sharpest. The film opens with protagonist Max Carlyle (Wesley Snipes) directly addressing the audience as he walks down a Manhattan street. He relates to us that he's a successful L.A.-based television commercial director, happily married with children and hoplessly straight, though some of his best friends are gay. In fact, the reason he's in New York is to mend fences with Charlie Reevis (Robert Downey Jr.), an estranged gay buddy Max just learned has AIDS. It's a lazy narrative device which allows Figgis five minutes of screen time to re-hash the press notes before allowing Max to finish with a portentous "We'll see what happens."
What happens, at least for nearly an hour, is a marvelously detailed portrait of an isolated infidelity and what it means to a man's life. In his New York hotel, Max meets a beautiful woman named Karen (Nastassja Kinski), then ends up spending the evening in her company after missing his flight back to California. One string quartet concert and a thwarted mugging later, Max and Karen are sharing a bed, and a sexual encounter staged with tremendous eloquence. The sequence lingers and builds, showing the participants taking tentative steps while fooling themselves that each subsequent step is as far as they will go.
The scenes between Max and Karen are tantalizing, but they're also risky, since Figgis is showing us an act of adultery without first providing much context to build sympathy for the characters. That doesn't happen until Max returns to Los Angeles, and we get a chance to see him with his wife Mimi (Ming-Na Wen). In one outrageous and hilarious scene, Figgis shows Mimi ordering Max through a fast and furious bout of lovemaking. The two sex scenes in ONE NIGHT STAND are probably the most disparate I've seen in a single film, and the most uniquely effective. Max's shallow, romanceless life unfolds gradually, allowing the significance of his one night stand to build in our minds even as it builds in his.
All is well in ONE NIGHT STAND until the words "One Year Later" appear on the screen, at which point the film begins to disintegrate like a bad marriage. In part, the casting of Snipes in the lead role is responsible. Snipes is a reliable performer, but he never seems entirely in touch with this character. To be fair, Figgis has written the part as the most guilt-wracked, angst-filled and introspective soul this side of Hamlet. Max spends much of the second half of ONE NIGHT STAND wandering about in a heavy-lidded daze, ever on the verge of bursting into a profound soliloquy. There are a couple of solid moments between Snipes and Downey (affecting and acerbic as the terminally ill Charlie), but at a certain point, 45 minutes in anticipation of a life-changing revelation feels like about 30 minutes too many.
The blame for that belongs entirely with Figgis, who can't hold the level of interest built by the film's first half. At turns he opts either to tell too much (in Snipes' opening monologue) or too little (in most of the second hour). It's a story which hints and teases, then offers a resolution which asks for a tremendous leap of faith as to the compatibility of certain characters. What begins as honest and probing turns sluggish, predictable and coy. ONE NIGHT STAND is at its most provocative when it finds a man beginning to question everything fundamental in his life. Sooner or later, for our sake if not for his own, he needs to stop questioning and actually do something. Snipes as the melancholy Dane isn't the stuff of which great drama is made.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 high infidelities: 5.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews