# Splendor (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    SPLENDOR

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     Samuel Goldwyn Films
     Director: Gregg Araki
     Writer:   Gregg Araki
     Cast: Kathleen Robertson, Johnathon Schaech, Matt
    Keeslar, Kelly Macdonald, Eric Mabius, Dan Gatto

Some decades ago Freud made his most notorious pronouncement, "What do women want?" Since then writers and movie-makers have obliged with their answers. We seem never to get over the idea that what the female of the species wants is a gentle Prince Charming, a guy who will take her to his condo in Maui for a weekend, get her a job in the film he's making, surprise her with a 3-carat diamond and whisk her off to the altar, a honeymoon in Tahiti, and a happy life ever ever after. He'll also remember--without being asked--to put the toilet seat down after he uses it. This may work for some but the idea that not all women are enamored of this ideal is nothing new. Seventy-odd years ago Noel Coward challenged Prince Charming in his "Design for Living," a play about a menage a trois focussing on a woman who lives with a painter, then selects the painter's playwright friend, finally marrying a third guy, a stuffy, financially successful fellow with whom she soon grows bored. Deciding that the conventional life is not for her, she bolts from her stifling union and heads for the sunset with her two unpredictable bohemians. Coward is all but saying society be damned: do what makes you happy and not what your traditional parents tell you is appropriate.

Filmmaker Gregg Araki is obviously inspired by this modern stage classic in fashioning his current offering, "Splendor." Araki is known to a generation of teens for his anarchic "Totally F***ed Up" (about a gang of gay, alienated L.A. kids who hang out, talk about sex, and complain about homophobia) and for his breakthrough film "The Living End" (a road movie about two twenty-something gays who similarly rage about their circumstances). This time, Araki considers the plight of a band of heteros of entirely diverse personalities who make choices and learn to cope with the difficulties inherent in their options.

A zany, postmodern treatment that may suggest the screwballs comedies of the 1930s, "Splendor" features Kathleen Robertson ("Dog Park," "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died") as Veronica, a pretty, promiscuous 23-year-old who has fled her small town for the life of a temp in L.A. and who hangs out with an irritating best friend, Mike (Kelly Macdonald) who recalls the exasperating Mari Hoff of Mark Herman's "Little Voice." Almost simultaneously meeting a witty music critic and unpublished novelist, Abel (Johnathon Schaech) and the brainless but muscular sexual athlete Zed (Matt Keeslar), she falls in love with both and develops a solution to the dilemma. She comes clean to her two boyfriends, generates a diabolical party game to get the two together, and sets both suitors up in her apartment where they learn to overcome their jealous rivalry and become a cohesive team. Becoming weary of their slacker ways and inability to make even a minimum wage, she walks out on them and takes up with a handsome and rich but terminally nerdish TV director, the appropriately named Ernest (Eric Mabius), who tries to overcome their lack of chemistry by giving her a role in a his drama, taking her on a whirwind courtship to his condo in Maui, and presenting her with an immense diamond ring.

Much of the comedy during this latter period comes from the arrangement made between former rivals Abel and Zed who--unlike Leo and Otto in the Noel Coward comedy-- continue to live together in Veronica's flat, mutually whimpering about the pitiful hand they'd been dealt. The scenes are divided by straight-at-camera narrations by Veronica, Woody Allen style, as she summarizes events to date and--completely absorbed in herself--informs us and also her friend Mike about her thoughts, feelings, and hopes for the future.

"Splendor" is a thin, one-premise comedy without the polished wit of the Noel Coward play that inspired the script. Still, Araki has taken a substantial step forward from his violent, anarchic previous works to assert his take on the old French theme of the menage a trois. Women in the audience are likely to root for the continuance of the threesome in spite of themselves, as the wholly compassionate new man in her life, Ernest, looks awfully good for someone faced by Veronica's predicament. Araki films the production with bold, comic-book colors that should appeal to MTVers as well as to adult looking for a zany, yet seasoned comedy, though some in the audience may hope for a break from the terminal frivolity of the enterprise. The choices that Veronica makes in the concluding scenes seem impractical: we wonder how long she can remain deliriously happy, a woman who seems not to have learned any lessons from her experiences. The acting is uniformly appropriate though Johnathon Schaech has been seen to better advantage in the off-the-wall "Welcome to Woop Woop." A hip sound track with works by The London Suede, Lush, and Everything but the Girl.

    Rated R.  Running Time: 93 minutes.  (C) 1999
    Harvey Karten

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