A great romp with both Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt having the time of their lives. Especially fun to see Pitt do something completely different .
Writer/director Tom DiCillo (“Living in Oblivion”) pulls a rabbit out of his hat with this great double-take on the unlikely comedy-drama team of Michael Pitt and Steve Buscemi. The scheming Pitt of “Murder by Numbers” and the vacuous Pitt of Bertolucci's “The Dreamers” is replaced by a softened and updated Jon Voight figure, a different kind of midnight cowboy headed for a future where dreams come true on Broadway.
As for Steve Buscemi, if you are one of his legions of fans and loved him in “Fargo,” “Reservoir Dogs” and all the rest, you will not be disappointed in this film. Nasty, sullen and getting no respect all the way, rest assured he doesn’t die like his counterpart Ratso Rizzo in “Cowboy.” Not only does he live, but he exits the film with actual grace, even if it is graceful defeat. In fact, even when he died in “Fargo” the audience had to laugh because, nobody, and that means nobody, ever deserved it more. To paraphrase Martin Sheen’s line in “Apocalypse Now,” even the prairie wanted him dead! Buscemi reports that he is living to the end of more and more of his films every day. Huzzah!
In this film he is a down on his luck paparazzi who is always one step away from that great picture that will rocket him to stardom. Instead of the best picture ever taken, he gets the bum’s rush wherever he goes; lying, cheating and stealing his way into any privacy-violating situation that can possibly be penetrated by the scheming mind of the starving street photog. Enter Pitt, the naïve, trusting kid who just wants to get a break, working in show business any way he can. He gets his first job with the same status as Steve Martin’s in “The Jerk.” The sequence of Buscemi showing Pitt into his own private closet is priceless. No, he won’t have to do anything with it, it is great just the way it is.
The fact is that Pitt is great just the way he is. He seems to come out of a shell in this film. As hard as it is to believe there is chemistry between him and Buscemi. Or maybe Pitt just decided it was OK to shuck off that hard shell of “sophistication” that hovered around him like a cloud in his past films. He actually seems to be enjoying himself in this picture and we enjoy seeing him, all of him, for the first time. He can be a dynamic actor when he wants to be.
Alison Lohman plays K'Harma Leeds, the drug addled rock star genius who sees honesty in Pitt and paves the way for his rise to fame while Buscemi, well, doesn’t quite do as well. And Elvis Costello? OK, a short piece of the action but fun anyway. All-in-all a great buddy comedy set in the heart of the Big Apple, but without pandering to the city with all of land-mark shots. The film makes use of the city’s show business legends but focuses on the players from beginning to end. The shots of Buscemi’s crummy apartment are as accurate as the bum’s rush he gets just trying to do his job. A great laugh from beginning to end.
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