TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052190/0521420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.4 KB | 79 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 78

Doing the Ultimate Deal


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CADILLAC MAN
Directed by Roger Donaldson
Screenplay by Ken Friedman


    You have met guys like Joey O'Brien (Robin Williams) before,
most recently in Tin Men. He is the scuzzball salesman of every
consumer's nightmares. For him, selling is more than a job and
less than an honorable passion; it is not unlike date rape,
against which neither resistance nor entreaty is an effective
countermeasure. In Cadillac Man, he is discovered pulling up
to a stalled funeral procession, to see if he can unload a
replacement hearse on the desperate undertaker. While he's at
it, he takes a shot at selling the bereaved widow one of his
luxury cars, coyly suggesting it might be a nice memorial to
her late, apparently generous husband.

    Larry (Tim Robbins) is not entirely unfamiliar either. You
have met him most memorably in Dog Day Afternoon. He is the
not-quite-bright, entirely too volatile urban terrorist of
every passerby's nightmare. For he is the kind of weirdo who
one day decides to air his grievances by invading public space,
grabbing a few hostages and seeing if the resulting police and
media attention will ease the throbbing in his temples. Larry
rides his motorcycle through the plate-glass window of Turgeon
Auto, in grungy Queens, N.Y., where Joey works. He is looking
for whoever is having an affair with his wife Donna (Annabella
Sciorra), a secretary at the dealership.

    But if glib Joey and loopy Larry are reasonably familiar
figures, their juxtaposition in the same movie is wonderfully
unexpected. Joey has troubles enough: debts to the Mafia and
his former wife, affairs with two unstable women (Fran Drescher
and Lori Petty) and a falling sales record. In fact, the only
problem he has avoided is adultery with Donna. Yet when Larry
starts waving his rifle and demanding to know who is cuckolding
him, it is Joey who takes the blame.

    Altruism -- his life for the many? No way. Loyalty to his
boss, who is the real culprit? Quit kidding. Joey sees talking
the would-be terrorist out of mass murder as the maximum test
of his salesmanship. In his time he has cut the sticker price
and upped the trade-in allowance on everything but death. He
cannot resist the opportunity to do this ultimate deal.
Besides, Larry is his kind of customer, infinitely suggestible,
infinitely distractible.

    And infinitely funny, in Robbins' variation on his
performance as the dopey, fire balling pitcher in Bull Durham.
Thought is for him a face-scrunching agony. Ideas -- rare
occurrences -- render his countenance beatifically beamish. But
since life is mostly utterly unpredictable to him, he is
atwitch with dangerously unmediated impulses. Williams is his
opposite, a man racing to keep up with a runaway brain, yet
striving, hopelessly, to project an air of normality.

    Theirs is a terrific comic duet, and writer Ken Friedman has
backed them with a rich chorus of disapproval, including all
the customers and salesmen also trapped in the showroom.
Director Roger Donaldson, who has had his ups (No Way Out) and
downs (Cocktail), is in his best voice here. It is the
lower-depths snarl, angry and frustrated. It provides Cadillac
Man with a steady bass line and makes it a rarity among recent
films -- a comedy that is in touch with a recognizable reality.