# Shadow Hours (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    SHADOW HOURS

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     CanWest Entertainment
     Director: Isaac H. Eaton
     Writer:  Isaac H. Eaton
     Cast: Balthazar Getty, Peter Weller, Rebecca Gayheart,
    Peter Greene, Michael Dorn, Richard Moll,
    Johnny Whitworth, Corin Nemee, Daniel Faraldo, Benjamin
    Lum, Frederic Forrest, Brad Dourif,
    Christopher Doyle

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher told the class, "Don't go to night clubs. They're bad places." I hadn't the foggiest idea what she was talking about. Years later my mother advised, "Don't go to night clubs. They'll take your money and you'll have nothing to show for it" (as though goods and not services were the only thing worth spending money on). I never did become much of a night-club fly but my teacher and my mom could never have imagined what goes on in some of these dark and evil places nowadays in big bad cities like L.A. For others who have rarely if ever descended into the abyss of an Ayatollah's nightmare, "Shadow Hours" is an education, and a far cry from what you'll learn from your Sociology 101 textbook. This noir movie, written and directed by Isaac H. Eaton, has the quality of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" with a touch of David Fincher's "Fight Club," plus an assortment of characters that would put a scare into Fellini. "Shadow Hours," which emerged at a recent Sundance festival, is a modern morality fable whose sound track and rapid-fire banter give the movie an absorbing edge without the enigmatic quality of the aforementioned "Lost Highway."

Interpreted in a psychological vein, we could say that "Shadow Hours" dramatizes a favorite expression of the Freudians and their ilk--those who say that the patient cannot begin to make progress toward a cure until he has descended to the depths and, absent of defenses and horrified by his torment is ready to make the painful transition to a healthier life. Eaton's film features a weak individual, Michael Holloway (Balthazar Getty of "Lost Highway"), who has just cleaned himself up after a long bout with alcohol and drugs, has settled into a miserable, $7.50- an-hour graveyard shift at an L.A. gas station, and worries alternately about the bums surrounding his office and his pregnant wife whom he can barely support. He meets Stuart Chappell (Peter Weller), who drives a sleek new Porsche and describes himself as an author who could use Michael's help in researching a book he is writing on L.A.'s sordid night life. While their relationship could remind you of that between "Fight Club"'s Tyler and Jack, Stuart is not Michael's corporeal alter ego but rather a combination of devil and guardian angel who serves as the young man's escort into the ignoble life of L.A.'s night people.

Throughout the story, images abound of masochism in the guise of freakish performance artists, gambling joints where the stakes are bets on bouts of Russian roulette, and a genuine fight club--all among the conceptions laid out by Eaton in this Gorkian lower depths, all taking place during an investigation by Det. Steve Andrianson (Peter Greene) into a murder that may or may not have been committed by the rich and debonair stranger.

Despite the film's desire to present a morality tale of one man's struggle to extricate himself from a despondent life of poverty, drugs and alcohol, Eaton may be happy enough simply to confront his viewers with an eerie sequence of impressions unwittingly confirming 92-year-old author Jacques Barzan's thesis in his current best-seller, "From Dawn to Decadence." We could, I suppose, read into this theme the notion that we human beings, having reached the depths of depravity following the world's most brutal century, have nowhere to go but up. But I suspect that titillation is this picture's principal aim, and insofar as this succeeds in captivating its viewers, "Shadow Hours" is not a bad choice to make when faced with alternatives like "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle."

Rated R. Running time: 95 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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