The man from Elysian Fields

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating * * *)


It's an odd marriage of talents which gives birth to a strangely misshapen creature. Hickenlooper, a learned cineaste, shows some mastery of the medium in the service of a storyline which is as unpredictable as its ending is conventional.

Garcia plays Byron Tiller, a struggling writer whose bitterness about the commercial failure of his critically acclaimed novel has morphed into writer's block. He can't bring himself to tell his wife (Margulies) that his publisher has turned down his latest manuscript, and from small deceptions larger ones grow: He meets Luther Fox (Jagger), whose high-class escort agency gives the film its name, and succumbs to his suggestion that a little moonlighting would help the family finances.

When his first client turns out to be the pretty wife of literary lion Tobias Alcott (Coburn), Tiller finds himself caught up in an odd menage a trois which looks like it might offer him a way out of the literary desert.

The story is a deliberately unsettling blend of drama and comedy intended as a moody meditation on the corrupt heart of the creative impulse and it is discharged with considerable panache. It is handsomely shot, the slinky jazz soundtrack adds to the atmosphere and Coburn, who died in November, turns in a gruff, knowing performance which keeps things afloat.

Jagger, by contrast, despite having some of the best lines, attempts an eerie aloofness but manages only to look like a sedated undertaker and the subplot involving his infatuation with a client, played by a wild-eyed Huston, is distracting.

In the end, the story's substance is fatally overwhelmed by its considerable style. Inexplicably, Tiller's devoted wife doesn't wonder why his "business meetings" keep him out all night, and the saccharine ending to a resolutely eccentric film is rather unsatisfying.

Cast: Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn, Anjelica Huston. Director: George Hickenlooper. Running time: 105 mins. Rating: M. Screening: Lido. Strikingly uneven in tone but a good deal more engrossing than it has any right to be, this faintly Faustian fable is directed by the man who wrote Hearts of Darkness (the brilliant behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now) from a script by one of the writers of television's Barney Miller.