Bright Lights, Big City.

Bright Light, Big City

I READ ABOUT thirty pages of Bright Lights, Big City before the rightful owner of that particular copy of Jay McInerney's novel reclaimed it, and I never felt impelled to pursue the matter. It seemed to me like a reasonably competent piece of cheeky postgraduate writing: Holden Caulfield Gets Older But Doesn't Grow Up, yuppie subdivision, with lots of coke-snorting and girl-chasing, but nobody--least of all the novelist--concerned with where the money for this lifestyle was coming from. There were some fairly clever verbal tricks and, had I gotten further into it, I might have enjoyed, I suspect, the author's account of his fictional alter ego's misadventures as a fact-checker for the not very fictional Gotham magazine, McInerney having spent half a year in The New Yorker's awesome fact-checking department.

But, like so many novels whose stock-in-trade is the monologue of the writer/hero replete with cute observations about what's going on around and inside him, this one does not translate well to the screen. McInerney, who is credited with the screenplay, and his director, James Bridges, have tried to preserve some of the book's hallmarks via the intertitles and the narration in the second person singular: the novelist/narrator cozying up to, yet finally disassociating himself from, the hero through this somewhat hectoring, hortatory chumminess. (Actually, that second person singular comes from an early novel of Michael Butor, but no matter; it's a device that can work in a novel but cannot be sustained on film, where its unavoidable intermitencies make it seem strained and mildly ludicrous.)

The story covers a week in the life of Jamie Conway (in the book, the "you" had no name, which made him more piquantly autobiographical) as he moons over his lost Amanda, the fashion-model wife who left him; as he discos and parties and dopes up with his friend Tad Allagash, the Vergil to his Dante through the late-night downtown scene; as he mishandles his overpedantic research assignment at Gotham and loses his job; as he meets a sweet Princeton philosophy student who exudes "good womanhood" even as Amanda exuded "bad"; and as he finally comes to terms with his mother's slow and painful death from cancer, which keeps haunting him in neatly spaced flashbacks throughout the movie.

Some reviewers thought the gravity of these flashbacks, the pious over-specificity of this grief clashing with the more generalized juvenile weltschmerz dimly attributed to the breakup of the juvenile marriage, tipped the movie into an unwelcome, bottom-heavy self-pity. I myself found these scenes no different from the rest: glossy portentousness converging with glossy shallowness on a collision course that wrecks them both. I gather that the book wanted to be more fun than "heavy," but the movie tries to be edifying, with demolishing results.

Nothing convinces. The disco sex is too studiedly, antiglamorously lurid; the work situation at Gotham is treated with a certain reverence that takes most of the satire out of it; the dope-taking is continuous but without noticeably lightening anyone's head any more than his pocketbook; the brief retrospect on the marriage does not tell us enough to sympathize with Jamie's obsession to track down Amanda; and the dopeless but copy scenes with the angelic Princeton girl can't put a tiger in this leaky tank. Even Gordon Willis, who has shot New York City so dazzlingly in the past (notably for Woody Allen), doesn't seem to have his heart or his light meter in it any more, and the picture has an unaromatically anywhereish look about it until redemption and peace descend on our hero on Gansevoort Pier as he eats a piece of fresh bread he pays for dearly while enjoying the (in more ways than one) gratuitous dawn light suffusing his sky, his city, his life.

It might have been more bearable if Jamie were not played by Michael J. Fox, who invests everything he does with a kind of spiritual baby-fatty puppydoggishness that could give lessons in stickiness to flypaper. Shorter in stature than any of the girls he sighs up at, and saturated with a sweetness that with all his good will he cannot make curdle, he doesn't allow you to forget for a moment that all his problems could be settled by the right date for the junior prom. Neither Tracy Pollan, as his good angel, nor Phoebe Cates, as his bad one, gets a chance to act, which does not, however, prevent Miss Cates from proving that such a change would be wasted on her. As the supposedly wicked Tad--though the movie makes him quite nice and harmless--Kiefer Sutherland is certainly better than Fox; Swoosie Kurtz, as an oozingly sympathetic checking-department colleague, is so patient you wonder what she's doing off a monument; Frances Sternhagen and John Houseman are suitably stuffy Gothamites, though Jason Robards may be a mite too precious as a nonstop guzzler and name-dropper on the editorial staff. As the dying mother, Dianne Wiest agonizes philosophically and philosophizes agonizingly with considerable poise.

But what does it all come to? The movie tries to capture the mood of a moment that is already gone in a moralistic style that is primly post-modern; it suffers simultaneously from datedness and prolepsis. And a kind of lightweight heavyhandedness.