Bright Lights, Big City

Written by Jay McInerney

Directed by James Bridges

At the USA Paris

LESS Than Zero was a lousy book and a worse movie. But Bright Lights, Big City was an excellent book and is now a fine film. Really.

The movie version of Jay McInerney's bestseller is getting a bad rap which seems to confirm the bad reputation it earned before it was even released. Oh no, the detractors said, another up-in-coke account of yuppie New York. Oh no, they added, Michael J. Fox plays an arrogant asshole once again. But BLBC is worth your viewing time. It is quite well done and true to the spirit and plot of the novel.

For those of you who have not read the book, there is nothing particularly yuppie about the story, aside from its audience and the vast quantities of coke that the narrator, better known as "you," consumes through the fast-turning pages. No one in the story works on Wall Street. No one has a VCR, drives a BMW or listens to CDs. In fact, the protagonist, who in the film has a name, Jamie Conway, works as a fact-checker at a magazine modeled on the stodgy old New Yorker. Even his best buddy, the flashy Tad Allagash (Kiefer Sutherland), is in advertising--not investment banking--although he certainly does come off as a New York nemesis, lost in the party world of models and money.

And Jamie (Fox) certainly has seen too much of the bright lights in the big city when we first encounter him. It's six a.m. on a work day, and Jamie is still lingering in a stupor at the Palladium, staring at a skinheaded female bartender who's asking him what's wrong. "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning," an overvoice tells us, quoting the first line of McInerney's second-person account.

So just what kind of guy is Jamie Conway? A decent sort from upstate New York who can't come to terms with the fact that his mother (Dianne Wiest) died of leukemia or that his model wife Amanda (Phoebe Cates) has left him for good. Instead of dealing with reality, he is continually in pursuit of a good coke deal.

MICHAEL J. Fox comes to this role with the disadvantage of having already established himself as the glib Young Republican Alex Keaton, who's forever offering us the secret of his success. The yuppie image of Fox's earlier roles biased critics against him at the outset. On the other hand, it has given Fox plenty of ammunition to flex his thespian (although rather slight bodily) muscles just enough to give an extremely convincing performance that both Siskel and Ebert admired. And it is quite admirable. Jamie Conway is a truly desperate soul, quite close to dulling his own smug-young-New Yorker edge.

Fox also has multiple amusing moments, usually when Tad Allagash is in tow. In one particularly funny scene, the pair release a vicious ferret in the office of Jamie's former boss while the fiction editor who has rejected his stories falls flat-on-his-face drunk before an armor ornament. And all of Jamie's forays into the Manhattan night are funny in their pathetic way, and this is precisely the sort of humor that Fox is fit for.

While Fox proves exceptional in his aspiring-writer persona, the other performances vary. Vacuous Phoebe Cates proves perfectly adequate to play vacuous Amanda, but Kiefer Sutherland is too awful to be believable as the awful Allagash. In the midst of all these city slickers. Tracy Pollan is a preppie breath of fresh air as a Princeton graduate student with whom Jamie spends a rare drug-free evening. Otherwise, it will come as no surprise that Oscar winning actress Dianne Wiest is competent as Jamie's beloved, bedridden mother, and Swoosie Kurtz is decent as what appears to be the only decent woman in New York City.

Even if you fail to find Bright Lights, Big City to be a profound picture--which it can be for some--it is never boring and always entertaining. The only scene that I completely hated was the last one, which is equally despicable in the novel. Rather than involving cocaine, it involves a loaf of bread. And while it is one of the few scenes without drugs, it is completely dopey.