**/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham, Natasha Gregson Wagner
written and directed by James Toback
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Viewers of Toback's 1977 cult classic Fingers will find no new ground covered in 1998's Two Girls and a Guy. Once again, we have a young-turk artiste (Robert Downey Jr. in this incarnation) who's too wrapped up in what his mother thinks of him. We also have his wanton sexual behaviour, and his attempts to put his chaotic life in order. This time, however, we are to believe that he's being properly grilled by his two girlfriends, who meet by chance when they get the same idea of surprising him on his doorstep.
It's hard for anyone who has seen a Toback film to take this stuff seriously. In 21 years, he should have clued-in to the fact that his male protagonist's manifest destiny is not the only game in town; he's still agonizing over wanting to get laid and be an artist. Here, Toback feeds you how to react to the male lead while leaving you completely in the dark about the women who confront him. All we know about Graham's horribly underwritten character is that she's an intelligent, focused career woman forbidden to show her sterling qualities to the camera. Wagner is at once condescended to (she's given dialogue which is meant to expose her shallowness) and overemphasized (because stupid and sexy make a great camera subject?). Downey, meanwhile, is given time to babble all manner of revelatory tics and traits, stacking the deck with his woundedness.
Miraculously, Two Girls and a Guy inches close to making a point. However under or over-written his characters, the suggestion of a three-part relationship is raised when Wagner remarks on how the relationship might have gone. Hovering in the air are the ramifications of such a relationship, which threatens to turn the talk into something a little meatier. The film is pushed so far into a corner that it must either redefine the relationship or take evasive action; the escape hatch here is Downey's mother. She's dying of some unnamed disease, and this gives the film an excellent excuse for Downey to put off the discussion. We never find out what the resolution of the argument might be. We mostly find out what we already knew: that life is complicated.
Now, Two Girls and a Guy is by no means unbearable. You like the actors, it's kind of sexy, and it's a swell loft that boy's got there. But it dissolves in memory two minutes after it ends. In choosing not to comment on what went down in the loft, Toback scuttles any resonance the film might have had. If all you want is good acting and a little sex, then by all means rush to see it. But even if that's all you want, let it be known that that's all you'll get. Originally published: April 29, 1998.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers I'm frankly tired of Toback's mommy fixation–and Toback the man, especially now that I've listened to his DVD commentary for Two Girls and a Guy, wherein he's joined by Wagner and a diffident Downey Jr., who shows up to the table late. Besting Peter Bogdanovich's self-congratulatory behaviour, Toback cites several scenes as the best of their kind in the history of cinema, including Downey's entrance and his "oral stimulation of [Heather Graham's] anus," shown here in R-rated form (as opposed to an NC-17 version, longer by eleven seconds, that's floating around out there). In the meantime, Wagner accuses Toback of having asked her to 'make out' with Graham in an earlier sequence and elsewhere masturbate, both of which Toback is neither willing to remember nor deny. It's a stimulating track, to be sure, as nobody ever quite says what one expects; Graham's absence results in much speculation about her reactions to various things said and done on camera.
The Fox disc sports a lovely 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer with perhaps a bit too much edge enhancement to compensate for a lack of shadow detail. Colours are exceptionally strong. The Dolby Surround audio is small in character, although music sounds full. The only additional extra is a predictably misrepresentative trailer.
84 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
