HURLYBURLY

HURLYBURLY

Directed by Anthony Drazen

Starring Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey

Perhaps without meaning to, director Anthony Drazan rips the sheets off a slumbering America and slaps it awake to its morning after. Crammed into Hurlyburly are the ugly effects of all our modern fascinations, and the revelation is poetically set in the land of the beautiful people--Hollywood.

There's Eddie (Sean Penn), the casting director who has spent enough years in therapy to diagnose his own longing for female love and yet has learned sufficiently little from his expensive vocabulary to chase his analysis with a request for a blow job. There's Artie (Garry Shandling), Eddie's pal who possesses the almost laudable ability to ignore decades of feminist screaming and offer his friend the sexy runaway (young Oscar-winner Anna Paquin) he's found in an elevator as a `pet.' There's Mickey (Kevin Spacey), Eddie's best friend, whose overtreated platinum blond hair is a testament to the excess that leads him to shag woman after woman.

There's Bonnie (Meg Ryan), the woman used by Eddie and Mickey as their own sexual welcome wagon. There's Darlene (Robin Wright Penn in a reprise of the troubled slut she portrayed in Forrest Gump and Moll Flanders; I miss The Princess Bride), the old flame passed between Eddie and Mickey who counters Eddie's infidelity with her own in mock independence. There's Phil (Chazz Palminteri), the struggling actor who drowns his artistic voice in a persistent whine about his own worth. And there's weed, Valium, fast cars, big houses, sex, sex and more sex.

The most troubling aspect of Hurlyburly is not the realization that not one of these self-absorbed characters is likeable but the recognition of our own closeness to them. Maybe we've sat next to them in the waiting room at the shrink's office; maybe they buy cocaine off the same dealer; maybe they look back at us through redrimmed eyes in the morning. Maybe they're us, maybe we're them, and maybe we know just as little as they do about who we are and what the hell we're doing here. Drugs, money and sex do nothing to resolve that incessant questioning--still we stick ourselves with needles, cover ourselves with expensive clothes and exhaust ourselves in bed after bed in search for the fulfillment that just has to be somewhere in all of it.

Like Bonnie, Darlene, and Phil, we can assure ourselves that we've found the answers we've been pursuing to the point of self-destruction, but like them, we are, beneath our cardboard confidence, old shoes, aged divas, wilted fruit. "I'm all dirty," Eddie confesses late in the film; Hurlyburly shows us that we're all just looking for a way to get clean.