No Love For Hustlers

EVERY FILMMAKER has a bit of hustler in him. This is especially true of filmmakers determined to work outside the system. Whether artist, showman or hack, such a director knows he can't get the money, material and cooperation he needs without buttering people up and making them feel they're amazingly special creatures with talents the rest of the world doesn't see.

Actors and behind-the-scenes craftsmen who've gotten a taste of Hollywood pampering appreciate the hustle because they're hustlers, too. They believe they have talents rarely showcased in Hollywood's focus-grouped, factory-sealed extravaganzas. They don't want to be reliable and employable; they want to be dangerous and memorable. Deep down, they fancy themselves provocateur-philosophers. They'll do anything for a chance to strut, strip and otherwise defy expectations (even take a pay cut).

When hustling filmmakers and potential collaborators meet and mingle-flattering, flirting, bumming cigarettes and ostentatiously choosing not to answer their cellphones-there's an electric charge in the air. For a moment, they've ceased to be meeting-takers and social climbers and become modern cousins of the bohemian Gilbert & Sullivan performers in Mike Leigh's period piece Topsy-Turvy, converging to drink, screw, sing and feel brilliant. Everyone's using everyone else for career advancement or personal expression (in the movie business, the two are often indistinguishable), yet the manipulations instill joy rather than remorse. Gatherings like this help make art possible.

Writer-director James Toback doesn't merely understand this dynamic; he's staked his career on it. Since 1978's Fingers-which gave Harvey Keitel, fresh from being overshadowed by De Niro in Taxi Driver, a star part as a pianist who supports himself by collecting mob debts (talk about commerce subsidizing art!)-Toback has financed small, personal films on the backs of name actors looking to stretch. Like disciplined, less pompous cousins of Spike Lee's films, Toback's have tangled plots and laundry lists of obsessions (sex, race, greed, deception) and are coherent enough to pass any auteurist test, yet they also double as de facto records of the striving required to create them.

Toback's improvised, acidic, nearly irresistible Black and White (2000) worked both as a millennial consideration of race relations (as practiced by rich folks and wannabes in the entertainment industry) and as a gallery of celebrities Toback daydreamed about casting in a movie, from Brooke Shields to Mike Tyson. His charming sex farces The Pick-Up Artist (1987) and Two Girls and a Guy (1997) gave perennially under-challenged star Robert Downey Jr. the rare chance to showcase an undistilled version of his specialty, opportunistic sincerity; more than one reviewer observed that in both pictures, the hyperverbal Downey seemed be playing a puppyish fantasy version of James Toback. (If one chooses to walk that interpretive path, the three-way sex farce Two Girls starts to seem a practical improvisation-the kind of film a quick-witted director might devise after offering the female lead in his next project to two actresses, and having both accept.)

The end product of Toback's hard work is a remarkable filmography that combines social and political satire, low humor, improvised drama, unfashionably 70s, male-centered notions of sexual "liberation" and a strong (though artfully disguised) element of autobiography. By watching Toback's films, one gets an equally strong impression of East Coast American life during the period when the film was made, and the various personal and financial forces that drive James Toback-the filmmaker, the entrepreneur and the man.

The first act of Toback's latest, When Will I Be Loved, promises to cover the same sociopolitical bases as Black and White, complete with just-for-the-hell-of-it cameos by hiphop playas (Damon Dash!), faded ingenues (Lori Singer!) and athletes (for no apparent reason, Mike Tyson is back!). But it's as meandering and disconnected as Black and White was energetic and on-point. In due time, though, Toback settles into a multifaceted look at the hustle, exemplified by an alternately sweet and repellent trio of characters drawn into a relationship that mixes sex with money.

Frederick Weller plays Ford Welles, a fast talker who wants to "blow up" and doesn't care how. To this end, Welles simultaneously pursues the attention of Damon Dash and a fictional Italian media mogul named Count Tommaso (honey-voiced charmer Dominic Chianese, who played Arthur Fox in Fingers), who might be Silvio Berlusconi before his ascent to Italy's highest office. Ford wins the notice of both men by promising to serve as a procurer for model-actress-whatevers, a category of big-city striver Ford knows quite well. (In a funny but totally extraneous scene that confirms Toback's status as a Hugh Hefner disciple, Ford enjoys a naked foursome with three young ladies against a leafy cliff in Central Park. Not only are we denied the chance to meet these women or learn their names, Toback never even gives us a good look at their faces.)

Ford can't talk Dash into taking his transparently pimpy bait. But he entices Tommaso by offering up the one woman whose services might cost Ford something emotionally: artist-student Vera Barrie (Neve Campbell), Ford's rich, spoiled, super-sexed, irresistible girlfriend, who's like Holly Golightly by way of Penthouse. Asking price: $100,000.

You might think it's pretty lame to replay the plot of Indecent Proposal and Honeymoon in Vegas 12 years later. Vera thinks so, too, and expresses her bemused incredulity to Ford, who counters that by sleeping with Tommaso for money Vera would bravely seek an answer to the "fundamental existential question" that most folks are too cowardly to face: "What am I capable of doing?" This is pure undergraduate bullcorn, of course-a crafty hustler's appeal to an amoral college chick's intellectual and sexual vanity-but Vera goes for it.

Or maybe she only pretends to go for it. Thanks to Campbell's amazingly seductive opacity (she seems open to anything and closed to everyone), we're never quite sure if she's a smart sex kitten embarking on a test-your-morality adventure, or an already-rich gold-digger seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Either way, once Vera invites the Count up to her place, things get really complicated.

Toback attacks this material with the serene, sensual confidence of a man who's lived every role in the triangle. At times When Will I Be Loved seems to sympathize with all three central players. Ford Welles seems the most obvious Toback figure, a fringe-dwelling young hustler who can talk his way into (and out of) almost anybody's bedroom or checking account. "I'm a mentor, I'm not a hustler," he insists, and almost seems to believe it. (The character's marvelous name signals the director's conflicted attitude toward the hustle of filmmaking: It combines one of America's greatest and most ruthless industrial tycoons with one of its greatest and most persecuted cinematic auteurs.)

Vera, too, seems representative of a certain type of artist figure: the free spirit who freely gives herself to others without guilt, yet has become accustomed to a certain level of privilege and seizes on an opportunity that might allow her to stay there for a while. (One cannot imagine Vera suffering for her art; she's like a wannabe director and trust-fund baby who inherits a fortune, then spends it on a townhouse.) Chianese's Count is another, far more poignant Toback manqué: an aging but still virile man who still dreams of being appreciated for his masculinity and charm, not just for the financial opportunities he can provide.

Tommaso's status as Toback figure would be more apparent if Toback didn't give himself a stingingly funny cameo as Professor Hassan al-Ibrahim ben Rabinowitz, a Jewish professor of African-American studies who interviews Vera for an assistant's job. "I'm gonna try to mix races, mix colors, mix creeds," the professor tells students, summarizing Toback's own filmmaking strategy. The professor is at once idealization and indictment, the visonary indie filmmaker and lifelong fringe-dwelling hustler-a uniter-not-divider who's always on the outside looking in and who seems to get a contact high from being near ambitious, sexy young people.

The character reminded me of a college professor I once knew-a velvety-smooth gentleman who slept with every attractive student who would consent to his affections, and whose fascinating intellectual provocations often seemed like glorified foreplay. That even the dumbest students he targeted could see through him did not prevent him from being irresistible, perhaps because there was no subterfuge in his method. His appetites were all on the table, his intellectual curiosity was genuine and his transparency ensured that the exploitation was mutual, and thus not destructive: You give me a new experience, and I'll return the favor. Or as the professor puts it to Vera, "Can I be of use to somebody who's on a journey?"

The question could apply to almost every character in the movie. They're all going someplace-or at least they convince themselves they're going someplace, because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate. Hopeless materialist Ford wants to be part of the jet set he worships. Vera just wants to be supported in the lifestyle to which she's become accustomed-perhaps because she wants to make art without interference, perhaps because she wants to be free to live the pampered life without pretending she's interested in art. The Count, like an Orson Welles figure, seems to have gained the world and lost his soul. He's a regal loner, surrounded by yes-men and hustlers, most of them far more resourceful and potentially nettlesome than Ford. One senses that he pines for things no man can have: one's youth, perhaps, or a sense of self not deformed by the responsibilities of work and money.

The problem, of course, is that all of Toback's characters wish to arrive at their final destination by means of a shortcut, represented by the $100,000 deal-and in this story, as in life, a shortcut does not necessarily lead to the desired destination. These characters are nowhere near as innocent as they believe themselves to be. Even their pretensions toward culture are suspect, as evidenced by Tommaso bawling out an assistant sent to buy Glenn Gould recordings but who returned with CDs by another performer. "If I ask you for a Mercedes, would you bring me a Lincoln Town Car?" snaps the Count, unknowingly wallowing in a kind of intellectual materialism.

After 81 minutes in the company of these fascinating, deluded people, one wonders if any of them are even capable of feeling love-even the Count, who appears to possess a sensitivity Vera and Ford lack, but whose worldview is poisoned by the distrust that comes with wealth. Suffice it to say that while the movie's title is melancholy enough (note the MIA punctuation mark), the implied answer to its question is sadder still. Adults know better than to ask. o