HUGO POOL
By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Nomadic Pictures Director: Robert Downey Sr. Writer: Robert Downey Sr. & Laura Downey Cast: Alyssa Milano, Patrick Dempsey, Cathy Moriarty, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Downey Jr., Richard Lewis, Sean Penn
"Hugo Pool" is the work of the man who gave us one of the great irreverent movies of all time, "Putney Swope." This is in itself enough reason to run to see this latest contribution, which puts him at the helm after a six-year hiatus. But alas, if "Swope" might be considered today even more brazen given the more extreme demands of the political correctness movement, "Hugo" is a distressing disappointment. Now, Downey's heart is certainly in the right place with this absurdist comedy which treats one of the world's dread diseases with a touch of honey. Downey's wife Laura died at the age of thirty-six of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, which attacks and kills off nerves rendering one part of the body after another paralyzed and unusable. In the production notes, Downey is quoted as feeling that his wife, who lost her life so tragically at an early age, was responsible for making his own life so meaningful. Downey constructs "Hugo Pool" around that theme, setting up characters far more quirky than the Savannah denizens you've seen in Clint Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," using his central character to bring a dysfunctional family together and provide for a feel-good bonding of a zany community.
The trouble with the movie is not so much that it is off-the- wall silly but that the characters, who apparently are given considerable freedom to improvise, also seem to be holding themselves back as though fearful of treating the ALS affliction with frivolity. The characters are for the most part cartoonish enough, but if any trait burnishes through it is repulsiveness rather than mere oddity. With Malcolm McDowell in the role of a seedy and unsympathetic heroin addict, Richard Lewis as a bulgy-eyed brat, Robert Downey Jr. as an unimaginably giddy film director, even the good guys are unable to save the work from audience indifference.
A road movie in which one adventure follows another, "Hugo Pool" features the title character, played by Alysssa Milano, who runs a business filling pools with water and cleaning them. With a heavy schedule of natatoria to saturate and unpollute in a single day, she calls on several of the people in her life to help her. She will pay her mother Minerva (Cathy Moriarty) enough to allow her to settle accounts with her disgusting bookie so that she will not have to work off the debt in bed with him. She will permit Franz Mazur (Robert Downey Jr.) to work off the $12,000 he owes her by impressing him into her service. And she sends her dissolute dad, Henry (Malcolm McDowell) to the Colorado River to extract enough gallons of water to fill the pool of one of her clients--illegally, it seems, since California is experiencing a drought. The most sympathetic character of the lot is Floyd (Patrick Dempsey), the uncomplaining victim of ALS, who seems content to have his head scratched, his body uprighted in his wheelchair, and his need for liquid elimination assisted. Functioning as a kind of angel, the dying Floyd fashions the folks around him into better people, not he least by giving Minerva a hot tip on a long shot in a harness race and by allowing the cutesey Hugo Dugay to overcome her fear of sex.
The picture features a choice ensemble of actors who are starved by the lack of a nourishing script and whose improvised quips and sallies fall far short of hilarity. The best that can be said of the film is that it emphasizes a bold and colorful visual design, is professionally edited and has a good sound track particularly in offering a section of Richard Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman." Rated R. Running Time: 93 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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