Hurlyburly

Director Anthony Drazan successfully brings the sexist, self-destructive camaraderie of 'Hurlyburly' to the screen.

By Jonathan Lethem

Dec 23, 1998 | "Hurlyburly," adapted by director Anthony Drazan and writer David Rabe from Rabe's award-winning play, is less a tale than an X-ray of four self-destructive and misogynistic Hollywood wise guys. The film is a discomforting dose of fast-lane meltdown and macho angst, one that justifies comparisons to the best of David Mamet. Not since "Glengarry Glen Ross" has such a vibrantly and uncompromisingly talky play been so successfully translated to film. The result is a showcase for a remarkable ensemble of actors.

At the center of "Hurlyburly" is the friendship between two middle-echelon Hollywood operatives earning enough money to achieve a hellishly vacuous kind of personal freedom. Sean Penn plays Eddie, whose downward spiral through cocaine and various forms of betrayal is only an outward symptom of his ludicrously inarticulate ontological breakdown. "Everything distracts me from everything else," he muses, then works to refine the point: "But what I've really noticed is that mainly, the thing I'm most distracted by is myself. I mean, I'm my own major distraction." His partner and roommate is the stingingly cynical Mickey, brought to life with razor-sharp precision by Kevin Spacey. Mickey's cool, manipulative demeanor is a disastrous match for Eddie's existential passion. He's less Eddie's sounding board than his fun house mirror. Spacey's Mickey is the type who lectures on the difference between "sarcasm" and merely "being flip" before concluding, with a perfect note of weary self-admiration: "I can do both." When Penn nearly claws the carpet demanding to know "What kind of a friendship is this?" Spacey pauses cruelly before replying: "Adequate."

Rounding out the central quartet is Chazz Palminteri's Phil, an ex-con character actor who's on the inside track in the race to self-destruction, and Garry Shandling's Artie, a successful producer who tucks his insecurities behind a glibly superior front. What plot emerges out of the bitching and moaning of these brutes involves the unfortunate women who are passed between them like tokens -- and the fact that Phil's violent outbursts have begun to wear on the others. Both plot lines converge in a disastrous night of (relative) truth-telling that leaves the group shattered.

Drazan and Rabe solve the traditional problem of "opening out" the interior scenes of a play in exhilarating fashion: Penn and Spacey conduct their first long argument over cell phones in a chaotic montage of screeching highway car scenes and interrupted power meetings. The whole of Los Angeles has been reduced to a psychic landscape for the self-obsessed characters, in a sequence that's defiantly writerly and cinematic at once. Less successful is Drazan's mannered camera, which jiggles restlessly in a redundant underlining of the film's themes. Celebrated Chinese cinematographer Changwei Gu ("Farewell My Concubine") helped Drazan develop a special camera rig involving bungee cords, but the result is only reminiscent of a television cop show.