# Less Than Zero (1987)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    Less Than Zero (1987)
    * *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Bret Easton Ellis's flash-in-the-pan novel becomes a weak and sentimental movie. Casting of Robert Downey, Jr. is an asset, though.

I read LESS THAN ZERO when it was first published, and several other times since. Each time I've come back to it, it seems to contain that much less. It wasn't that profound a book to begin with, and what little insight it did have (Los Angeles is a terrible place for anyone to try to be a moral person, for one) has not survived the transition to the big screen. LESS THAN ZERO, the motion picture, is even less absorbing than the book that spawned it. It's just not a good movie, despite the presence of three good actors (Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, and Robert Downey, Jr.) who are given potentially interesting roles to play.

McCarthyis a young L.A. denizen, Clay, who goes off to an Ivy League university. His girlfriend and best friend (Gertz, as "Blair", and Downey) enter into a kind of relationship of the damned, and then a panic-stricken Blair calls Clay at Christmastime. Maybe he can help straighten his friend out. Maybe not.

Downey has drifted into the coke-and-decadence orbit that many people fall into for no particular reason. In Downey's case, it's boredom, more than anything else. He's got pretty much everything he could ask for -- he's more or less been given a recording studio by his father -- but none of it is enough. He has never learned how to really enjoy any of it, and so of course he's thousands of dollars in debt to a drug dealer (James Spader, also good). All of this is played out against a glossy, 90210-ish backdrop of pool parties, rock clubs, coke binges, and so on.

It's funny how many individually good things there are in the movie -- and sad how they never quite add up, probably because the movie's agenda is too cut and dried. Instead of getting a story about lives in decay, we get a simpleminded parable about the dangers of cocaine; it's on the level of an ABC AFTERSCHOOL SPECIAL. The worst thing about LESS THAN ZERO is how, like a bad gangsta rap video, it winds up glorifying what it's supposed to be attacking -- partly because it doesn't know how to be angry enough about its subject, I think. It winds up being more like a resigned sigh.

And yet in the middle of this movie there are some very good performances. Jami Gertz takes what could have been a one-note role and populates it with small tics and mannerisms that make it real and substantive. Spader, as the drug dealer, sounds like a human being, not a stupid Hollywood conception of what a drug dealer is supposed to sound like. And Downey, despite the fact that the script he's given marches him clean off a cliff, works nicely as the damned soul. What was missing was a stronger backbone to the movie, a more definite sense of purpose other than the easy target of drug addiction, to make it really worth the experience.

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