MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Less Than Zero’ Adds Up to a Feverish Nullity

The people who made “Less Than Zero” (citywide)--producer Jon Avnet, director Marek Kanievska (“Another Country”), writer Harley Peyton--may have felt they were being faithful to the original novel’s vision. But they were faithful only in their fashion, one that finally seems as vacuous as the blankly hedonistic world in Bret Easton Ellis’ book.

Ellis bleakly described a world of rich, affectless Beverly Hills teenagers through the eyes of a narrator, Clay, home from college for Christmas. These jaded kids had peaked fast into ennui and Clay, watching them, drifted through their world of mansions, sports cars, cocaine and promiscuous bisexuality with a numbed passivity. Languidly, he got together with old friends: his ex-lover Blair, with whom he could barely talk; and his best friend Julian, now a shadowy figure running up cocaine debts and working them off as a gay hustler.

From this spare, allusive book--which painted the entire milieu as valueless and deadening--the film makers have somehow manufactured a wild, preachy melodrama in which stalwart, true-blue Clay (Andrew McCarthy) comes back from the East to rescue his sad, sick friends Blair (Jami Gertz) and Julian (Robert Downey Jr.) from the hell that cocaine--and, seemingly, cocaine alone--has made of their lives.

Gone, largely, is the novel’s sense of overall enervation and amorality, and the sarcastic, angry presentation of the parents’ world is reduced to some nervous comic relief. Instead, there’s a lightly satiric infatuation with the glittery surfaces: a pink room garlanded with TV monitors, a white loft with pearly walls and azure pools lacquered with sunlight. A dull viewer might come away thinking they’d just seen a lot of swell places; that if only those stupid kids hadn’t messed up on drugs, they could have had a wonderful life.

There’s a razzly-dazzly beauty in Barbara Ling’s designs and Kanievska and cameraman Ed Lachman shoot them wittily. But it’s swallowed up in the story’s empty outrage. Now, the villainy is concentrated in evil dope dealer, Rip (James Spader) and his muscleman Billy (Michael Bowen), forcing desperate Julian, against his will, into a life of homosexuality and AIDS, pursuing him like hellhounds.

Ellis’ novel probably needed changes; it’s somewhat attenuated and underfelt, and it’s not really free of sentimentality. One good addition Peyton has made is to expand Julian into a more comic, lively character. Robert Downey, Jr. seizes these opportunities; he makes Julian’s anxiety magnetic, the dissolution weirdly funny.

But Downey and Spader are the only two actors who seem to have be having any fun. They get to overplay self-destruction or smarmy villainy, and, along with Michael Greene as Julian’s uncle, they give the film’s best performances. By contrast, Jami Gertz offers a paralyzed portrayal of beauty ravaged, and the usually adroit Andrew McCarthy mostly wanders around in stiff spasms of torpid righteousness. He seems to be playing a man about to leave Melrose Avenue forever for a life of meditation in Santa Barbara.

The changes in “Less Than Zero” (MPAA-rated R for sex, nudity and language) seem as if they were made to placate the kind of audience that would have hated the novel, and despised any film version of it.

The novel certainly doesn’t make promiscuous sex or drug abuse attractive. It makes them look empty, spiritually destructive and dead. But the movie degenerates into a rant. There’s actually a scene where tearful Julian and his sobbing father embrace on the Wells tennis court in a frenzy of reconciliation. Afterward, idiotically, Julian goes off to tell the dealers in person that he’s quitting. (Couldn’t he have phoned?)

Kanievska surrounds the weeping pair in this scene with a hailstorm of orange tennis balls. But he’s a long way from the clarity and control of “Another Country,” and you can’t tell how satiric he feels. Instead of making this hopped-up “Just Say No” parable, it’s a pity the film makers didn’t zero in on the novel’s true riches: its penetration into a scene and an attitude, its understated morality. Hooked on the drug of compromise, they’ve scraped Ellis’ world down to zero.