The New Age

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  October 21, 2008

  threefolddado

  It has it's ups and downs, but ultimately as empty as these people's lives.

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  October 20, 2009

  magnolia12883

  Michael Tolkin's dry, savage, sardonically-witty satire is yet another emotional X-ray of the morally and spiritually bankrupt in search of a change. Peter (Peter Weller) and Katherine Witner (Judy Davis) are a couple of upper-middle class L.A. yuppies living in a dreamland of op...( read more)ulence with no center. Peter is a show biz agent who "used to be the guy people wanted to be around" and now can't bring in more money than he's payed per year; he quits when his boss (Corbin Bernsen) lets his criticism of Peter go one step too far. Katherine seems to work in some semblence of high finance, but is losing clients as well. They both have affairs, and before long will be sleeping with different people in the same house. They've got about 30 days worth of money left, and then homelessness begins to sink in as a very real possibility. What can they do? They consult a "spiritual teacher" (Patrick Bauchau) who asks them what they're "good at." "Shopping and talking," Katherine admits with cold, cynical honesty. Almost inevitably, this translates to an idea: They'll open a trendy boutique designed to cater to the needs of the hip aristocracy. The name? Hipocracy! The opening party is somewhat of a success, though you can see the embarassment of a friend (Patricia Heaton) at paying $433 for a belt, but it's not long before the walls come crashing down around them. They could turn to Peter's father (Adam West), an aging, wealthy swinger for help; or could they? Soon, they'll be consulting a bald Pagan psychic woman, and many another "new age guru" to find a direction. The ending is sort of inevitable. Michael Tolkin has literally made a career of painting frighteningly vivid and accurate portraits of the morally and spirtually vaccuous. He previously wrote and directed "The Rapture" (1991) with Mimi Rogers as a woman prone to promiscuous and kinky sex, only to turn to sudden spirituality as a cure-all; that one ended with an Apocalypse of her own creation. Then there was his viciously satirical screenplay, adapted from his own novel, for Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) with Tim Robbins as a corrupt Hollywood studio executive who gets tangled in a darkly hilarious noir plot. With this film, Tolkin is back to his no-holds-barred examinations of the search for spirituality as a quick fix to the problems of the morally vacant. However, where as his previous directing effort more or less seemed to take its story and its implications as seriously as it could, here he seems to be more in the biting, ink-black mood of "The Player." Davis and Weller play the Witners as smart, stubborn, clueless; they are utterly unaware of what it means to "get by" and they joke that they might kill themselves if they ever had to "really work for a living"; one indeed wonders where they would be nowadays. Tolkin's film is dry as the desert, merciless and brilliant at seeing with absolute clarity and complete brutal honesty the predicament of his characters, the type of people they are, and the inevitability of the potential solution to their problems. All's well that end's well.

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• Patrick Bauchau
• Peter Weller
• Samuel L. Jackson
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