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Entertainment Harvard Man Film Review by John Demetry Adrian Grenier and Ray Allen in Harvard Man I'm only two years out of undergraduate school. Despite its specific focus and milieu, James Toback's perceptive new film brings back that recent past like an acid flashback. Harvard Man seriously attempts to put the sexual, chemical, and social experimentation of privileged (white, hetero) male development into cultural and philosophical perspective. It's ironic that Toback's coming-of-age film feels like the confused, yet exciting, work of a first-time filmmaker. However, Toback came of age - and into his artistic own - after over a decade of filmmaking with the 1998 Two Girls and a Guy and 2000 Black & White. Toback's own filmmaking maturation disproves the simplifications of Harvard Man - especially the ending. It lacks the often unnerving honesty that took Toback beyond the naval of his own void in Two Girls and a Guy and Black & White. Certainly, Harvard Man marks a development in Toback's unique style - but the reverse in terms of substance. Like his earlier films - The Pick-Up Artist being a fave - Toback's sexual and ethnic fascinations, and the resulting raunchy dialogue, keep Harvard Man vibrating. "How many of your students have you fucked?" Harvard basketball player, played by Adrian Grenier, gets off asking his philosophy professor, played by Joey Lauren Adams in a giddy bit of casting. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Grenier's mafia-daughter girlfriend. She delivers a few choice lines too: "I didn't know black people could swim" and "Suck my dick." This two-girls-and-a-guy setup reveals the problems with the casting of Grenier. In Two Girls and a Guy, Toback gave Robert Downey, Jr. the freedom to expose his troubled psyche. Toback saw his own reflection in Downey, Jr.'s actor bombast and masculine dread. That's the revelation that makes Two Girls and a Guy a near-masterpiece of the era still rocking from the sexual revolution. Grenier, here, is only serviceable. In Harvard Man, Toback continues his existential swirling camera that began with Two Girls and a Guy, his first collaboration with amber-lighting cinematographer David M. Ferrara. Not only keeping the characters' position tentative, demanding definitive vectors of action, the moving camera also signifies a director in search of the existential truth that the actor will provide. Either Grenier isn't up to it or he's never given a chance. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Rebecca Gayheart Unlike with Downey, Jr., however, Toback locates Grenier amidst a cops-and-robbers milieu. That connects Harvard Man to the sprawling hiphop epic Black & White. In Black & White, Toback didn't rely on any central character to anchor the volatile class, race, and sexual cross-section. Toback anchored Black & White himself. Its diagram of the body politic was actually a mind-heart-cock-&-soul self-portrait. Harvard Man fails to be that incisive. Still, Toback hypothesizes on the psychosexual basis for the FBI. Grenier states it baldly to agents played by Eric Stolz and Rebecca Gayheart, who have a taste for three-or-more-somes: "How does it feel to have a guy in a position of authority getting off by doing you in for your transgressions?" What about the psychosexual genesis of the movie director? In a bit of near-autobiography, Toback connects the crime Grenier commits with the drugs-and-sex limits he also pursues. (Note Grenier's tendency to listen to classical music and rock at the same time - accounting for the film's own Bach-'n-roll soundtrack.) Grenier pretentiously endeavors to break down the edifice of "I." To express this, Toback uses the jump-cutting and crosscutting he premiered in Black & White. Now, he adds another dimension to the space-time-shifting. Toback actually shows a decision being made crosscut with the results of that decision being acted out. The technique posits Hollywood-style narrative as another bogus edifice. Toback develops an ingenious stylistic and narrative advance - but he puts it to the service of an obvious foreshadowing of his own artistic career. (Jump-cuts are like the photographs Grenier takes at the end.) It's as if Toback believes that art frees him from scrutiny. Alan Jensen (Adrian Grenier) gets mixed up with Cindy Bandolini(Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her mobster father, played by Gianni Russo The best artworks by hetero white men are the new albums by Bryan Ferry (Frantic) and David Gedge's Cinerama (Torino). Toback would do well to take a listen. Frantic and Torino represent works that raise self-reflection and cultural observation to philosophical heights. That's what Toback wants to do - which is more than you can say for most American filmmakers. Ferry (inspired by Oscar Wilde) and Gedge (recalling Marcel Proust) always have their ears on the prize: the aesthetic invention, humor, and fun of pop while also scrutinizing their own relationship to pop culture and sexual mores. Listen no further than Ferry's cover of The Drifters' "One Way Love" or Gedge's "Close Up." These songs are so emotionally rich and idiosyncratic that the artists open themselves to - and acknowledge - queer projection. Toback almost recognized this process through Downey, Jr.'s gay-gay turn in Black & White and, maybe, achieved it through Downey, Jr.'s mother-loving fear in Two Girls and a Guy. Unfortunately, in Harvard Man, the concluding freeze-frame close-up on Grenier's eyes doesn't account for the expansive, challenging vision of Two Girls and a Guy and Black & White. It's just naval gazing.

For More ... Related Stories All Over the Guy Storytelling Lola Related Sites Harvard Man: Official Site

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