THREE OF HEARTS
By Owen Gleiberman
A cornered infidel in the revealing Two Girls and a Guy - A brilliant Robert
Downey Jr. wears his art on his sleeve
Who is Robert Downey Jr...? For more than a decade, he has been an actor of
shimmery imagination and verve--baby-handsome, with a sweetly effusive,
naughty-dog brashness and, at the same time, a barely visible hole at the
center of his being. In almost every movie, Downey mocks, he teases, he
flirts, he puts on preening stardust airs, raising eyebrows of fake intimacy
at his fellow actors. Playing characters as varied as the fast-lane hellion of
Less Than Zero (1987), the balletically miraculous silent-film clown of
Chaplin (1992), or the facetious Aussie tabloid-TV reporter in Natural Born
Killers (1994), he has glided across the screen without visible
deliberation--a harlequin put-on artist, literally making himself up as he
goes along. The paradox of Downey the happy charlatan is that since you can
never pin him down, he is, on some level, most revealing when he's being most
duplicitous. What he has never quite fulfilled is the audience's desire to
connect with a movie star's soul.
Until now. In Two Girls and a Guy (Fox Searchlight), a liltingly audacious
comedy written and directed by James Toback, Downey has--in every sense--the
role of his life as Blake Allen, a pathological romantic narcissist who lies
and poses as reflexively as most of us blink. In ritzy, deserted SoHo, two
women--Carla (Heather Graham), beautiful, sophisticated, and no-nonsense, and
Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a chipper, slightly damaged-looking punk
waif--stand outside of a chic apartment building. Each is waiting for her
boyfriend to return from L.A. As the two make small talk, they discover that
both, unknowingly, have been hoodwinked into a supposedly exclusive
relationship with Blake, the dreamboat actor who, for 10 months, has preached
his undying love and faithfulness to each of them. Embarrassed and incensed,
they decide to break into his apartment and give him the comeuppance he
deserves.
The two hide in the elegant, airy loft, and there, soon enough, arrives the
bastard himself--singing an aria, riffing into the mirror, high on his talent,
looks, and panache. Why don't they just kill him? The beauty of Two Girls and
a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his
duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost
physical state of curiosity. Like many women, Carla and Lou feel they've been
jerked around by men their entire lives, and here, at last, is the ultimate
hormone-driven con artist, the Uberlothario. They need to know what makes him
tick. What they don't realize is that they're about to try and pin down a
ghost.
Toback, a compulsive maverick who has worked on the fringes of Hollywood for
several decades, made his directorial debut with the gonzo street opera
Fingers (1978) and directed Downey, in one of the actor's first starring
roles, in The Pick-Up Artist (1987). Now, working on a budget of just $1
million, he achieves a poetic spontaneity and impudence. Two Girls and a Guy
never leaves Blake's apartment, but the lyrical camera work and tricky,
unfolding wit of the dialogue give it a delicate suspense that feels as
cinematic as most action films. When Blake is called on the carpet, he
sputters with hapless protest, spewing lies even between the lines of his
abashed explanations. Carla and Lou know that he's lying, and he knows that
they know. But he can't stop. Downey plays this knee-jerk deceiver as a
spiritual chameleon denied, for the first time, the shield of his charm. A
performer to the end, Blake fakes suicide, does Shakespeare, and sheds his
identity like a slow dance of veils.
The movie is ingeniously structured, with an intuitive balance of passion,
jokiness, and surprise. An outrageously protracted sex scene between Carla and
Blake arrives just in time for a mini-catharsis. Even more telling are the
frantic calls Blake makes (as if the telephone were an umbilical cord) to his
ailing mother, the only woman, it's suggested, he has ever truly loved. The
film's haunting theme song, heard in several versions, is 'You Don't Know Me.'
The lyrics apply, at first, to Blake's infidelity, then to his vision of
himself (it's the song Downey chants robotically into the mirror during an
unnerving breakdown scene), and, finally, to all three characters, as
deception--that is, the ultimate unknowability of any one person--is revealed
to be the secret metaphysic of relationships themselves. Those lyrics apply as
well to Robert Downey Jr., an actor who, by the end of Two Girls and a Guy, we
feel, at long last, we know after all.