People I Know

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/25/03)

There's some humor, if not actual irony, in the fact that in this picture the once notoriously press shy Al Pacino is playing an old-school publicist — one of those guys who, when they started in the biz, were called press agents. Pacino seems to be having a good time playing a sort he has observed much and cooperated with little. Pacino's Eli Wurman is more than old-school; he's washed up, living on the money and sympathy of his last paying client, movie megastar Cary Launer (Ryan O'Neal, who is a welcome presence here). When Launer solicits the haggard, hard-drinking, pill-popping Wurman (who's trying to salvage a glimmer of his activist glory days in the counterculture by frantically organizing a benefit — are you starting to detect the pattern of clichés here?) to get him out of a jam involving a hotsy-totsy starlet of allegedly depraved tastes, Wurman finds himself thrust into a shadowy world of dark secrets, where sex and power. . . No, Lord, I can't go on.

The picture, directed by Dan Algrant from a script by renowned playwright Jon Robin Baitz, smushes together The Bonfire of the Vanities (the novel, that is), True Believer, and Eyes Wide Shut, only it does so without being nearly as good as any of the aforementioned. And despite the fact that it's being touted as a quintessential slice of New York, the movie speaks of my adopted hometown with a veritable forked tongue. When Wurman's much-put-upon assistant Ross (Mark Webber) tells his boss that he's quitting to move back to Seattle, Wurman tells Ross that leaving N.Y.C. is a smart decision. Do Baitz and Algrant want to discourage ambitious young people from living here? Are they afraid of the competition or something? Given the quality of this effort, they have reason to be.

— Glenn Kenny