In yet another amazing instance of art imitating life, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play a couple of sexy clones this week in The Island. If clones are your thing, The Island has you covered. But if you prefer movies about actual humans, there are three other films opening this week that showcase wildly dissimilar slices of human life, from locales as far-flung as the concrete jungles of Manhattan, the deep South and suburban Anywheresville. The characters who populate Heights are mostly New York's beautiful people – an array of young actors, writers and artist types, all consumed by various nagging tragedies, and all connected to one another, whether knowingly or not. These characters are positioned in hierarchies (famous, wannabe's, has-beens, and never-will-be's), then further sub-divided into categories of the brilliant and – most tragically of all – the nearly brilliant.
It all begins with Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), an angst-ridden, under-achieving photographer with an equally angsty actress mom and a so-deep-in-the-closet-he-doesn't-even-know-he's-there fiancé who's jumping through hoops trying to hide a past fling with a celebrity artist. It seems, in fact, as if everybody in Heights has either slept with, is sleeping with, or is planning to sleep with someone they have no business sleeping with, sometimes out of good old-fashioned lust but mostly for the purpose of advancing a career or for the sheer thrill of screwing someone famous.
Director Chris Terrio dutifully complicates the story with secondary characters whose lives dovetail with the principal's, piling up the coincidences as thick and fast as they multiplied in the recent Crash, but with little of that film's narrative sizzle or subtlety. This is the sort of movie where a character not only mentions Six Degrees of Separation but drives the point home with "More like two when it comes to New York."
There are some interesting turns here, but Heights is basically just a small screen soap with delusions of big screen grandeur. The characters are thin, flat and as uniformly underwritten as the fresh-out-of-film-school dialogue is overwritten and full of itself. Tensions simply mount, approach the boiling point, then inevitably implode at a big party that monopolizes the movie's last act, and where most of the characters collide in an overheated sea of tears and boozy revelations.
A far more interesting neighborhood to visit this week is the Memphis outskirt inhabited by a small-potatoes pimp and his shabby harem in the Sundance-approved Hustle & Flow. Terrence Howard is flat-out remarkable as DJay, a sleepy-eyed hustler who ekes out a living running drugs and women, but dreams of becoming the hip-hop world's Next Big Thang.
Director Craig Brewer gets the steamy, Southern-fried flavor of DJay's surroundings down pat, nailing everything from the regional colloquialisms to the look of a hooker's living room or a backroads juke joint. The movie's about style as well as authenticity, though, and Hustle & Flow generates just the right balance of grit and flash, complete with some tasty wah-wah guitar on the soundtrack and a judicious use of freeze frames and other techniques that suggest a cool '70s vibe without getting all retro about it.
Curiously enough, the most obvious hooks in Hustle & Flow – its sections detailing DJay's attempts to create that one killer song that will transform him from penny-ante pimp to mega-successful musician (sections that come complete with their own heavy-bumpin' soundtrack) – are among the movie's least interesting aspects.
The music is likable enough, and it's fun watching it all come together in the studio, but the film wastes some prime opportunities for satire by letting Djay's hustler rap go basically unexamined ("You know it's hard out here for a pimp," goes one insidiously catchy refrain). It all winds up a bit too close for comfort to the middle movement of any generic musical biopic.
But then Hustle & Flow surprises us with a third act stripping DJay's ambitions bare in an excruciating turn of events involving the hustler being out-hustled, followed by a Taxi Driver-esque coda where our anti-hero's failure turns out to be the very thing that allows him to succeed (don't ask).
The film's three loosely connected acts function almost like mini-movies unto themselves – a richly detailed slice-of-life opening, an agreeably inconsequential middle, and an intensely psychotronic finale – but each is solidly entertaining, and odds are you'll have that tune about the pimp running through your head for a long time to come.
A movie that takes even bigger chances, succeeding brilliantly when it isn't falling flat on its face, is Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, a film relying on an alchemy so fragile it seems in danger of disappearing right before our eyes.
It's almost a disservice to attempt describing this very curious movie in terms of plot, but at the center of it all are two people trying to make a love connection – a recently separated shoe salesman (John Hawkes) and an aspiring artist (July) – orbited by various underage boys and girls curious about sex in ways that will make more than a few adult viewers extremely uncomfortable.
The movie isn't trying to shock us, though – July's weirdly dreamy sensibility is more interested in embracing the suburban lives on display – and the film's characters project such absolute, unmitigated sincerity that it almost seems to double back on itself, evolving into a homespun irony not dissimilar to what we get in some David Lynch movies.
Me and You and Everyone We Know can be terribly self-conscious, even pretentious, but it also beautifully fulfills a prime obligation of the cinema by transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary (and vice versa). Miranda July, a video artist making her feature film debut, excels at pulling reality's rug out from under our feet, homing in on mundane details usually taken for granted and turning them into something strange and significant simply by shifting the context slightly. Her movie is revealing even in its imperfections, like some instructional video made by alien observers still working out the particulars of who we are and how we work.
Lance.Goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.