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One
Night at McCool’s has a promising opening. Matt Dillon is a jilted, luckless
bartender named Randy. When we first see him he’s entering a bingo parlor to hire a
hit-man named Mr. Burmeister. Burmeister turns out to be Michael Douglas, decked out in a
pompadoured wig that’s three shades darker than the hair sticking out around it. At
that point, with the camera panning around the bingo players’ intense faces, and
Randy launching into his explanation of who he wants killed, McCool’s look like it might be a
Sturges-Demme-type comedy about American originals. By the end of the scene, though,
it’s hard not to notice there’ve been no real laughs despite its rat-a-tat spray
of gags. And so it goes. McCool’s throws
jokes at the audience like alms for the poor; unfortunately, they’re all pennies.
The object of Randy’s anger is his
girlfriend Jewel (Liv Tyler), whom he saved one night from an abusive boyfriend outside
McCool’s, the dive where Randy works as a bartender. Randy takes Jewel to the house
he inherited from his mother, and she’s instantly enamored with the dilapidated
hovel—so enamored that she coolly murders her boyfriend and moves in with Randy.
Randy is smitten enough with her that he’s willing to tell the detective
investigating the case (John Goodman) that he shot the boyfriend in self-defense during a
robbery. Detective Dehling believes that he’s lying, and when his investigation
brings him into contact with Jewel, he becomes infatuated with her, seeing in her the one
woman that can take the place of his cherished dead wife. At the same time, Randy’s
smug cousin Carl (Paul Reiser) is nursing his own crush on Jewel, but where Detective
Dehling sees a virginal young woman in need of protection, Carl sees a sultry sex-kitten
that can fulfill his Penthouse Forum fantasies.
McCool’s central joke is
its three-ply narrative: as Randy recites his version of the events to the hit-man
Burmeister, Carl and Detective Dehling are doing the same thing with a psychologist (Reba
McEntire) and a priest (Richard Jenkins) respectively. The three versions of how the men
came to be infatuated with Jewel dove-tail and overlap as their paths intersect, and we
see how they view Jewel, and each other, in the way their flashbacks are tweaked to form
contradictory perspectives on the same events. (Where Randy sees himself as a Cocktail-type dynamo behind the bar, Carl sees him
as slobbering drunk who swills alcohol out of a toilet plunger, while Dehling is convinced
that the nebbishy Randy is physically abusing Jewel.)
When Randy is fired from his job
because of the shooting, Jewel sweet-talks him into turning to burglary as an answer to
their financial woes, but they’ve barely begun their career as criminals when they
have another corpse on their hands. By degrees
Jewel is revealed to be more than the dysfunctional waif that she first
appeared—she’s actually a cunning femme
fatale who’s playing the three men against each other in order to secure the
domestic security she’s always craved. As Jewel fiddles with her paint samples,
trying to decide how to remake Randy’s house into the nest of her dreams, Carl and
Dehling both realize that the increasingly depressed ex-bartender is the only thing
standing in between them and the woman of their dreams.
One Night at McCool’s
misfires on almost every level. It’s not much fun to criticize the work of a man who
died last year, but there’s no getting around the fact that Stan Seidel’s script
isn’t any good. Jokes such as “You ought to see what she does with my hose” sound like they came from a
vaudeville for preteens. McCool’s has a
grab-bag of wildly uneven tones, veering without reason between parodies of old movies
such as The Lady From Shanghai
to outbursts of realistic violence. (When did attempted rape become the stuff of comedy?
And why are horny priests still considered
funny?) Seidel attacks American materialism as if he’s wrestling with a puppy, and he
fails to exploit the satiric possibilities in the connection between Jewel’s yen for
upward mobility and the Madonna/whore fantasies that the men build around her.
Director Harald Zwart tries to spritz things up with some modest visual
effects, but his thinking is just as pat as Seidel’s: the scene in which Jewel washes
Randy’s car is indistinguishable from the soft-core beer commercials that it pretends
to satirize. (It comes as no surprise that Zwart has been directing TV ads up to now.) The
flashback device that we think is a setup goes on so long that it becomes the body of the
movie; by the time we’ve been brought up to the present, there’s only enough
time left for all the parties to converge Doris Day-style at Randy’s house. And the
climax—a string of homophobic jokes culminating in a four-way gun-battle in which the
characters inflict realistic-looking wounds on each other to the beat of the Village
People’s “Y.M.C.A.”—is somehow too trivial to even be offensive.
The
movie’s most satisfying acting comes from two unexpected quarters. Country-western
singer Reba McEntire, who was also a kick in Tremors, is
surprisingly polished and precise in the minor role of Carl’s
therapist—she’s the one adult in the movie. Of the leads, only John Goodman has put any heart
into McCool’s. All too often Goodman’s
booming voice and physical aggressiveness make him seem like a hip George Kennedy, but as
the grieving, lonely Dehling he displays flashes of the sweetness and vulnerability that
stole True Stories from
under David Byrnes’ nose.
But no one
in the movie’s patchwork cast can save One
Night at McCool’s. This may be the first time that Matt Dillon has ever been
boring, and it doesn’t help that a glaring incongruity surrounds his character:
it’s impossible to believe that a bartender who looks like Dillon could ever have
trouble getting laid. A larger problem for the movie is the casting of Liv Tyler as the
vamp Jewel. Tyler has grown into a plush, upholstered woman, something like the Melanie
Griffith of Something Wild, but her personality is so
inexpressive that watching her perform is like watching a couch trying to act. She
doesn’t come close to convincing us that she’s capable of turning men against
their basic nature; none of her bombshell poses results in an explosion. And it was a terrible
idea to cast Andrew Silverstein in even one role, much less two of them. Silverstein is so
unattractive a human being that you don’t need to remember he was once known as
Andrew Dice Clay to be repelled by him.
