The Funny, Brutal One Night at McCool's
One Night at McCool&#039;s, about four men whose lives are wrecked by their lust for a powerfully sexy young woman, is an odd little movie. On the surface,...
https://www.ourtownny.com/base-portlet/webrsrc/ctxvar/c8a905fb-1b2e-4bc9-a470-3987f6e36d81.jpeg
www.ourtownny.com
One Night at McCool's, about four men whose lives are wrecked by their lust for a powerfully sexy young woman, is an odd little movie. On the surface, it's brazenly similar to all those politically incorrect slapstick sex comedies that followed in the wake of There's Something About Mary, and the structure?which revisits events from four different points of view, like a Benny Hill sendup of Rashomon?is, in its own silly way, somewhat ambitious. But it has an Old Hollywood approach to characterization; writer Stan Seidel (who died last summer) and director Harald Zwart create precise, hard-edged, often very amusing caricatures of people who are driven by their basest impulses. That fact, along with the suburban St. Louis setting, suggests the filmmakers are trying to invoke Preston Sturges, or perhaps Billy Wilder in Kiss Me, Stupid mode. The movie never manages to be all these things at the same time, but in the process does pull off some very, very funny bits of business?and inadvertently raises questions about how matter-of-fact nasty so much pop culture has become.

Liv Tyler plays the va-va-voom girl, Jewel, a tight-dressed, full-bodied, red-lipped sex fantasy who's first seen through the eyes of young single bartender Randy (Matt Dillon). After closing up his bar for the night, Randy intervenes in what seems to be Jewel's attempted rape at the hands of her thick-necked felon of a boyfriend, Utah (Andrew Silverstein, aka Andrew Dice Clay). The thwarted Utah speeds off into the night, leaving Jewel stranded, and she asks Randy if she can spend the night at his house. One protracted and extremely funny sex sequence later, Jewel gives Randy the bad news: she and Utah are partners in crime, running a good-Samaritan scam that causes guys like Randy to bring Jewel home for the night so that Utah can stop by later to rob the place. Since Randy lives in a decrepit house left to him by his late mother, and has few possessions of value, Utah forces him to return to the bar to empty out the cash register, at which point Jewel impulsively shoots her boyfriend dead. Aghast but still in love, Randy helps her dispose of the body, and in short order Jewel's moved into Randy's house and they're making like Ozzie and Harriet?if Ozzie and Harriet robbed other people's homes to fill their own. A touch of Hollywood punch-pulling, Jewel insists to Randy that although she's pulled this same stunt many times, Randy's the first mark she's actually slept with. I seem to recall that both Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Patricia Arquette in True Romance had only been hooking a few days when they met the handsome heroes. Talk about Madonna-whore issues. It's a minor issue, though, since this is a comedy with dark subject matter but a light touch. And on top of that, Seidel has given Jewel a marvelous, Men-are-from-Mars, Women-are-from-Venus quirk: where the men in her life are irrationally obsessed with nailing her, she's irrationally obsessed with living in a really nice middle-class house that she can redecorate to her tastes. (In the Times, Elvis Mitchell astutely observed that Jewel, like James Caan's character in Thief, carries around a book of crude cut-out photo montages depicting her bourgeois aspirations.)

Long story short: Jewel, like the title character of There's Something About Mary, is so attractive that she transforms every man who sees her into a hopeless, pathetic stalker. One such stalker is Randy's cousin Carl (Paul Reiser), a married lawyer with a wandering eye, bondage fantasies and a knack for snappy observations. (Recounting the first time Randy brought Jewel to his family's house for a barbecue, the lust-struck lawyer tells his therapist, "It was like having a porn star in my house, except she was making salad.") John Goodman plays Dehling, a widowed police detective who investigates the shooting in the bar?as well as a never-ending string of weird and suspicious events related to Randy and Jewel?and falls head-over-heels himself.

Tyler, given the old-fashioned sex bomb treatment after several years spent playing emblems of virtue, is having a grand time, but her performance doesn't quite work, and it's only partly her fault. I bought her as an object of intense male desire, because she is; but Jewel's cartoonishly padded outfits err on the side of absurdity, and her sweetness comes through so strongly that at times the film seems to be bending over backwards to make sure we don't hate her. What this role needed was Marilyn Monroe, who was so primally sensual that questions of audience sympathy were rendered moot. You couldn't blame a Monroe character for using what she had to get what she needed, and you couldn't blame the men for doing her bidding; any doubts about the inevitability of the plots were erased by one look at Monroe spilling out of a dress while giggling coyly. Valeria Golino, breathy-voiced co-star of the Hot Shots movies, would have been a better choice as Jewel.

No matter. There's more than enough material here to fuel a modern-day romantic comedy with a gleefully cynical heart. Seidel and Zwart, however, take the movie one step further by having the events unfold through the eyes of Randy, Carl and Dehling. Randy tells his part of the story to Mr. Burmeister, a bingo-playing contract killer with a long, leathery face and a flattop that could double as a helicopter landing pad (the role is played, expertly, by Michael Douglas, who also co-produced; between the crow's feet and the retro hair, he's looking so much like his old man that it's spooky). Carl tells his side of the story to his therapist, amusingly played by country superstar Reba McEntire. Poor, schlumpy Dehling confesses his own role in the narrative to a priest, Father Jimmy, whose moral discomfort is eclipsed by his desire to hear all the sexy parts in detail?to better assess the detective's sins, naturally. (Father Jimmy is played by Richard Jenkins, a funny and immensely skillful character actor who was one half of the team of gay ATF men in Flirting with Disaster. I have yet to see him give an inappropriate or uninteresting performance. If this were the 1940s, he'd be in everything Preston Sturges ever made.)

As in Rashomon, replayed sections of certain scenes take on a different tone, depending on who's telling the story. For example, when Dehling visits Randy and Jewel at home and sees Jewel's bruised face (the result of an accident during a burglary gone bad), he assumes Randy is abusing her. Through Dehling's eyes, the affable and dimwitted Randy seems like a shiftless, cocky, sexist lout; Dillon, whose comedic skills will probably always be underrated, plays this version of Randy like a thirtysomething cousin of the S.E. Hinton hoods he portrayed in the 80s.

Zwart stages the skin-free sex scenes with tremendous comic energy, and a half-conscious sense of mockery; he gives the horndog audience what it expects and wants, but in a way that gently derides them for wanting it in the first place. This may have been one of the things that drew Douglas as a producer. Though many of the sexual thrillers he made in the 80s and 90s are trashy, opportunistic and badly dated, the sex scenes themselves (in every Douglas film except Basic Instinct) are infused with both heat and humor. Think of him banging Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction's kitchen tryst, then walking her to the bedroom, the pants bunched around his ankles hampering his progress like a prisoner's manacles. McCool's has what might be a subtle homage to the Michael Douglas brand of funny-sexy sex. When Jewel is grinding Randy into the mattress during their first night together, there's a cut to a medium-distance shot looking through the open door of Randy's bedroom. We see glimpses of Jewel riding the guy, but our attention can't help being drawn to Randy's spindly, hairy legs hanging helplessly off his bed, pants gathered around his ankles.

The sex is one thing; the violence is quite another. The film's generally light tone doesn't jibe with the brutality onscreen. The killings in McCool's are gory in that depressingly fashionable way; like Pulp Fiction and its numerous spiritual offspring, the most notable recent example being Nurse Betty, this movie thinks it's being edgy by showing us gaping bullet wounds and oozing puddles of purplish blood, when it's merely pandering to audiences who've been desensitized by faux-arty brutality. By the end, when Zwart resolves the plot with an astonishingly brutal close-quarters shootout no doubt modeled on True Romance?complete with fluttering pillow feathers?you have to wonder whether anybody involved with the picture had any idea what the word "tone" means.

I admit I'm probably overthinking this?I'm a critic; that's what I do?but while watching One Night at McCool's, I was torn between admiration for the film's high level of craft and queasiness over how utterly amoral it is. True, in theory a comedy has no mandate to be anything but funny, and I laughed harder at this film than anything I've seen in a while (especially when Reiser was being weaselly or Jenkins was nervously fiddling with his priest's collar). But the level of lawless, shameless, recklessly acquisitive bad behavior on display in recent movies makes me wonder where the culture is headed. Between the Farrelly brothers, American Pie, the admittedly brilliant South Park film, Adam Sandler, Tom Green and all the other movies that are part of the New Vulgarity, it appears we've been conditioned to expect horrible (and horribly self-destructive) behavior from movie characters. It's like a corollary to New York Times columnist Tom Wicker's legendary observation about the difference between JFK and Nixon: where we used to go to movies to see people better than us, we now go to see people who embody our worst fears about what we could become.