Permanent Midnight Review
by Bill Chambers (wchamber AT netcom DOT ca)September 28th, 1998
PERMANENT MIDNIGHT *1/2 (out of four)
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starring Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Hurley, Maria Bello, Janeane Garofalo
screenplay by David Veloz, based on the novel by Jerry Stahl
directed by David Veloz
PERMANENT MIDNIGHT is a pretty bad movie, though it took me a few days to conclude this. The film is more masturbatory than bleak, with its main character intent on confounding us with his stupidity. (He has a $6000 a week drug habit.) Ultimately, as adapted by Veloz, Jerry Stahl comes off as one of those playground braggarts who chainsmokes at the age of twelve; you are less mystified by his self-destructive nature than bored into a stupor yourself.
Ben Stiller plays Stahl, a young author who arrives in L.A. with ambition and a nasty drug habit. He eventually gets a gig for $5000/week writing for a sitcom called Mr. Chompers (a thinly veiled stand-in for "ALF": Chompers looks just like ALF except he’s blue), marries a producer (Hurley) so she can get a green card, and hooks up with a Spanish mother (Liz Torres), who shoots heroin with him in the afternoons. Insert proverbial downward spiral here. PERMANENT MIDNIGHT is structured mostly as a flashback, with recovering addict Bello meeting Stiller (at a fastfood restaurant, where Stiller works the drive-thru as part of rehab), taking him back to a hotel, and between bouts of serious screwing, listening to his life story. I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out why Stiller never seemed to find the frighteningly gorgeous Hurley attractive—worse, I’ve been trying to figure out why Hurley DID find Stiller attractive. As Stahl, Stiller displays none of the charm or wit one would expect (post-There’s Something About Mary) of either the actor or a comedy writer. What separates Stahl from the hundreds of other Hollywood punk-junkies, it seems, is that Stahl wrote a book about his idiocy. Watch Stahl shoot heroin next to a baby! Watch Stahl spoil numerous pitch meetings with smack-fueled babble! Stiller gives a technically flawless performance: the film could double as a documentary on how to be a junkie. But PERMANENT MIDNIGHT is mostly soulless. When the movie poses the question Will Stahl be saved? and then answers it in the form of Bello’s character (basically a shrink in black panties), could a person care less? In the film version of his autobiography of the same name, Stahl doesn’t need saving, he needs someone who will sit there and listen to him go on about himself. If you learn anything about the other characters in this movie, it’s that they are the most incredibly tolerant Hollywood-types known to man. (Stahl also seems to be the only person at schmooze parties doing drugs. Is this
Hollywood...California?)
I learned very little about the entertainment business from PERMANENT MIDNIGHT and a whole lot about an egotistical lunkhead. Of course you know that Stahl triumphed because he lived to talk about his problems. So, basically, his drug habit got him a book deal, a movie based on his life, and now he’s apparently collaborating with Stiller on future projects. So much for the moral of that story. TEMPORARY MIDNIGHT is more like it.
-Bill Chambers; September, 1998
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