Product: The Last Word (1995)
Rating: 4.0
stories to tell
It wasn't until the end credits when I saw that writer/director Tony Spiridakis' film was based on a play that I could fathom the reason for his Clifford Odets-ian blather which passes as dialogue. Spiridakis was fortunate to be able to direct his own material - he manages to make a contribution to the genre of wacked auteur classics which teeters between genius and lunacy. These kind of films have their own fascination and Spiridakis' is just as strangely compelling. I can imagine anybody else wanting to excise these pungently lyrical encounters and pare down the treatment to it's plot points, but perhaps there is no way to do this, since it's hard to genre-place the material. It begins in Detroit as a mafioso thriller of sorts with Chaz Palminteri threatening Timothy Hutton as a the writer of a column "Scenes From Everyday Life". Hutton has collected his writing into a book which has Palminteri in threatening mode, since Hutton exposes the underworld low life, which has "consequences". The title of Hutton's column and book scream irony and the notion of writer as a mythological figure, a modern day Cassandra, is perhaps a little too much of an ego trip for Spiridakis. Things become more surreal when Hollywood calls and options Hutton's book, with the proviso that he includes the latter material he has published on a stripper named Caprice. Caprice is aptly named, a "class act" who strips wearing hideous clown orange glow lipstick and a peroxide wig to the sounds of classical music. (In the real world this kind of stripper would be fired after her first set). Naturally she and Hutton become an item and with Hutton's childhood friend, Joe Pantoliano, relocate to L.A. The L.A. scenes are said to show Hollywood's darker side, though they are most memorable for the star cameos Spiridakis features. Richard Dreyfuss, Tony Goldwyn, Cybill Shepherd, and Jimmy Smits make brief appearances (Smits gets 7 words) which is proof that either Spiridakis' dialogue can cast a wide spell or that he pays well. Palminteri only got one scene as well. Spiridakis presenst all this with a straight face, with the occasional Toni Childs croaker on the soundtrack, intercutting between Caprice painting and Hutton having sex with someone else, split second flashbacks to Caprice's tragic past (which includes a Golden Boy violin), and an amusing opening with the entrance of a long-stemmed flower box thought to be a machine gun at Hutton's book launch. His screenplay features endlessly quotable thearical flourishes though my favourites are a line to Caprice - "It's not easy to love the way you do and still be alive", and how Hutton is required to produce a screenplay "with teeth". Hutton performs his duets with Michelle Burke as Caprice in hushed reverential tones, as opposed to the yelling that takes place between him and Pantoliano. Panoliano probably comes off the best, since he tends to rush through his lines. There is an interesting parallel between the two men and the leads in Sweet Smell of Success, with Pantoliano like Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco. Burke however comes off the worst. It doesn't help that she resembles Holly Hunter, but having none of Hunter's ability, and she gets Spiridakis'worst excesses, like a montage of silent screams. Movies about Hollywood are always a little odd, just from the fact that it doubles the illusion, but this is one of the oddest.