MOVIE REVIEW : FRUSTRATED POTENTIAL OF ‘MEN’S CLUB’

Most movies frustrate you because of their lack of potential. “The Men’s Club” (citywide), has the opposite problem: There’s a good movie buried in it, but it stays buried--and, by the end, the annoyances outweigh the pleasures.

It’s about seven Berkeley-area professionals (doctors, lawyers and one ex-baseball star) who, during the course of an evening together, are unraveled and exposed by their sexual hang-ups. Their club itself is a pastiche of a women’s group: Trying to “get in touch with their feelings,” the seven erupt instead into hysterical camaraderie--tearing the house apart in a drunken knife-throwing debauch that gets one of them beaned by his enraged wife and the other six tossed into the night. The sextet transfer the session to a brothel--which strips them to the awkward and occasionally degraded core.

First, the potential: Stinging, smart, abrasive dialogue from scenarist Leonard Michaels. At least a dozen distinct characters--some of whom actually go through changes. A fine cast--including Roy Scheider, Harvey Keitel, Frank Langella, Treat Williams, Richard Jordan, Craig Wasson and David Dukes as the club. And, sporadically, intelligent direction by Peter Medak (“The Ruling Class”).

Now, the crippling drawbacks: A dramatic curve that peters out and plunges into nothing. (It’s almost as if someone’s nerve failed at a crucial point--unless you’re happy with the idea of three men’s clubbers jogging jauntily across a bridge as the capper to all the terror and foolishness of the night before.) The production and musical score frequently recall the minimal sets and soft jazz-rock of the average porno movie.

This porno ambiance is doubly unfortunate: Some audiences are likely to conclude that Michaels’ intentions were salacious (or even misogynistic) and that the prominent cast was wangled into making a sordid “boys’ night out.” Obviously, that’s not true. This is clearly an honest attempt that’s gone awry: a try at exposing the anxieties and absurdities of modern masculinity that’s turned depressingly into a cheap mix of “Who’s Afraid of Kate Millett?” and “Last Tango in Berkeley.”

But, despite the shreds into which “The Men’s Club” (rated R) collapses, some of the actors--especially Keitel, Scheider, Langella and Stockard Channing--achieve some raw, fierce or affecting moments. With a little more guts or patience--even a little of the high gloss wasted on dozens of more puerile projects--this might have been a fine, provocative movie. Instead, it’s simply perplexing, a dead end for the problems it tries to probe.