The man in the elysian field3/17/2023 ![]() ![]() With its highly original and provocative storyline, `The Man From Elysian Fields' exerts an almost hypnotic pull on its audience, seductively drawing us into the lives and the complex relationships of its numerous characters. ![]() His very first client turns out to be the lovely young wife of a dying novelist who exploits Byron not only for his sexual prowess but for his skills as a writer, devising a scheme to get him to assist her husband in completing his final work (given his incapacitated state, the novelist and his wife have an arrangement that she is free to seek male companionship from an escort service). Driven by desperation, Byron reluctantly agrees to sell his services as an `escort' for lonely women. Andy Garcia, in one of his best screen performances to date, stars as Byron Tiller, a generally unsuccessful novelist who finds himself so low on funds that he is literally unable to support the wife and child he loves so dearly. And what a strange little tale it turns out to be. This time, however, it's all about love.Among its myriad unique qualities, `The Man From Elysian Fields' portrays Southern California not as the traditional sun-drenched paradise familiar to us from postcards and movies, but rather as a dank, drizzly, depressing locale, a perfect backdrop for the sad little tale the filmmakers are telling. Garcia's Tiller, at the opposite extreme, is a nuanced and subtle role by an actor who usually specializes in quiet, urbane menace. Barrel-chested and with a snow-white mane, his Alcott is a man who's outlived his talents. Hemingway is mentioned in passing more than once, and Coburn himself now bears more than a passing resemblance to the writer. At its heartfelt core, The Man From Elysian Fields is a pointed, often tender, examination of the pros and cons of unconditional love and familial duties. Both writing and dying slowly, Tobias has no qualms about his wife's bedroom indiscretions in his worldview a man does everything he can to satisfy his wife (a notion clearly not lost on Tiller), and it's noted repeatedly that the Alcott's marriage is hardly one of convenience. ![]() Tiller's first client, as chosen by Fox, is Andrea Alcott, who just happens to be the wife of multi-Pulitzer Prize-winning literary giant Tobias Alcott (a fantastic Coburn, who ratchets up the film's grizzle factor to almost unbearable extremes), who oddly enough just happens to be Tiller's hero. The writer-as-whore metaphor may be clunky and obvious (and annoying), but The Man From Elysian Fields has such uniformly excellent performances (including one by another Sixties rock & roll icon, Michael Des Barres, who appears to be doing a Terence Stamp to Jagger's Hurt), and such a ripping outlay of overall talent, that it's easy to overlook the fact that the story itself collapses into a shuddering heap in the third act that goes nowhere that you haven't already predicted in the first half-hour. Tiller, whose single novel Hitler's Child is now fleshing out the local remaindered bin, is desperate for money to support his family - so desperate that a “temporary” stint as a high-class gigolo seems like, if not a good idea, then at the very least, a serviceable one. True to his name, Fox lures Byron Tiller (Garcia), a once-famous suspense author with a wife (Margulies) and infant son, to his somewhat shadowy profession. These days, however, he wears a face that merges the lupine with a phenomenally complex latticework of wrinkles, pocks, and fjord-like maxillary crevasses worthy of the Alps. To look at either one is to fathom the age of the universe at least in Jagger's case he's still sporting the natty threads that, up to a point, marked his stagecraft with the Stones. Is it just me or is Mick Jagger turning into John Hurt? In The Man From Elysian Fields, Jagger plays Luther Fox, the reptilian head of a high-toned escort agency for lonely Southern Californian dowagers and the like, but he's also pulling double duty as Hurt's doppelganger, sporting better hair but much the same sense of Nat Sherman's-and-triple-malted weariness that Hurt's been oozing just shy of forever now. ![]()
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