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Review: Beauty before brains in 'Love and Death on Long Island'
March 23, 1998
Web posted at: 8:28 a.m. EDT (0828 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- Prepare yourselves. I'm about to ladle a fair amount of praise onto a movie that co-stars Jason Priestly.
"Love and Death on Long Island" is being compared by a lot of critics to "Lolita," but the aging, high-brow protagonist's poorly chosen erotic fixation is a shallow B-movie star (Priestly, if you couldn't guess) whose glossy good looks are packaged and delivered via the seductive wizardry of the modern media.
The inappropriately directed eroticism is "Lolita" all the way, of course, but Priestly is hardly a prepubescent girl and his vocation in the movie leads us down a corridor that's got nothing to do with Vladimir Nabokov, or even Stanley Kubrick, for that matter.
The writer/director of "Love and Death," Richard Kwietniowski, promises a lot more than he delivers, so it's not fair to be mentioning him in the same breath as a genius like Nabokov, but this is a pretty lightweight comedy that (suffused as it is with an undercurrent of morbidity) ultimately weighs a whole lot more than you might expect it to.
The story focuses on a proudly isolated intellectual (John Hurt, in one the best performances of his career) who unexpectedly finds himself developing the candy-coated longings of the average American teenager.
Scene from the movie 1.78 MB / 31 sec. / 240x180
1.13 MB / 31 sec. / 160x120
QuickTime movieHurt plays Dr. Giles De'Ath (the symbolic last name's a bit much), the kind of famous, over-appreciated writer who finally gets so immersed in his own swirling mind he can't really make a connection to anybody, or anything, else.
De'Ath has been writing weighty theoretical tomes for so long, he doesn't even understand that you need a television in order to operate a VCR. One day, after locking himself out of his London home on a rainy day, he wanders down the street and takes refuge (for the first time in years) in a movie theater.
He thinks he's going to see the E.M. Forster adaptation that's advertised outside, but he enters the wrong door at the multiplex and finds himself face-to-face with a "Porky's"-like American teen comedy, "Hotpants College II."
For a few minutes, we watch the same movie De'Ath is watching, and it's hilarious. This is one of those stories where the teen-age stars moon the other cast members at the beginning of the film, then spend the rest of their time trying to catch college "babes" with their tops off. (Hurt's slowly dawning awareness and sudden cry of "This isn't E.M. Forster!" had me on the floor.)
Just as he's about to leave, though, De'Ath's eyes lock onto a vision. It's Priestly as Ronnie Bostock, a second-tier star of these types of things, who, when Hurt first sees him on the screen, is being covered in ketchup at a phony-looking pizza joint.
We find out later that one of the things De'Ath is drawn to in Bostock's performance is a forlorn, defeated pose that reminds him of a Raphael painting. Right off the bat, though, it's obvious that he thinks Ronnie is plain old hot stuff.
So far, very good. We then see De'Ath sinking deeper and deeper into his fascination with Bostock.
There are several funny scenes (and maybe a few too many; it gets a bit repetitive) in which De'Ath, just like millions of teen-agers around the world, has to satisfy his jones for the heartthrob by buying fan magazines and cutting out the pictures. Unlike those other fans, though, he carefully glues them into a leather-bound volume and titles it "Bostockiana."
De'Ath's doing everything he can to intellectualize his fetish, to put it into a context that he'll find more fathomable, but he soon surrenders to his urges when he reads that Ronnie (who's really nothing more than a struggling actor) lives on Long Island.
He then (by this point, halfway through the movie) flies to the States and tries to locate the object of his affections, never knowing quite what he'll do if he manages to pull it off.
Though it never gets boring, things slow down considerably when Hurt gets to Long Island. A lot of time is taken up with him walking around suburban neighborhoods trying to find his idol. When he finally does come into contact with him (through a pre-planned encounter with Bostock's girlfriend at a grocery store), everything gets back on track.
Like most intellectuals, De'Ath knows how to weave an alluring web of b.s., and he soon has Ronnie believing that he's got a huge career ahead of him. Of course, it'll require the assistance of the learned Dr. De'Ath.
Priestly manages to make Ronnie both uncomprehending and endearing. He's an innocent who can't figure out that the one person in the world who wants to help him has ulterior motives.
His friendship with De'Ath (and the triangle of jealousy that soon develops courtesy of Ronnie's girlfriend, played by Fiona Loewi) is completely believable, but, without giving anything away, there's a moment near the end of the film where Priestly must carry the impact of a scene (and, indeed, the weight of the entire story) in one tight close-up, and it's a first-class piece of film acting.
Though Priestly should be justly saluted and sent on his way to better roles, Hurt is good enough in this movie to be completely ignored when next year's Oscar nominations come out. Remember, when he's not on the list in early 1999 and critics start complaining: you heard it here first.
"Love and Death On Long Island" sounds heavier than it is, but sometimes, oddly enough, is heavier than it sounds like it would be. There's some bad language and some silly nudity in "Hotpants College II," but no one will go blind from it. PG-13. 93 minutes.
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