PLAY MISERY FOR ME

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In life, the jilted who stalk and harass their former lovers are usually seen as forlorn creatures, objects of pity, if not downright contempt. In the movies (Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction), they are more often seen as menaces of a more melodramatic, if not downright terrifying, kind. What no one up to now has ever imagined is that people caught up in this common form of temporary insanity might possibly provide the premise for a romantic comedy.

But that's precisely what director Griffin Dunne and writer Robert Gordon have up and tried in Addicted to Love, and a fine--but not entirely uninteresting--mess they have on their hands. It offers us two voyeurs, one male and moony (Matthew Broderick's Sam), the other female and furious (Meg Ryan's Maggie). They meet (about as uncute as any couple in the history of screwball farce) because Linda (Kelly Preston), his former fiance, has moved into a Lower Manhattan loft with Anton (Tcheky Karyo), her former lover. Sam, an astronomer, has rigged up a camera obscura in a tumbledown tenement across from their love nest, which he uses to snark on them. He charts the many ups and very rare downs of their affair, hoping to predict a big bang in their happy little universe. Maggie, a photographer, bugs the place, adding sound to his pictures, thereby doubling a misery that in this case does not particularly love company.

It's never easy being a spy in the house of love. It is certainly not as funny as Dunne and Gordon must have thought it could be. But the movie does find some grotesque comic traction when Maggie and Sam move from the passive to the active mode, their prime target being poor Anton. They plant evidence indicating that he's having an affair on the side. They ruin the restaurant he runs by bringing in a horde of cockroaches the night the New York Times food critic is dining there. They destroy his fallback career as a model by making him break out in blotches from a food allergy. He finally finds himself virtually immobilized in a body cast, quite literally a broken man.

We, in turn, find ourselves in a theater of cruelty, consoling ourselves with incidental pleasures: the anti-comedic darkness of Dunne's lighting and sensibility; the relentless, half-mad meanness of Ryan's performance; the snarling strength Karyo demonstrates in multiple adversity. These people don't give a hoot if they warm our hearts or lift our spirits, and that's not nothing in a time when mainstream movie comedy is all blandness and ingratiation. Too bad we can't reward their bravery with the sound of more than one hand clapping.

--By Richard Schickel