[In the following review, Kauffmann discusses Hurlyburly as a reflection of contemporary American morality.]

The time capsule will be chock full. If such a capsule is arranged in the year 2000 to be opened a century later, and if it includes a fair sampling of films that reflect the moral climate of our time, it's going to be crowded. American films about American morals have been plentiful from the beginning, but as the century ends, the graph line is climbing. Just in recent months we've had Happiness and Your Friends and Neighbors and Very Bad Things and Bad Manners, among others. Now there's Hurlyburly (Fine Line).

If it's argued that these films reflect only a small portion of the population—about as un-Heartland as one could get—it can be countered that this is the way that our time thinks of itself, or at least is tacitly eager to be shocked at itself. Some scholars have argued that Restoration comedy did not truly represent Restoration society; nonetheless, this was at least the theater that the society of the time relished. American morality today is of course much more varied than the films above indicate, but that's not the most important point. These films in themselves, quite apart from the question of their verity, are manifests of what filmmakers have seen in one segment of society and what they believe will interest generally. Audiences may be shocked or secretly envious or blasé or even not quite convinced, but the sheer acceptance of these films (and they certainly are accepted) weaves them into the texture of our time.

Hurlyburly, the David Rabe play that was done successfully in several theaters, has been adapted by Rabe himself for the screen, with some opening-up of locale and some thematic emphasis. Most of the picture takes place in the Hollywood Hills house that is shared by two casting agents, Eddie and Mickey. They live fast-lane lives, particularly Eddie; their friends and their women are items along the freeway. The women in particular are mere items. Eddie, divorced, is a coke-head, though only in greater degree than the others. All these people, consciously or not, spend most of their time re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Says Mickey: “We're all going under, so how about a little laugh along the way?” Lest the film audience should be left wondering about the reasons for this nonchalant despair, Rabe introduces what he could do only skimpily in the theater: TV clips of the stupidities and horrors and cruelties of our time. (TV has replaced the telephone as the screenwriter's most essential prop.) These clips make cause-and-effect a bit heavy and pat—the cause was suggested vividly enough in the play—but in any case all of Rabe's characters are presented as products of the Zeitgeist, aware of it or not.

Nothing happens in this film. It was true of the play as well, but the film makes it even more evident. This fact, too, is part of the Zeitgeist: the author's disregard of traditional structure parallels the characters' disregard of traditional values. Incidents occur, both trivial ones and serious ones trivially regarded, but there is no central dramatic action. The film—again like the play—is not about climactic events in Eddie's or Mickey's life: it's principally about the way they live, as laid-back as possible without being laid out. Drugs and sex, quarrels and pathos provide topics of conversation, not much more.

Clearly such a mode demands interesting conversation, and Rabe generally makes good. But the film outstays its welcome. The last section, a sort of coda between Eddie and a girl who returns after a long absence, is attenuated. It feels as if Rabe knows he has struck the richest vein of his writing life—this play/film is his best work that I know—and is reluctant to let it go because he may never get another as rich. Also, attractively inflated though the language is, Rabe dishes out the rhetoric too impartially. Most of the characters speak alike. It's all very well for Eddie to say: “We have just verified, and I mean scientifically, the bitch has been proven to basically hate all men. She doesn't need to hate me in particular—she already hates me in the fucking abstract.” Eddie is apparently a somewhat cultivated man. But the roughest character in the film says things like “Hey, if I have overstepped some invisible boundary here, you notify me fast because I respond quickly to clear-cut information while, you know, murk and innuendo make me totally demented.” And there's more like that.

One member of the cast was a poor choice. Gary Shandling, a popular TV comic, plays Artie, a friend. (Artie drops in with a 16-year-old girl, Donna, who has been living with him for a while. “You want her?” he asks Mickey, and leaves her in the house “like a CARE package.”) Shandling has occasionally appeared as an actor but, so far, only appears to be one. Anna Paquin, who made her debut at nine in The Piano, does well enough as Donna, a bland, homeless, amoral waif. Robin Wright Penn is haunting once again as a troubled girlfriend of Eddie's, Meg Ryan is painfully cheerful as a hooker accustomed to abuse.

The three principal men shine. In a sense, two of them succeeded before the shooting started. Chazz Palminteri, the rough friend, apparently just needs to show up in order to be forceful, commanding. Kevin Spacey, as Mickey, is a much more skilled actor, but he, too, has become a presence who wins just by being there. We want to like Spacey as soon as he appears. Spacey, we should note, had a headstart on the role: he understudied Mickey in the New York production of the play in 1984.

Sean Penn, too, had a headstart. He played Eddie in a California production that was directed by Rabe in 1988, and he keeps going here. Eddie is not the pivotal character in any structural sense, but it is the biggest part and Penn has its measure. It's easy enough for an actor to simulate the progressive effects of coke-sniffing; Penn makes the coke-sniffing man a kind of fugitive—impatient, pathetic up to a point, quietly panicked. Penn showed talent as a writer-director in The Indian Runner, and he has consistently been a feral actor. Pessimistic as one may be about the film world, it's hard not to hope high for him.

Anthony Drazan's direction presumably reflects the advice of Rabe, who tells us, in the published play, that his own production differed from the first one (by Mike Nichols). In any case, Drazan makes the film seem fairly hot news from the front of lush, sterile living. He is greatly helped by Dylan Tichenor, the responsive editor. Together with the smoothly meshed cast, they give Hurlyburly its ultimate reason for being, its basic tone: wry dissolution.