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Fall of the Master of the Universe courtesy of the Man of the Moment, a gargoyle's vantage point. "I'll suck your dick for the rights." The preening opener is magnified out of Touch of Evil and ends on a note from La Dolce Vita, Altman helps himself to it for The Player. Glittering perdition, all told a deserved fate for the Wall Street bond trader (Tom Hanks) who drags his dachshund into a downpour for an extramarital call and instead phones his brittle wife (Kim Cattrall), and whose wrong turn into the Bronx ends in a hit-and-run accident involving his mistress (Melanie Griffith). ("Oh my God, natives!" drawls the belle at the sight of a couple of Black youths.) "We nail the WASP," a motto avidly followed by the celebrity-hungry preacher (John Hancock) and the D.A. gunning for mayor (F. Murray Abraham), flames fanned by the journalistic sot (Bruce Willis). "I know it has its funny side, but it isn't funny." What to do with the yuppie Eighties? Tom Wolfe's answer is transmuted into film, Brian De Palma has Preston Sturges in one hand and Dr. Strangelove in the other, the arduous failure of the production perfectly embodies its subject's arrogance and delusion. (The turd in the toy wagon is a presiding symbol, the split-screen's got Geraldo Rivera in it.) Don Giovanni at the opera, ragingly analyzed by the AIDS-stricken poet (André Gregory) and laid over the rich brat's sojourn behind bars while the screen turns shameful red, as well it might. A lie in the courtroom rights things the truth won't, Morgan Freeman is already deus ex machina. "If you're going to work in the whorehouse, there's only one thing to be..." The best thing about this is how it pointed De Palma away from the prestigious path and toward Raising Cain. With Saul Rubinek, Alan King, Kevin Dunn, Donald Moffat, Richard Libertini, Mary Alice, Clifton James, Robert Stephens, Beth Broderick, Adam LeFevre, Kurt Fuller, Rita Wilson, Richard Belzer, and Kirsten Dunst.
--- Fernando F. Croce |