Hoffman plays grungy, small-time chiseler Bernie LaPlante, the kind of guy who steals cash from the purse of his own defense lawyer. One stormy Chicago night, he finds himself alone at the scene of a plane crash. Against his win and all his natural instincts, he ends up saving the passengers from the wreckage, then disappears from the scene. One of the people he rescues is hotshot TV reporter Gale Gayley (Davis), desperate for a high-ratings, “inspirational” story about real heroism. Who was the mudcaked “Angel of Flight 104” who risked his life for her? Her station offers a million-dollar reward to find him. Hundreds show up claiming to be the guy, but the real McCoy is obvious … John Bubber (Andy Garcia), a quiet homeless who, like Cinderella, has the other shoe that LaPlante left behind in the wreckage. Telegenic, sincere, full of beautiful notions about helping the helpless, Bubber, the fake, cats a perfect, media-made figure, and Gayley finds herself falling for him. What gives the story its nifty ambiguity is that the fraud is actually a decent man, and the real hero, LaPlante, is a scumbag. A scumbag who wants his million-dollar cheek.
“Hero” unfolds with zest and confidence, yet as genuinely enjoyable as it is, it doesn’t fully come together. For one thing, its satire of the heartless media is hardly novel anymore. Part of the problem is the ending, which leaves a few threads unresolved and strikes too cute a note. Perhaps it’s too much like a Sturges movie: the deliberate ’40s stylization keeps the satire at one remove; what’s missing is the sense of contemporary immediacy that charged a movie like “Network.” Which is not to say that this sophisticated comedy isn’t very welcome-just that its bark is better than its bite.
–DAVID ANSEN
The hustlers in B_Glengarry Glen Ross_b talk too much. They have to; they make their sordid living selling bogus real estate with pseudopoetic names like Glengarry Highlands and Glen Pow Farms. They’re musicless rappers, masters of a ripoff spiel that spins webs of deceit around the suckers who fall for their con games. David Mamet’s screenplay, based on his 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, retains all the profane poetry of these desperate men, driven by their bosses to cutthroat competition in which the top salesmen win a Cadillac and the bottom ones get fired. IVs Mamet’s vision of an American hen, a mutual trap for the chiselers and the chiseled.
Actors die to sink their capped teeth into dialogue like Mamet’s. “Glengarry” assembles a powerhouse cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce. Director James Foley has orchestrated a crackling ensemble out of this high-voltage group. Pacino plays the ace huckster, Ricky Roma, like a gloomy cobra, targeting his hapless prey (Pryce) with his hooded eyes and spellbinding tongue. As the wornout Shelley Levene, Lemmon has the drowned eyes and scared smile of a loser, as he begs and bribes the heartless office manager (Spacey) for better “leads” (the data on prospects), he’s like a latter-&y Winy Loman to whom no attention must be paid.
Baldwin is sleekly sinister in the role of Blake, a troubleshooter caned in to shake up the salesmen. He shakes them up, all right, but this character (not in the original play) also shakes up the movie’s toned balance with his sheer noise and scatologilcal fury. Onstage, “Glengarry’s” major wobble was a relatively conventional second act, a mini-whodunit that involved the theft of the precious “leads” from the real-estate office. That gory line works better on screen, but the movie is darker, the comic element somehow lessened. Foley soaks the screen with film noir tones, and Mamet’s jackhammer rhythms lose some of their ricochet force in the editing process. Still, “Glengarry” is a compelling look at one of the closed-out items in the catalog of American dreams. Winy Laman believed his sales pitch, these guys are eaten away by the acid of their own con. The salesmen scrambling to save their cheesy jobs are no longer heroes of the American frontier. “There’s no adventure to it,” says Roma. “We’re a dying breed.” Maybe, all through our con-job culture, the buyers are wising up.
–JACK KROLL
For a moment in the 1950s, the comedian Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) was _B_Mr. Saturday Night.b That’s when he was the star of his own TV show, which had the misfortune of going head to head with Davy Crockett. Bad breaks seem to haunt Buddy: he gets a shot on “The Ed Sullivan Show”-as the follow-up act to the Beatles! To make a bad situation worse, he hurls insults at the crowd of hysterical teenage girls, who couldn’t care less about his one-liners.
Buddy’s bile always gets the better of him. He’s that classic show-biz stereotype: the funnyman as s.o.b. Billy Crystal’s melancholy comedy follows Buddy from child hood to embittered old age: from the first laughs he coaxes out of his relatives to a stint in the Catskills, where he woos his future wife (Julie Warner), through his TV heyday and on down to the dregs of the stand-up circuit, where he’s reduced to insulting senior citizens in nursing homes. Through it all, he’s accompanied by his loyal, long-suffering brother, Stan (David Paymer), who is his manager, sounding board and whipping boy. Stan finally throws m the towel and retires, having watched the acid tongued Buddy sabotage his own career through sheer nastiness.
It’s a daring move for one of our most likable comics to play such a heel. Crystal’s hilarious, tough-hided performance conjures up an earlier generation of comedians in loving detail-Milton Berle, Jack Carter, Jackie Mason, Alan King Crystal the director, however, is not as uncompromising as Crystal the actor. He hedges his bets with sentimentality (nudged along by Man Shaiman’s banal score) In the end, this borscht-belt Scrooge must learn his lesson and open his heart, at which point “Mr. Saturday Night” becomes “A Christmas Carol” with one-liners.
The good news is that the one-liners are consistently funny (written by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel), and the bantering interplay between Crystal and Paymer, sibling rivals and best friends, evokes a lifelong relationship in emotional shorthand. But like Buddy, who keeps making the same selfdestructive mistakes, the movie repeats itself. It swings back and forth between pathos and rage, caught in the dilemma of trying to be a heart felt movie about a heartless guy. Still, Crystal’s insider’s affection for the business is contagious: when it clicks, “Mr. Saturday Night” has the chutzpah and the ambiguous hilarity of a Friers Club roast.
