Sex, Lies And DVD Player

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The woman known only as Jewel (a stunning Liv Tyler) is capable of being all things to all men. Luckily, only three of them are significantly present in One Night at McCool's. If she had had any more boys to toy with, this movie might have turned into a sobering study in multiple-personality disorder. Instead, it remains a sort of low-rent Rashomon that is the smartest, funniest, most cleverly structured comedy of the year.

Jewel appears to us--and to Randy (Matt Dillon), the slacker barkeep at the film's eponymous drinking establishment--as a simple material girl. He rescues her from an apparent rape attempt, takes her home to his fixer-upper and soon finds himself innocently abetting two murders.

Detective Dehling (John Goodman), investigating those deaths, sees Jewel somewhat differently. To him she symbolizes purity, and reminds him of his tragically deceased wife. Why, Jewel even seems to have access to his beloved's linguine recipe. She also has access to the darkest desires of Randy's cousin Carl (a particularly delirious Paul Reiser), an up-and-coming lawyer in need of a dominatrix, a role at which Jewel proves--perhaps not so surprisingly--remarkably adept.

Each of these characters tells his story to an avid listener: Randy to the hitman (Michael Douglas, who also produced the movie) he has hired to rid himself of Jewel; Dehling to his brother (Richard Jenkins), who is a priest; Carl to a psychiatrist (Reba McEntire)--wow, this is a well-cast movie. But none of them can do much more than offer sympathy for the poor dopes' entrapments. For what is possibly the funniest thing about McCool's is how easily the men fall into Jewel's clutches.

As they recall their relationships with her, her costumes suit their imaginings. Sometimes her skirts are hot and short, sometimes they're demure and innocent. It's the same way with attitudes. Sometimes she's clipped and bossy. Sometimes she's innocent and virginal. Sometimes she's a kitten with a whip. Sex is a weapon for her; weapons are weapons for her. She'll screw you or kill you, depending on what seems to offer her the shortest route to the DVD player of her dreams.

There is, possibly, a moral here--something about how sexual and material fetishism renders people crazy with desire. But let's not go there. One Night at McCool's is, finally, quite a brilliant exercise in style. First-time director Harald Zwart, a Norwegian music-video guy, has a marvelously cool eye for the slightly surreal aspects of American bad taste. Lamps that light when you clap your hands, the chrome and leather modernism of an arriviste's pad--they are the objective correlatives of his characters' endless seducibility, their inability to imagine the stupid consequences of ill-considered passion.

Only one thing about this genial and savage film must sadden us: it is the first-produced feature screenplay by a writer named Stan Seidel, who died while the movie was in post-production. His was, obviously, a rare sensibility, unpredictable, unsentimental, unsparing and, most important, unlike anyone else's. Bless his memory. See his movie.

--By Richard Schickel