# Two Girls and a Guy (1997)

### reviewed by
Eric Lurio

    review (c)1998 eric lurio

    Two Girls and a Guy

    Written and Directed by
    James Toback

How precisley do you film a minimalistic stage play? Consider what we've got here. The title says it all. We've got three characters [Okay, five, but one character (Frederique Van Der Wal) has two lines and another (Angel David) has a teensy part as a masher on the street] and a large empty set.

So what James Toback has done, is is put in a short introductory scene in the front of a SoHo apartment building, and put everything else in one large set. It works.

Carla (Heather Graham) and Lou (Natasha Wagner) are strangers. They are waiting in front of an apartment house in SoHo, and after the brief encounter with the aforementioned masher get into a conversation in which they have the same boyfriend one Blake Allen (Robert Downey Jr.).

So Lou climbs up the fire escape breaks into Blake's apartment, and buzzes Carla up, where they wait to confront poor, unsuspecting Blake.

Downey give the performance of his life. He sings! He dances! He does Hamlet! It's amazing the way he mugs at the mirror, how he squirms in front of the two p.o'd significant others. He weaves, he parries, he slices and dices! It's amazing.

Think of Shaquille O'Niell or Michael Jordan going one-on-two against two college woman's basketball stars. Graham and Wagner are perfectly fine, but they just can't keep up.

This is Downey's movie plain and simple. The closest thing one can compare it to is Robert Duval's performance in `The Apostle.' Powerful, effecting and enthralling.

Without Downey, this thing wouldn't have worked.

There's a sex scene which was reportedly cut down quite a bit in order to bring the film down from an NC-17 to an R. That was an excellent move as the sex scene was mostly gratuitous.

Without it the film would have been PG-13.

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