Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew Hamlin Joint

Passion Is The Enemy Of Precision Dept.: I didn't know what to expect from Zero Effect. It came at the end of a long day of film watching wherein I'd already watched Robert Duvall's incendiary The Apostle (if he isn't award the Best Actor Oscar I shall have no choice but to assassinate each and every single member of the Academy) and the stolid Mrs. Dalloway (well-meant, but not well-made enough to keep me from falling half-asleep). But my movie date wanted to stick around and the concept of mercurial Bill Pullman as a private investigator so private he never meets his clients or indeed anyone in the outside world without a disguise, flashed a flicker of recognition across my radar.

Going on six years after my college graduation, I find that no fewer than four of my closest college friends have sunk into misanthropic hermitage; they no longer answer their telephones, return phone or e-mail messages, or accept offers to appear at parties, films, concerts or any other activity requiring a venture into public. So with the idea of hearing some news I could use, I sat down as the lights went down one more time.

The opening credits flash the detective's false signatures over Elvis Costello's "The Mystery Dance"; the dark wiry drone with bewildered fathoming of sex and other compulsions proves a fitting motif. The directorial debut of Lawrence Kasdan's son Jake, who also wrote and co-produced, and a neither-fish-nor-flesh curiosity, Zero Effect features Pullman stars as Daryl Zero, world's greatest detective, master of disguise, protean metalinguist of human behavior, and hopeless loon, who keeps a base of operations high in a windowless Hughesian penthouse furnished with a bed, a sturdy computer station semi-circle, and a Centurion-sized refrigerator stuffed with Tab(tm). His only employee, Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller) puts on a suit and shaves carefully and flies all over the country taking meetings to procure clients for the boss, but Zero's sweaty, amphetamine-popping, tunafish-straight-from-the-can madness makes him itch under the skin; he dreams, not so quietly anymore, of getting out.

The task at hand is to unmask a blackmailer who's leaning on a Portland, Oregon lumber magnate, Gregory Stark, (Ryan O'Neal as a bloated, jaw-jutting barracuda), but the client is uncooperative, Arlo misses his girlfriend (Angela Featherstone), and the undercover Zero begins to fall for his prime suspect, an Emergency Medical Technician played by Kim Dickens (you may remember her as Vincent Gallo's girlfriend in Palookaville), who begins flirting with Zero at the health club where she, O'Neal, and the incognito Pullman (passing as an accountant) all work out. The detective watches the client and the suspect simultaneously, but as Dickens draws closer to Pullman, the question of what she knows grows, not to mention the questions of who and what she is.

No one decided--no one apparently cared about deciding--what specific sort of Hollywood fodder was supposed to come out the nozzle here, and in his inability to color inside the lines of any stock form the younger Kasdan--accidentally, perhaps--ended up with intriguing characters in affecting existential circumstances. When we first see Arlo, Kasdan jump-cuts between a morning business meeting with Stark, implacably baiting him for the hook, and a midnight bar-table yell session with a friend, shouting and slapping out the intolerableness of his boss. The meaty, punctilious O'Neal hardly draws much sympathy, until you watch him execute the impossibly Byzantine directions left by the blackmailer ("Pull over when the last three numbers on your odometer match the three-digit number that appears on your beeper, watch for a new three-digit number and take that number bus northbound") for the cash dropoffs. And Pullman's Zero stands in for all the appearance/reality divergences we've ever conceded in ourselves, one minute inscribing "passion is the enemy of precision" in his endless interior-monologue memoirs, the next screaming and kicking motel furniture to shreds while Arlo stands by shaking his head. Whom amphetamine destroys, it first makes mad.

A great deal of Kasdan's story slumps into a sinkhole of sense--I never did figure out why Stark needs his lost keys back if the blackmailer is withholding a strategic key from him--but that's less important than the arches of interaction. Zero and Arlo are trapped in a dance with one crazed leader and one ragged follower; Stark huffs and puffs after the blackmailer in a parallel involuntary minuet. When Arlo meets Stark he jumps upon a vector of the second dance, swinging his own leader into a new orbit and necessary rendezvous with O'Neal's leader.

This romance of Pullman and Dickens, a quiet, metered pattering of clockwork-choreographed footfalls, makes one of the season's peculiarly touching romances. Not a believable romance by any stretch of the imagination--I haven't seen a believable screen romance since 1996's The Whole Wide World (yes, you should see that film and no, its basis in a real story does not automatically bestow believability). But I've seen love stories I can root for if I concentrate on the loveliness inherit in two people meeting mid- trajectory and ignore the Acme Anti-Reality Bazookas necessary to launch them; file Titanic under that heading, or Good Will Hunting. File Zero Effect there as well, with the mitigation that Rube Goldberg, not Wylie E. Coyote, got them off the ground.

As the lovers leave the well-lit greasy-spoon en route to their first and only night in bed, as Zero leaves behind the receipt in violation of everything he's persuaded Dickens of in his accountant guise, the piano tinkling of Nick Cave's "Into My Arms" rises. The song offers a mouthful of an opening line--"I don't believe in an interventionist God/But I know, darling, that you do"--but if God did intervene in human matters, Cave continues, he'd ask him "to make bright and clear your path...and guide you into my arms." Thus does the filmmaker sweetly blow a kiss to the machinations of higher forces that might sometimes breathe such results into human lives, if not in necessarily in our own, even as he hint our hero's having his first intimate encounter for which presentation of a major credit card is not a prerequisite.

Zero Effect is packaged and sold as a comedy, and that's logical inasmuch as, corporately, it has to be packaged as something, but it is not always laugh-out-loud funny, though the viewer can work up some giggles over Pullman's insistent mania for minutiae (the case revelations of a poem Stark wrote in college aren't nearly as important as his godawful rhyming of "towards" and "birds") and pseudo-insights in crisp Buckaroo Banzai-style voiceovers ("if you're looking for a specific thing, your chances of finding it are pretty bad, because out of all the things in the world, you're just looking for one thing, but if you're looking for something, your chances are pretty good, because out of all the things in the world, you're bound to find some of them"). The younger Kasdan's story collapses into itself and leads the viewer up many unfinished off-ramps, but it seems, as Goro Shimura said of Yutaka Taniyama, to make mistakes in the right direction. I wish it the softly glowing shelf-life of the cult film, with enough viewers so that if one should joke about The Case of The Man With Mismatched Shoelaces in a crowded airport, a face only two or three bodies back would break into a smile.

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