MOVIE REVIEW : MAILER’S ‘TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE’

Some are born, William Blake once told us, to sweet delight. And some are born to endless night--a category that includes most of the characters in Norman Mailer’s strange, erratic but often brilliant new film “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (opening Friday at selected theaters).

It’s a fragrantly pathological gallery we see here: dope dealers, brutal cops, ex-porno stars, would-be and actual killers, cretinous thugs and rich, despairing sybarites--all scurrying through the lovely Provincetown streets and beaches on lurid errands of murder and madness.

At the center of this crazed film noir fever dream--punctuated with shrieking gulls, whooshing auto tires and the howl of wind--is another Mailer surrogate, Irish, of course: Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal).

Madden’s memory of one explosive night has vanished like froth on the gray sea swells and he now spends his time trying to reassemble jangled recollections for his cancer-ridden, scowling father (Lawrence Tierney).

Did he murder his wife, Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund)? The porno star, Jessica? Her gay escort, Pangborn? If not, why have two decapitated blonde heads sprouted like evil weeds in his marijuana stash? Why is his car covered with blood? Why is a smirking narc named Alvin Luther Regency (Wings Hauser) dogging his tracks like some jovially sadistic hound of hell? Is Madden a real madman? A real murderer? Or only a stand-in--like the phony sinners in some leering ‘50s sex comedy?

Mailer’s 1984 novel--from which he scripted and directed this charmingly cracked nightmare comedy--was a self-conscious existential thriller, full of ruminations on machismo and thick with seedy, rotten characters whose collective morality might have lodged easily in the belly of a flea.

The movie, in turn, is a self-conscious modern film noir , an ominous romantic farce fueled by the fear of homosexuality. Like the book, it’s suffused with nightfall melancholy, the sour dread of late-morning hangovers, chewed-up honor and nameless fears sneaking under the sunlight. It’s a story that dances through death’s darkness and ends in a cackling blaze of witches’ laughter.

And where the novel had gorgeous metaphors, the film--thanks to cinematographer John Bailey--has darkly gorgeous visuals. There are stark Edward Hopperesque streets here, plumed with mist and achingly clear gray daylight, briny night scenes washed in windy threat.

Mailer’s three previous film-making efforts--those harsh, semi-improvised ‘60s works--didn’t hint at the suave surface here. Even when the pace seems off or the staging a bit clumsy, Mailer and the actors get an edgy feel into nearly every scene.

The dialogue is a brew of Hemingway tough talk laced with oddball Joycean jive and rhetorical flourish; the cast chews into these lines with an insidious savor. O’Neal, as Madden, has a glancing, haggard quality perfect for this film’s center, peering out warily at the carnage which piles up absurdly around him. As Madden’s dying father, Lawrence Tierney is an amusingly gravelly noir icon; Wings Hauser gives Regency shining malice and fresh-eyed sadism.

The most ingeniously judged comic performance is John Bedford Lloyd’s Wardley Meeks III, a willowy Southern scion, dabbler in crime and ex-Exeter classmate of Madden’s. Lloyd seems a touch young for the part, but he creates a great pathetic monster. When Meeks dubs his two crummy co-conspirators “you two un speak able sleazos,” it’s a priceless moment; so is the sad, spent lust and weary disgust of his last nocturnal beachside scene.

Unfortunately, it may be the women here who are the film’s major flaw--not necessarily because the two blondes, Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) and Jessica Pond (Frances Fisher), are such heartless schemers or because Isabella Rossellini’s Madeleine is such a sometimes weepy heroine. The women are too artificial, and they lack the paradoxically human twists and tenderness that make Mailer’s equally scurrilous male characters so fascinating.

Some will find “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (MPAA rated R for sex, nudity and language) ludicrous; others will complain that it lacks big studio movie flash. True--but why mourn the absence of an expertise mostly made to distract audiences from the emptiness of the story they’re being told?

Whatever else you can say about this film, it’s alive with ideas and a rich, strange view of the world. Even at its most awkward moments, Mailer’s brilliance shines out of nearly every scene.

Perhaps the movies should be grateful for the compliment he’s paid them--albeit with tongue partly in cheek. Stealing time that might have been reserved for another big novel, Mailer diverts it into a homage to the films he loved as a young man. He almost revives the soul, as well as the surface, of film noir , making it again a dark, lucid mirror of society’s corruptions, wicked hypocrisies and evil glamour.