Permanent Midnight

Director: David Veloz
Cast:
Ben Stiller
Elizabeth Hurley
Janeane Garofalo
Maria Bello
Daniel Hartley
Genre: Drama

There are two things that are routinely tough to take: movies about Hollywood, and movies about someone with a drug addiction. Films about Tinseltown always seem so self-satisfying, easy and full of inside jokes/situations that serve only to alienate viewers who are watching the flick at a multiplex outside Pierre, SD. And films about drugs are always the same thing: boy gets successful, boy starts doing drugs, boy spirals out of control, boy ends up sadder but wiser. Pardon me while I YAWN.

It is a minor miracle, then, that "Permanent Midnight" ends up being watchable at all, and in fact, can even be a little riveting. Ben Stiller, who might be the bravest actor in Hollywood, plays the lead role as a Hollywood writer so full of self-hatred that he takes to the needle in an effort to dull his throbbing sense of emotional dysplasia. Needing a green card, Elizabeth Hurley marries him, and the resulting family/career/psyche crisis is, at times, unbearably horrifying. Watching someone stick needles into their own neck while their baby looks on...let's be honest, this movie isn't for everybody.

But there is a sort of redemption in it that bypasses the usual Afterschool Special morality. Watching somebody trash their lives can be a sick pleasure, if only watched from the lofty perch of cautionary moralism. And Maria Bello (Anna from "E.R."), given the impossible task of being a "present" love interest in a "flashback" movie, is stunning—one wonders what the movie would be like if we were allowed to see her hell, rather than the predictable Hollywood one. With Peter Greene and Janeane Garofalo.

—Ian Williams

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