Actors in date-flick `beautiful girls' seem even more real than your hometown buddies
beautiful g irls bills itself as a "Date Film for the '90s."
And to the extent that it eschews happy endings, easy solutions and a linear plot, it is.
But it's really more like the string of date films that brought the Brat Pack to dominance in the '80s, of which the best were The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire . The movie actually pays homage to the pack in a minor piece of dialogue, "You look like Ally Sheedy!"
It's a "feelings" movie that inserts us into the lives of a group of small-town friends in their late 20s for a week. The men are struggling to bridge the gaps between their adolescent dreams and their lives, which don't measure up. They also try to bridge the gaps between the beautiful girls they fantasize about and the real women who can't measure up.
As long as you ignore the stale clichés and empty symbolism that the writer uses to move the plot along, this is a film that provides you with people you can care about and lines that make you laugh.
"Beautiful girls are all-powerful! That's better than love!" cries out perpetual adolescent Paul (Michael Rapaport), whose relationship with Jan (Martha Plimpton) is going nowhere because he refuses to commit to anyone other than the myriad supermodels plastered on his wall (and his dog, which is named Elle MacPherson).
Also stalling in their relationships are Tommy (Matt Dillon), who is destroying his relationship with Sharon (Annabeth Gish) because he wants to recapture the glory days of high school with ex-girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly), and Willie (Timothy Hutton), who is so disenchanted with his life that he becomes infatuated with the innocence represented by his 13-year-old neighbor, Marty (Natalie Portman of The Professional and Heat ).
Rosie O'Donnell stars as a feminist beauty salon owner whose advice marks the best parts of the movie. Uma Thurman plays a "beautiful girl" whose encounters with the men in the movie are its worst moments.
Rapaport, Dillon and Hutton deliver what could be the best performances of their screen careers. The supporting cast, particularly the character actors, make the small town believable. Indeed, many of the actors fit so comfortably in their roles that to a degree they are probably playing themselves. The intensity is sufficient that you may find yourself smiling and humming to a Neil Diamond song without a shred of self-consciousness.
Writer Scott Rosenberg attempts to pass off the mundane as mystical, and his vague statements and unconvincing interplay between men and women tend to make the film drag in places. But the profound moments that Rosenberg shows as prosaic make the movie work.
While Willie's greeting for his arriving girlfriend is shallow, a conversation with his father about watching golf on television conveys more depth than any heartfelt conversations about relationships. These people, due to uniformly superb acting, seem real. They're the friends you had in high school, 20 years later, and they make it easy to just relax and enjoy the film.
This film is not worth an Oscar, but it is worth seeing. Director Ted Demme puts you seamlessly in Knight's Ridge, Mass. -- a town that will give you a warm feeling of coming home.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the February 16, 1996 issue.
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