Hurlyburly (1998) – DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright Penn, Chazz Palminteri
screenplay by David Rabe, based on his play
directed by Anthony Drazan

by Bill Chambers The word "hurlyburly" describes the thought processes of Eddie the Cokehead to a tee. As played by Sean Penn, hypersensitive Eddie is a wind-up toy that threatens to stroll right off the tabletop–he just doesn't let things go. At first, his behaviour smacks of self-absorption, narcissism, solipsism ("My biggest distraction is me," he tells a loved one). Eventually, we come to understand that Eddie is an existential Sherlock Holmes, desperate to get to the bottom of, quite literally, everything. Hurlyburly is about how a place like Hollywood can eat a person like Eddie alive, because there's no there there. What you see is what you get.

Eddie, with his pencil-thin moustache and half-gelled hair, is a player high enough on the film-industry food chain to afford a big, sterile Beverly Hills pad and liberal amounts of pot and cocaine. (He snorts in place of morning coffee.) But he has a housemate in Mickey (Kevin Spacey), a bleach-blonde smoothie with whom he occasionally shares an office and women, too. They live on Sno-Balls for sustenance and will probably be found dead together one day by a maid.

Eddie's other best friend is Phil (Chazz Palminteri), a hulk more violent and needy the deeper the rift in his marriage gets. In a group of ticking timebombs, Phil is the one nearest to final countdown. He's a stray pitbull our hero can't shake…and deep down, Eddie doesn't want to shake him, because Phil's hostility makes Eddie seem rational by comparison. (As Mickey puts it, "No matter how fall you fall, Eddie, Phil will be lower than you.") Meanwhile, a teenage runaway (The Piano's Anna Paquin, who isn't exactly plausible as a Kids type of kid but does make for a convincingly ironic (and fetching) oracle late in the film) is staying at their house, a "gift" from friend Artie (Garry Shandling), who spotted her on an elevator.

Penn, Spacey, and Palminteri are mesmerizing, if to a one exhausting: they give big, to-the-rafters performances that nevertheless achieve a curious intimacy in close-up. Spacey, more or less typecast (all three actors are playing extreme versions of their default personas), makes it look the most effortless, and delivers a quintessential moment of smug self-satisfaction during a climactic exchange between Eddie and Mickey when Eddie says, "You have no feelings!" "No," Mickey replies, "I just don't have your feelings." Hurlyburly, however, belongs to Penn as an eventually suicidal addict with a busy mind that won't let him shut down and reboot. Five and 10-minute chunks pass with only Eddie's voice on the soundtrack, begging for everyone's sympathy but mainly ours. Your enjoyment of the film will hinge on your tolerance for two solid hours of a pitiful Sean Penn emoting obscenely.

Hurlyburly does not shed its stagebound roots: no more than a handful of scenes unfold outside of Eddie and Mickey's place (let alone outside), and towards the end one senses that director Anthony Drazan, whose third film is this, is struggling to maintain some visual interest in the central location with some stabs at expressionistic lighting and colour. In effect, the movie is a better fit for television than it was the big screen: TV began life as a medium for broadcasting live theatre and has held to certain traditions of the form, including intermissions. (What else are commercials?) A sense of place is even more key to the television screen besides–it's the window in our living room through which we look to see other living rooms. On the small screen, Hurlyburly's claustrophobic confines become the cozy environs of sitcoms and cop dramas. The downside is that a viewer is faced with more distractions at home, and Hurlyburly demands the concentration a good film gets in a dark, hushed cinema, dare I say because the temptation to turn it off will be just too great. The picture only seems longer on the small screen.

Where Hurlyburly fails to translate the theatrical experience is that David Rabe's play, by all accounts, felt dangerous in its original Mike Nichols staging, with the line separating the actors' drug-fuelled, sex-crazed behaviour onstage from their backstage antics practically nonexistent. One imagines that going to see it was a bit like walking into one of Caligula's orgies, but the film, for all the volatility on display, has an antiseptic quality accentuated by the casting of the likes of Meg Ryan, who you know will only ever be a tourist in this kind of production. (She plays a stripper in name only.) Still, the opportunity to see Penn take a crack at this material is a gift that keeps on giving 'til you're saying "uncle."

THE DVD
Hurlyburly looks stupendous on DVD. New Line is the reigning king of the format, even if their output has become staggered of late. Letterboxed at 1.85:1 and 16×9 enhanced, the film shines brighter than it did in moviehouses–in fact, it reveals focusing snafus in Changwei Gu's cinematography I had previously blamed on an AMC projectionist. Skin tones, shadow detail, contrast–high marks across the board, blah blah blah. The audio is available in Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 surround, but there is almost no discernable rear-channel or LFE information at any point in the film, save the blaring television Eddie observes with disdain and the Sheryl Crow (!) song over the closing credits. Crucially, dialogue is easy to make out, and alternately subtitled for the hearing-impaired.

Although this is not a "Platinum Series" edition (despite online key art that suggests otherwise -Ed., 4/3/22), the disc does contain supplements of substance. One can choose between two audio commentaries, the first on the filmmaking process featuring Drazan and Rabe, the second focused more on Hurlyburly's messaging, with Penn, composer David Baerwald, and Janet Brown, a "social commentator," joining the returning Rabe, who clearly considers this his baby. Penn's actorly observations belong on the first track, while Brown is probably there as a safety net–this is a film that doesn't treat its women kindly and needs all the help it can get. For what it's worth, Brown is a very persuasive social commentator. The participants were all recorded separately and edited together later–rather seamlessly, if you ask me. I prefer track one only because I'm an aspiring filmmaker. The disc also includes a trailer plus cast and crew bios; this is a nice effort for an overlooked movie that opened against Penn's own The Thin Red Line and lost.

123 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; New Line