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Here’s an original idea for a movie: a low-budget, digital video look at the search for love in New York City, in which person A wants to connect with person B, who’s only looking at person C, who’s in pursuit of person D, and so forth, until it all comes back around to person A. You say you’ve seen this before? There’s a twist this time–Edward Burns isn’t in it, nor did he direct it.
Not that Burns holds the patent on this kind of thing, a story structure that goes back at least as far as Arthur Schnitzler’s 1896 play Reigen, which Love in the Time of Money credits as source material. But Burns deserves a lot of the blame for the crappy contemporary variant, epitomized in his Sidewalks of New York, which shares with Love in the Time of Money actress Rosario Dawson. You want to say that Dawson deserves better than movies that seem like extended acting exercises featuring the director’s famous friends (in Burns’ case) or folks who owed the producers a favor (in this film’s case, Robert Redford and the Sundance lab). But Dawson has the clout to pick and choose her roles nowadays, so she deserves what she gets.
First-time feature helmer Peter Mattei is out to show us the difficulty of making romantic connections in a disconnected world, and that’s a fine intention. No doubt many of us are sick of watching Happy Friendly Guy going on a brief quest, meeting Cute Perfect Gal and living happily ever after in a movieland that makes the dating scene seem about as complicated as a grade-school math problem. Unfortunately, what Mattei creates is only more believable in the sense that most of the connections he shows us fail. Beyond that, they’re as contrived as a Julia Roberts hooker movie.
We begin, in fact, with a hooker (Vera Farmiga, who co-starred in 15 Minutes with…Edward Burns!)–a particularly stupid one who does the deed before she gets paid, hardly the business practice of a real-life streetwalker. Her deadbeat client (Domenick Lombardozzi, Kate & Leopold) is an interior designer who often has sex with clients, including his latest (Jill Hennessy, Law & Order), whose husband isn’t interested in her but might be interested in an annoying artist (Steve Buscemi, every other movie ever made) whose paintings all consist of two triangles against a blank background (“I want them to enter the art world like a virus and infect it”). Said artist is actually smitten with the aforementioned Rosario Dawson, who must–if she wants him also–break up with former flame Nick (Drive Me Crazy‘s Adrian Grenier, MIA for a while, but it’s good to see him back onscreen). Nick may or may not be into a substantially older woman (Carol Kane) who takes a phone call from….ahh, why tell you the whole plot? But it keeps on going.
That each vignette ends with an ironic twist is to be expected. The fact that the soundtrack insists on rubbing in the irony via a music box/nursery rhyme motif is grating. More annoying still is the fact that the Buscemi-Dawson sequence revolves around the latter getting naked, and yet we get to see nothing. C’mon, Rosario, you were in Kids for chrissakes. Don’t go getting prudish now. And don’t even start with any kind of line about how it’s all about the credibility–this movie may have the Sundance lab pedigree, but it adds nothing of substance to the résumé.
What keeps Love in the Time of Money from being truly awful is the fact that the actors give it their all–they may be in contrived situations, but by golly they’ll make the best of them. Buscemi has almost never been less than great, and his scene with Dawson, despite the unfair nudity tease, is the strongest of the bunch, with Dawson’s follow-up scene with Grenier running a close second. Carol Kane, who’s spent most of her time in recent years playing roles that cause her to essentially resemble a live-action Muppet, gets a welcome chance to shine in her role, eschewing her trademark hyperactivity to inhabit the soul of a broken woman.
Still, the film feels like little more than an extended exercise for some kind of Sundance Channel special, and if you’ve been to more than one indie flick in your life, chances are you’ve already seen this kind of thing.
