Two Girls and a Guy (1998)
Director: James Toback

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When I first wrote this, Heather Graham was the blonde of the moment. Two years later the crown had passed to Reese Witherspoon. The crown should lie uneasily on their heads. It almost ensures that a comic actress will be underrated, and the only recent examples of blonde comediennes with solid careers are Goldie Hawn and Meg Ryan. Both are talented, but both serve as warnings to bright young girls.

Hawn, in particular, has played into the much less interesting side of her talent, giggly Goldie, to stay on top, and she's played it not just in movies but as a public figure as well (even after her transition to harder-edged comedy in the '90s). Ryan is never quite daddy's-little-star-of-the-home-movie as Hawn has been, but they both act helpless to get us to lean towards them. I like Ryan. She's a graceful goof, with the supple, springy movements of a marionette whose string-puller is in a crisis. Even in Sleepless in Seattle, a movie I hated sitting through, she's constantly scoring both plusses and minuses. She plays Annie Reed as Hawn might have played Annie Hall, fluffier in her confusion, less erratic, less liable to remote miseries. She may be "adorable," but with her blonde hair falling out of its elaborate braids and talking through every doubt to whoever happens to be around, she seems a totally unself-conscious woman (that's what averts the Goldie curse). When she sings along to "Jingle Bells" on her car radio, she starts singing back-up, bouncing out "horses, horses, horses, horses," and it's inspiredly ordinary. So she's not as cloying as Hawn tends to be in comedy, but she's still pretty goddamned cute ("Jingle Bells"!) and her scripts have been so weak that although her cuteness is spry the movies still over-rely on its appeal to the mass audience. (She's made me laugh hardest when her acting was most energetically stylized, as the sisters in Joe vs. the Volcano and in the hard-ass version of the flashback in Courage Under Fire.) Thus, despite her success, part of you agrees with Joanna Lumley's Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous when she reads out a fashion magazine headline, "Meg Ryan, Movie Star," and sneers, "I'll be the judge of that."

Like Hawn, Heather Graham can have an almost pleading look in her big eyes, as if the characters were fledgling actresses auditioning for life. But unlike Hawn, Graham doesn't work that look out of character to get us to pull for her. No passive object of projection, Graham puts the ambiguity of a Lolita into her characters.

Diggstown (1992) was the first movie to use the fact that Graham isn't just a "blonde," but it undeservedly failed to find its audience. Boogie Nights (1997) was the first movie to "get" Graham that did find its audience, but it didn't use her best. The script overdid the dark side of her gaze. When she got back at the boy who had made fun of her in high school she suddenly seemed like some avenging demigoddess of female sexuality, which didn't work with the realistic high school background story or the movie's amorphous sympathy for the porn workers. In Bowfinger (1999) Steve Martin got at the dual nature we sense in Graham with the role of a midwestern girl who steps off the bus in Hollywood and immediately begins sleeping her way to stardom. Her behavior is conscious and corrupt but in a way that seems distinguishable from conscious corruption. She's too quicksilver a fish to net with a melodramatic concept like "evil." And Martin gives her the quintessential line for this character: "I'm from Ohio, but I'm not from Ohio." (Quintessential for the actress as well, whose career has estranged her from her midwestern Catholic parents, a retired FBI agent and a housewife.) Bowfinger formulated Graham's complex appeal as a blonde, but it was already a step back for Graham, after her amazing performance the year before in James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy.

Of all the American directors who in the past forty years attempted to make a career of their intuitive drives, Toback is the only one who has maintained his youthful adventurousness as well as a controlling intelligence, which he always had to an unusual degree. Once John Cassavetes, for instance, established his signature style with Faces he stuck to it to the end, but that style was to renounce control, or the appearance of it, in favor of putting the actors forward as much as possible. He had an idea, one that widened the stylistic possibilities for all American moviemakers after him, but he didn't work as an idea man. Toback, a former English professor, does, and further has the knack that most academics lack of letting himself go, of exposing himself in his ideas.

He has always brought more mind to bear on his movies than any American director who works so feverishly. Most of Scorsese's finest hours, for instance--Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Life Lessons--have depended on literary minds-for-hire. And Paul Schrader, who worked on the first two, has as a director become decidedly more settled than you'd expect from his best writing. Even Affliction, a brilliant study of impacted male rage, and thus a worthy pendant to Taxi Driver, builds slowly and calculatedly. (Taxi Driver is both the hallucinatory aura preceding a seizure and the seizure itself; Affliction is an autopsy waiting to happen.)

In Two Girls and a Guy, a shoestring release, Toback works out a premise: Blake (Robert Downey, Jr.), a young, not quite successful actor, arrives home from the airport and finds in his apartment the two girls he's secretly been dating simultaneously, spoiling for a confrontation. It's infinitely more interesting than a What's New Pussycat kind of harem-fantasy farce, first of all because Toback clearly lets the actors, especially Downey, improvise much of their material, in the manner of Cassavetes. With its premise of a man wooing two women with word-for-word identical romantic patter and getting his comeuppance in what plays like real time, the movie could have been billed as John Cassavetes's Merry Wives of Windsor.

Cassavetes movies, however, are acts of display, of barely shaped exhibitionism. The extroverted scenes center on emotions but are not really emotional, openly driven as they are by the actors' performance impulses. The typical Cassavetes scene is messily actory, an unanalyzable amalgam of the actors' ideas of the characters and of themselves and, probably, of what they hoped would impress the maestro. In his movies acting comes to seem synonymous with alcoholic hipster bravado, and it's no less hammy for being unconventional. Two Girls and a Guy owes something to this process, but finally has a pugnacious, edge-flirting, pointed articulateness that makes it recognizable as Toback's work and no one else's. The ideas about what people do with their excess of romantic and erotic feelings come out of the acting cauldron surprisingly distilled.

Downey received most of the praise, probably because people already knew he was good, and for the more legitimate reason that he represents the headlong side of Toback. It's perfect that in real life Downey is an addict, because it's that reckless side of himself that Toback is getting at in Two Girls and a Guy, the compulsive seducer who, even when confronted with the girls he's been lying to, is still trying to figure out how to play his hand. This means there's no bottom to hit with Blake. When the last defenses are failing he turns toward the mirror and improvises a moment of moral revelation and redemption. But conviction soon deserts him and he slides into random face exercises. In this scene the moment when self-knowledge might be possible turns back into acting before our eyes (the fate of an unholy percentage of our resolutions). The scene gets at that core of personality that all the analysis in the world is unable to amend.

That Downey stands in for Toback you might remember from having seen him in Toback's 1987 charmer The Pick-up Artist. What makes Two Girls and a Guy interesting in a new way is that as the three-way confrontation progresses in Blake's apartment (where most of the movie takes place), the two girls differentiate themselves more interestingly than by hair color. In the set-up scene on the street when the two girls figure out Blake's game, Natasha Gregson Wagner as the brunette Lou starts out amateurish, with skittishly fast readings. But when the girls take Blake on, Wagner finds her voice, varying her delivery between spiky thrusts and seductive suggestions of the possibilities in a three-way relationship. Finally, she's never less than pleasantly natural (better by far, in fact, than her mother, Natalie Wood, ever was, though her voice has familial echoes) and at her best her eyes have the frisky promise of pleasure of a Naiad's.

Lou is a "modern," downtown tootsie, which seems to mean bisexual, mainly. From the very start Graham's Carla comes across as the bigger character. Graham allows you to read Carla's thoughts on her face. When she rolls her eyes sideways at Lou's friendly chatter in the opening, you recognize a girl whose interest the run of humanity is not smart enough to hold. This legibility does not mean that Carla is emotionally unprotected. She approaches emotion as a mental activity, and she figures out Blake's feelings like a literary critic parsing a character in a novel. You can see why Blake wouldn't have wanted to choose between them: Carla is the brain, while Lou is the one who monkeyed up his fire escape and tossed a plant through his window to let herself and Carla in. But to Toback the mind is where the real action starts. Upstairs before Blake has arrived, and paying more attention to Lou now that she knows who she is, Carla wants to know where they stand. Not to gain the expected feminine advantage but just to know. She asks Lou, "Did you really love him?" and gets in reply, "Yeah, I did." When asked in her turn, Carla raps out, "I told him I did and I thought I meant it. Who knows? I felt something." I don't think there's ever been a character in a contemporary "relationship" movie, male or female, who conveyed more of the half tones and quarter tones of her creator's mixed thinking.

With responses like this, Carla unexpectedly becomes not only the most intelligent character of the three, but the most astute player, the most in control. We're impressed when Blake first enters and Carla presents Graham's starlet smile to him. It's great because we know that it's a consciously misleading production. When Blake's buying-time chatter gives way to a more direct challenge--"How the fuck did you get in here?"--the challenge underneath Carla's put-on smile rises through the limpid depths to the surface. But this is nothing compared to the intellectual swagger Carla shows later, when, smirking at Blake, she asks him in a way that cues him rather than cuts him off, "Did it excite you to know that you were always in danger of being caught? It must have. It excited you. It had to," while leading him up to the bedroom. When she insists, "You were aware," you sense that she wants him to have been aware because awareness is more exciting to her. Whether Carla's control is such that she gets what she wants, or whether it's a kind of ex post facto mopping-up mental control (that is, spinning theories that help her reformulate what can't be helped into the kind of experience that intrigues her) isn't perhaps decidable.

Downey actually seems depleted in the movie--this is more than a few uncomfortable beats after a young star can no longer be called "promising." (Though he seemed refreshed two years later in Toback's Black and White. His scenes accompanying Brooke Shields benefited from the free hand of the movie more than any other element of Toback's sketch-essay. Downey and Shields at times made a crazy-believable, arty-socialite Manhattan mismatch, deserving of a movie of their own.) But Graham is still in her first flush and the truly unusual thing for a female character is that all of this sexual struggle passes through her brain.

Graham is so good that you admire Toback more: in this no-budget movie he pushed his artistry even farther by identifying with the woman who probes and analyzes the mess in a way totally beyond the man who caused it all. In The Pick-up Artist Toback made the familiar sexual distinction between Downey as the romantic male and Molly Ringwald as the practical female. (The contrast between Bob Eberle's and Helen O'Connell's verses in the Jimmy Dorsey version of "Tangerine" is as incisive a pop cameo of this as we've had.) Toback makes the distinction here, too, but Blake and Carla are more fully worked out and both seem to represent sides of himself as well.

In identifying with Blake, Toback is well past the confusion he felt as a Jew at Harvard longing for WASP girls, who he then felt were "too good, too white, too blue for you, O funny, too-hip, freaky Jew...." 1   Downey's Blake is not identifiably Jewish, and his male confusion is far more general than an ethnic condition. When, as a young man Toback wrote of his need to earn "a sufficiently strong sense of my own powers and self, a force sure enough to provide certainty that I could hold my place with anyone, that, ultimately, I didn't even need to try, that my own heritage could stand alone," 2   he probably didn't imagine that a supra-ethnic overview could come unaccompanied by answers to the mysteries of sexual relations. That's the revelation here, with respect to Toback's work taken together. The situation is finally beyond Blake who has nothing further to say (since he feels all language is lies, which is why he prefers music) except that it seems wrong to throw what he and Carla have away. He wants to continue and see what happens.

It's up to Carla to formulate a theory that permits them to do what they feel like doing anyway. She has the brainiac's way of using concepts to "open" doors she's already half way through. And this only semi-convincing theorizing permits the movie to be true to its nature as less of a production than most movies, while remaining true to comic conventions. Blake may be a bloated clown, but unlike Falstaff he deserves one of these merry wives. However, because the concept requires Downey to work so intuitively, Graham's role is more important to hold the movie together. As Carla her eyes seem to have f-stop settings corresponding to degrees of understanding, interpretive connections. No starlet has ever presented a more actively intelligent face to the camera as the focus of a performance. And Graham isn't less sexy because she's working from the head down--her body follows and she knows how to use it as an actress.

Still, I fear her career may suffer from how petite and fragile-looking she is. The actresses of the previous generation who were able to span the gap between comedy and drama--Diane Keaton, first and foremost, Jessica Lange, Sigourney Weaver, Christine Lahti--were tall women. Mainstream Hollywood may never see more in Graham than the co-starring blonde thing, her smiling fate in the second Austin Powers movie. There's a zero sum game in American moviemaking according to which the less money you risk, the more you can risk in terms of style and ideas. This may lock enormously talented people out of big-time attention. But then is there an audience, has there ever been, can there ever be in a popular medium, for this kind of challenging work? Two Girls and a Guy is at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from Meg Ryan's career breakthrough movie When Harry Met Sally, which dramatizes the clichés about the romantic and sexual differences between men and women in comfy little sit-com vignettes. If the price of success is letting yourself become the bonsai version of Meg Ryan that Hollywood has cultivated with audiences, then maybe it's best that Graham stay on the sidelines of major notice.

1. a Jew at Harvard: Toback 25. (return to text)
2. a sufficiently strong sense: Toback 25. (return to text)