What a lesson in film-making!
Let me report that among date movies, very few age well. This one has improved remarkably with age.
Part of the reason is the two main actors. Molly is her most striking here. She's absolutely at her peak in what she does, which is a sort of sassy, deliberately fostered innocent/wise cuteness. No one can do this today, and the attempts are depressing. Kate Hudson? We all die a little when she tries.
And then we have Downey. He's already heavy into drugs and he doesn't have the drugged discipline he had in "Chaplin." But he has an energy that is so appealing. Undisciplined, druggy energy would usually be just dispersed effort, but this is a date movie, something that depends on misregistration of self.
And look who surrounds them: Aiello doing his working class avuncular bit. Keitel being such a movie gangster they bleeped his every speech. And Dennis Hopper! That man who is a permanent token of intoxicated risktaking. Three solid marks in film characters, all portrayed by their inventors.
You can see that the filmmaker is a writer. The script is actually very good. Very good indeed for what it is and the assets that are available. The direction is so inadequate it hurts. But it hurts in exactly the right way. This is a film about stretching, about yearning without touching. Its all about inadequacy in love, a sort of reality-tinged inadequacy overlain on the romantic comedy template.
Because the camera is always in the wrong place, is always too tentative, is always unsure of itself, but still goes, still goes...
It puts us in the thing as one of these kids, clumsy, bold without cause.
I recommend this. I do. Its problems work for it.
Molly has faded as a presence now. But that's inevitable because of how we all exploited her youth. We shouldn't think that she is a flake, like say Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts. This very year she starred in one of the most intellectually ambitious movies of all time, Godards "King Lear." And more recently, she was in a Greenaway film. No stupid actor would do that.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
