Grade: B
Watching James Toback’s new film is rather like having an out-of-time experience. “Harvard Man” is apparently set in the present–certainly the cars and clothes indicate as much–but, appropriately for a piece loosely based on the writer-director’s own college career in the mid- 1960s, its plot seems a throwback to a much earlier era. The picture deals with recreational drug use in a way that recalls the anti-establishment flicks of the swinging sixties, while toying with chronology in a coy, old-fashioned (and, it must be said, confusing) fashion. Nonetheless the end result is weirdly entertaining and even engaging.
The protagonist is Alan Jensen (Adrian Grenier, looking more than ever like a Harry Hamlin mini-me), a Kansas native who’s an undergrad at Cambridge and playing point guard on the school’s habitually unsuccessful basketball team. He’s also involved with two women: Cindy Bandolini (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a Holy Cross cheerleader who just happens to be the daughter of a notorious mobster (Gianni Russo); and his philosophy prof Chesney Cort (Joey Lauren Adams, who should really play Renee Zellweger’s sister sometime), who fills his head with deep thoughts about Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein in class and meets his physical needs elsewhere. Jensen’s faced with a crisis when a tornado destroys his parents’ uninsured home. Desperate for cash, he arranges with Cindy’s dad to throw a game, but things don’t turn out as expected. Soon the FBI is involved, as are a couple of doltish mob hitmen, a chem student who provides our hero with three big hits of undiluted LSD, and a comically Viennese doctor (John Neville) with an antidote for bad trips.
The outrageousness of all this is hardly an accident. “Harvard Man” might have been played as a glum cautionary tale, but in Toback’s hands it becomes a lark–flashy, florid and blissfully over-the-top. True, it’s uneven. Some of the mob humor–especially the scenes involving Michael Aparo and Scottie Epstein as the two dunderhead hitmen–is too broad for the age of “The Sopranos,” and one gets the uncomfortable feeling that the overwrought philosophizing isn’t intended to be quite as absurd as it winds up sounding. A major coincidence involving Chesney and two of Bandolini’s employees (Eric Stoltz and Rebecca Gayheart) isn’t well choreographed. The carnival-mirror effect that’s been devised to portray Alan’s drugged-out perspective is eye-catching at first, but eventually it’s overused. And the shift in chronology is both intrusive and unnecessary.
But there are compensations. At one point the drugged-out Alan imagines that a poster hanging in his dorm room comes alive during a conversation he’s having with Chesney–an amusing invention. Al Franken and his daughter Thomasin show up for a hilarious scene in which they encounter a happily high Jensen during their tour of the campus. A bitchy confrontation between Gellar and Gayheart gives the former a chance to diss her Buffy gig. Grenier and Ray Allen have an easy camaraderie as teammates on the Harvard squad. And throughout one can savor a marvelously eclectic background score–mostly of various works of Bach, but with some contemporary tracks mixed in with repeated doses of the mournful adagio from Brahms’ op. 18 sextet. The music is a fine complement to David Ferrara’s crisp, elegant cinematography.
The acting, on the other hand, isn’t so impressive. Grenier exudes energy as the glib, smoothly self-confident Alan, and even has a touch of charisma about him. But he’s too short to be entirely convincing as a starting guard even on a Harvard team, and at times you have to wonder what a true star would have made of the role. Gellar and Adams (who hasn’t gotten many opportunities of note since “Chasing Amy”) are both effective but limited. Stoltz and Gayheart, on the other hand, seem uncomfortable.
“Harvard Man” isn’t the equal of the sixties classics it wants to emulate, but at least it shows that the Toback of “Fingers” (1978) wasn’t a one-shot wonder. Despite his exalted reputation as an auteur in some circles, all of the director’s films since that promising debut have been deeply flawed, with the two most recent (1997’s “Two Girls and a Guy” and 1999’s “Black and White”) nearly unendurable. This new effort may disappoint some of his more fervent admirers as too conventional and jokey, but it actually represents a considerable improvement over those harsh, pretentious flicks.