LIVING OUT LOUD

From the opening credits sequence - aerial shots of the city skyline set to jazzy, nocturnal music - Living Out Loud (1998) positions itself as a classic New York film, and over the next hour and a half, director Richard LaGravenese desperately checking off each requirement, eventually making the film a jumble of well worn reference points: George Gershwin and Woody Allen, jazz clubs and bored socialites. This indecisiveness and inconsistency comes to characterize the entire film.

A tale of two lonely souls in the big city, Living Out Loud stars Holly Hunter as Judith, a neurotic divorcee who often imagines her life taking fantastical turns, only to be jerked back to reality: her dismally disappointing lack of romance and friendship and the burning resentment she still holds for her ex-husband and his new wife. Things aren't all bad though: Judith lives in an improbably spiffy apartment in Manhattan (she works as a nurse, but must collect loads in alimony). It's here she meets down and out doorman Pat (Danny DeVito), who is also divorced, and mourning the recent death of his daughter. The two form an unlikely friendship and an even unlikelier romance, Judith seeking something more "real" than the comfortable upper class life she's come to know.

DeVito is truly made for these kinds of roles and he plays this one with an undeniably endearing genuineness. He's an unexpected leading man, and there is a subversive quality about pairing him with Holly Hunter, but much of this goes unexplored as the movie pushes their relationship to a more realistic and perhaps more predictable resolution than one would hope.

Along the way, they befriend a singer played by Queen Latifah, who performs regularly at a kind of jazz club around which their lives seem to revolve. Given a somewhat cringe-inducing role to play - essentially Judith's "exotic" new black friend - she handles it with dignity and warmth.

Holly Hunter's performance is manic. At varying points, we see her calm and collected, raging and destructive, and (in one memorable sequence at least) blissed out on ecstasy. DeVito and Queen Latifah draw a welcoming friendliness out of simplistic characters but Hunter seems to have more difficulty making Judith the likable, spunky heroine she is clearly intended to be.

It's hard to blame her though, she's at the core of a wildly inconsistent film. Indeed, Living Out Loud never seems to quite figure out what it's supposed to be. Is it a wry deconstruction of romantic comedies, a classic New York love story or a modern update of the novel of manners? (Alluded to during a scene in which Judith reads Edith Wharton's House of Mirth during a lonely dinner.) The film's frequent and unnecessary diversions don't do much to center it, from Judith's steamy encounter with a hunky masseuse to a drug-induced, hallucinated dance number at a wild night club.

Living Out Loud certainly has its charms - an engaging cast and a classic setting - but it proves that when a film tries to be everything to everyone, it can often end up as nothing at all.