Joey Lauren Adams in Harvard Man (2001)

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James Toback is an independent filmmaker who doesn't really follow the typical indy path. This film doesn't really try to tell a simplified story with personal passion or niche appeal, for example. This plot, on paper, is just as contrived and silly as anything Joe Esterhaus or anyone else in Hollywood ever penned. If you're sick of mind-reading CEO vampires from outer space who fall in love with SEC investigators with mafia dads, Toback is not your go-to guy for an antidote.

Here is the summary:

Step 1: A Harvard student needs $100,000 because his parents' house has been swept away by a tornado, and they can't replace it. Luckily for him (a) he is the point guard on the Harvard basketball team (b) his girlfriend is the daughter of a mob boss. Therefore, he agrees to shave a bunch of points against Dartmouth in return for a hundred grand of mob money.

Step 2: Unfortunately for Mr Basketball, the mafia princess lays off her action on a bookie who is actually an undercover FBI agent. The FBI figures out why she wants to bet so much (her boyfriend's insider position), and goes after the basketball player.

Step 3: Since the mafia head can't afford to let Mr Basketball turn state's evidence against him, which is what the FBI really wants, he sends a couple of (very dumb) hit men to kill the lad.

Step 4: As luck (or contrivance) would have it, Mr Basketball is also sleeping with one of his teachers who loves him and is a highly sexual creature. She gets into a messy multi-person sexual liaison with the FBI agents and allows the kid to photograph it, which therefore allows him to blackmail the agents into stopping the investigation. When the investigation is closed, the mafia head calls off his hit men.

Pretty believable, eh? He is sleeping with two women, one of whom controls all the crime on the Eastern seaboard, the other of whom controls all the FBI agents in the same territory.

If you think the plot is silly, how about the casting? Start with Joey Lauren Adams as a professor of philosophy at Harvard! At age 28! And it could have been worse. Much worse. Toback really wanted Leo DiCaprio to play Mr Basketball. I suppose he also wanted Jennifer Tilly to play the head of the Harvard physics department.

While the individual elements sound like a typical screwball Hollywood movie, it is the details that differentiate it:

Toback has always been fascinated by the process of juxtaposing the powerful and the street people, then sitting back and letting them all riff. In Black and White, he had them come together in Central Park. In this film, they come together along the banks of the Charles: mafia hit men, philosophy professors, FBI agents, basketball players, and the eager parents of future students. Once he has assembled the pieces, Toback weaves them into a jokey, cynical overview in which nothing is ever what we expect it to be. For example, the film begins with a lecture on how people stereotype Italians by thinking that they must all be gangsters. Then the film proceeds to show us several Italian characters, 100% of whom are gangsters. The basketball players discuss Wittgenstein. The philosophy professors and the FBI agents discuss sex. Everyone can be bought. The characters who seem to be the least powerful end up wielding the most power.

For some reason necessary to the screenwriter's vision, the basketball player is a serious druggie. Before the Holy Cross game, we see him smoking a joint big enough to choke both Cheech and Chong, as well as the entire Rastafarian sect. Before the Dartmouth game, he took enough acid to turn Rush Limbaugh humble and liberal. The film makes no attempt to explain how Mr Basketball can play in this condition. Frankly, I don't know why he needed to throw that second game. He barely understood that he was in a game in the first place. Unfortunately for the audience, his drug-altered state is shown from his P.O.V. with the usual movie clichés - fish-eye lens, Kai's Power Goo distortions, slowed audio. you know the drill. These convoluted perceptions occupy a lot of running time. Way, way too much, as I see it.

Really not a very good movie, but the offbeat dialogue and the cynical world view may hold your attention, if you have an inclination for such things. C-

Nudity Report: Dark, remote breast exposure from Polly Shannon.

Critics Vote: Roger Ebert 3/4, Filmcritic.com 3.5/5. Other independent filmmakers found the film disappointing.

IMDb Summary: IMDb voters score it 8.0/10.

Box Office: Made for a modest $5 million dollars, it grossed $13 million in the USA despite never appearing on as many as 300 screens. It set all box office records in Mexico.

DVD Info: Widescreen anamorphic or full screen version. Director’s commentary.


Written by: Scoopy …courtesy of Scoopy.net