Hurlyburly Review
by James Sanford (jasanfor AT MCI2000 DOT com)January 1st, 1999
HURLYBURLY (Fine Line)
Directed by Anthony Drazan
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with making a movie based on a Broadway hit; after all, such musicals as "The King and I," "Evita," "Grease" and "Oklahoma" were hugely successful on both stage and screen. Transferring a set-bound comedy-drama such as David Rabe's "Hurlyburly" is considerably more of a challenge. A high-voltage showcase for William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Harvey Keitel and Ron Silver when it debuted in New York in 1984, this is a work driven purely by Rabe's crackling conversations and the slowly mounting chaos inside a Hollywood home shared by a band of venomous, misogynstic film industry types whose behavior is fueled by a certain kind of "Bolivian health food" they constantly put up their noses.
Though director Anthony Drazan has valiantly tried to pull the piece out of its stagey shell, it doesn't lend itself to being opened up. When the madness is all taking place in one room, as it does in the play, intensity is generated. When it's spread out across a variety of locations, the power of "Hurlyburly" is quickly diluted, despite a go-for-broke performance by Sean Penn and a typically sleek and cunning Kevin Spacey characterization of a heartless, self-adoring louse.
Rabe's screenplay lifts large chunks of the dialogue verbatim from the original, but the same exchanges that had potent shock value in the theatre -- where it sometimes felt like the actors were spitting acid at each other -- doesn't carry the same power onscreen, and while Penn's Eddie does everything short of garroting himself to show how tormented he is, the man has no charm or charisma. Certainly it's impossible to imagine him attracting someone as seemingly bright as Darlene (Robin Wright Penn). Hurt's interpretation of Eddie had a much better balance of dark and light: He didn't feel the compulsion to unleash a few inner demons in every single scene. Part-time hooker Bonnie (a raunchy Meg Ryan, miles away from "You've Got Mail") says it best midway through the story when she tells Eddie, "I'm gonna need a magnifying glass to find what's left of your good points." Perhaps ultimately the problems of "Hurlyburly" go deeper than differences in acting styles and locations. It may be that the work belongs too much to the cocaine-crazed period in which it was written. Though Drazan and his cast nail the decadence and depravity of a setting in which no one has any qualms about using a teenage runaway (Anna Paquin) as a convenient sex toy, much of this material now seems as quaint as a "Just Say No" bumper sticker. James Sanford
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