The Decade List: When Will I Be Loved (2004)

When Will I Be Loved – dir. James Toback

If I were to guess which film on The Decade List would be scorned the most, it’d have to be James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved. I’ve never heard or read anyone casually dismiss the film; vicious abhorrence colored the (many) pans it received from what few critics and audiences actually watched the thing. Like Abel Ferrara, a fellow NYC filmmaker with the uncanny ability to sharply divide his audience, Toback has a strange and distinctive idea of what America is and what values it holds. When Will I Be Loved is a very unofficial continuation of the director’s Black & White, set in a world filled with generally unlikable souls with overactive libidos who have run-ins with an unlikely lot of celebrities.

Toback even repeats Black & White’s Central Park orgy, which shocked the MPAA in 1999 but, even with the addition of another body, was left in tact here.

While situated in a homogeneous world, When Will I Be Loved feels more like an overhead tale that might have happened to someone one of the characters in Black & White knows. It’s Toback’s fucked-up version of fairy tale, in which a petty conman (Fred Weller) arranges for a reenactment of Indecent Proposal, prostituting his girlfriend, a sexually adventurous heiress of some sort (Neve Campbell), to an aging Italian media giant (Dominic Chianese) for a six-figure sum. Toback and Campbell’s Vera are wiser than anyone involved with Indecent Proposal, so instead of blasé marital guilt, we’re treated with a premeditated act of revenge.

Though I can see what turned so many people off When Will I Be Loved (the sleaziness, the meandering, chatty walks through the city, the absence of a single “likeable” character), something about the film just pops for me. Maybe it’s the oversaturated color scheme, Neve Campbell’s surprising transformation into an interesting actor, or possibly my liking of it is for the very reasons most people don’t.

One of Toback’s greatest charms in his fantasy film worlds is the wonderfully oddball cast he acquires. Take Exposed (where you get Nastassja Kinski, Harvey Keitel, Bibi Andersson, Pierre Clémenti and Rudolf Nureyev) or Black & White (where Claudia Schiffer, Robert Downey Jr., Mike Tyson, Marla Maples, Method Man, Brooke Shields, Ben Stiller, Bijou Phillips and Joe Pantoliano cohabitate), both of which provide messy delights in their casting alone. When Will I Be Loved isn’t as expansive as those two, but we still get to see Neve Campbell stop to flirt with Lori Singer, playing herself, while in the park, just after running into Mike Tyson, claiming to be a man named Buck who “doesn’t give a fuck,” yelling at someone on the street. Karen Allen is also pretty memorable in her small appearance as Vera’s mother. Proceed with caution, but thank me later if you happen to be among the happy few.

With: Neve Campbell, Dominic Chianese, Fred Weller, Karen Allen, James Toback, Joelle Carter, Barry Primus, Alex Feldman, Ashley Shelton, Damon Dash, Lori Singer, Mike Tyson, Jason Pendergraft
Screenplay: James Toback
Cinematography: Larry McConkey
Music: Oli ‘Power’ Grant
Country of Origin: USA
US Distributor: IFC Films

Premiere: 4 June 2004 (Lake Placid Film Festival)

The Decade List: The Company (2003)

The Company - dir. Robert Altman

Though Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion, with the director's recognizable flare for multiple character storylines with esteemed actors, received most of the praise during the last stages of Robert Altman's career, I've always preferred The Company, his documentary-style portrait of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet company. Altman teases us with a narrative that surrounds a dancer named Ry (Neve Campbell, who finally delivers on the promise Hollywood gave her in the 90s), whose career looks to be on the rise, but character and convention are really of little concern in appropriately titled The Company.

This comparison may need some closer analysis, but The Company reminded me a lot of a Maysles brothers film. The camera only appears to capture what it's invited to see, from selected moments in the forming of a relationship between Ry and Josh (James Franco), who's not a member of the troupe, the head of the company Alberto Antonelli's (Malcolm McDowell) bittersweet acceptance of an award from the people who had once criticized his decision to become a dancer, the shattering of the Achilles heel of one of the top performers and the uncertain futures of a new recruit and one who isn't meeting his potential. While these character glimpses in The Company are placed between lovely dance performances, everything in the film is draped with its own resolute history. As in Grey Gardens, the entire company is affected by what has come before it. Though the devastating toll AIDS took on the dance community during the 1980s and 1990s is alluded to (though never actually named), other things, not least of which the tightness of the company's money and the aging of their star dancer, suggest a declining future for these individuals' craft.

Altman makes brilliant use of depth and foreground within the frame. While this may be similar to Gosford Park, especially in terms of trailing conversations, his framing is put to better use here. The scene where Ry performs her big number, Altman shifts from multiple perspectives (the audience, the performer, the stage-hands, the musicians), shedding light on what it is he's trying to do with The Company. The film isn't about the world of dance or the characters within it, but instead, it's a remarkable window into the process of creating and replicating art and the variable of its success.

With: Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco, Barbara Robertson, William Dick, Susie Cusack, Marilyn Dodds Frank, John Lordan, John Gluckman, Davis Robertson, David Gombert
Screenplay: Barbara Turner, story by Neve Campbell, Turner
Cinematography: Andrew Dunn
Music: Van Dyke Parks
Country of Origin: USA/Germany
US Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Premiere: 8 September 2003 (Toronto International Film Festival)
US Premiere: 10 September 2003 (Boston Film Festival)

When too much is just enough

Wild Things - dir. John McNaughton - 1998 - USA

Inspired by a comment that my friend Brad made to me last night about a possible reteaming of Denise Richards and Neve Campbell, both in dire need of a return to the screen, in a film written by Stephen Peters, who wrote Wild Things, I've remembered the extreme fondness I had for the film when I was a wee lad. Wild Things is, above all else, a glorious parade of excess and trashiness. On nearly every level, we're given way too much, which strangely works in the film's favor. It never ceases to inspire a "no, they aren't going to... oh wait, they did" reaction. I could make a list that would go on for pages about everything that is taken to the fullest extreme here. The only thing missing was Denise Richards giving an unsimulated blow job to Matt Dillon. When a lesbian scene between two hot high school girls quickly turns into a bitchy cat-fight, when you get a full view of Kevin Bacon's obviously fluffed penis as he turns around in the shower, when you cast fucking Theresa Russell as Richards' gluttonous, slutty mother -- you know you're in for a treat.

The tentative title for the Richards/Campbell reteaming is Backstabbers, which might as well have been the subtitle for this film. The plot twists and turns appear to be typically Hollywood, but when they come in the droves they do in this film, you can't help but smirk. It's certainly problematic when a film is aware of its own campiness, but Wild Things is so genuinely appealing in its seediness that this doesn't hurt it at all. Richards is perfect in her token role, the rich, pouty-lipped bitch (I really can't think of anyone who pulls it off better than she does). Campbell is delightfully miscast as the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, but still pulls off the alluring cruelty. Bacon is a total sleaze, a pulpier version of his character in Where the Truth Lies. And Dillon plays exactly the person you'd expect that he would have become if his career tanked post-1980s. The only one truly out of place here is Bill Murray, as the lawyer, whose role solely requires him to make unfitting jokes and shoot looks of utter confusion and moritification at Richards. His faces are the exact ones we'd give her if we weren't in on the joke. And because he's not, he's useless here. It's actually most surprising that the film was directed by John McNaughton, whose Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was a starkly realist horror film. He made a campy women-in-prison film a few years prior with Anne Heche and Ione Skye (weirdly predicting both of their "coming outs" as lesbians) called Girls in Prison -- though I haven't seen it, I doubt it matches the tawdry brilliance that is Wild Things. The film goes so far over-the-top you can't help but be shocked at the fact that McNaughton decided to cut a scene of Dillon and Bacon naked in the shower together. Now, that's too much.