MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tequila Sunrise’ Lost in a Haze

At one point in “Tequila Sunrise” (citywide), as Mel Gibson’s ex-drug dealer is getting to know Michelle Pfeiffer’s restaurant-owner a little better, he infuriates her by one word. “Don’t call me slick ,” she snaps, truly wounded.

Unfortunately the name applies, not to her as much as to this whole loving-foolish enterprise that writer-director Robert Towne has constructed. Written with his trademark artfulness, nicely acted and gorgeously pretty, “Tequlia Sunrise” finally blows away into slick unsubstantiality.

It is shaped a little like those ‘40s movies when best pals Clark Gable and Henry Fonda both fell for the same beautiful dame. But it is absolutely of the ‘80s. One of our heroes, Dale (Mac) McKussic (Gibson) is a drug dealer, retired. Or so he has to keep saying. In spite of the numbers of people apparently dependent on his former scale of spending, including his manipulative ex-wife (Ann Magnuson) and his nudging cousin, a ferret in a Hawaiian shirt (Arliss Howard), Mac is really a struggling Southern California businessman, proudly working to sell and deliver irrigation pipe.

His closest friend since high school, Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell) has become not just a cop but lieutenant in charge of narcotics investigations in the Los Angeles area, a man given to sharp clothes and a white Cadillac. And Jo Ann Vallenari (Pfeiffer) is hardly a dame. She co-owns and runs an elegant Italian restaurant, Vallenari’s. Watch her spread the charm like Cheez Whiz in her own dining rooms, listen to the way she whittles down visiting Washington narcotics chief McGuire (J. T. Walsh), and you’ll find a woman very much of the ‘80s. But you wonder if her heart is somewhere in that restaurant refrigerator, too.

Gibson suspects otherwise. And in his goofy eagerness to seem a serious person to her, he does a drug-related favor for her young Century City lawyer (Ayre Gross), “smart enough to be a lawyer but too stupid to be a drug dealer.”

Unfortunately, that act only makes it harder for the assorted police hierarchies to feel that Gibson is entirely clean. And if this is his idea of a calling card into Pfeiffer’s good graces, it may also make audiences wonder about the number of little white cells left in his brain. Ah well, why should we expect more lingering smarts from cocaine dealers than we’ve seen demonstrated, say, in the political arena?

“Tequila Sunrise” feels written from the inside: from an insider’s affectionate view of men’s friendships. From inside the early moments of a love affair when questions of trust and abandon are still delicate and uncertain. Even from the inside world of the restaurant business or of life around Los Angeles’ South Bay beaches. That intimacy has always been one of Towne’s great skills as a writer (“Chinatown,” “Shampoo,” “Personal Best”). As in “Shampoo,” we’re taken around backstage in these worlds, which are sleek and overlapping. But we’re never quite involved in them.

It’s probably because Towne has acres of plot here, lashings of it, plot so complicated and so intricate that if you’re not clenched to follow every second of it, you’re lost. The sheer details of what he has created finally engulf Towne’s handsome trio.

“Casablanca,” which “Tequila’s” morning mists and its love triangle somehow bring to mind, at least sat in one place and let its characters work on you within a scene. You have precious little time to relax with these three; someone must always be hitting the freeway or getting to the restaurant on time. It’s not an inaccurate observation about the Los Angeles time frame, it just ain’t very restful. And sensuality needs a little time to build up; it can’t be jump-started and expect to hold its voltage.

The R-rated film still provides a nice outing for its three stars and the chance for incisive detail in some of its smaller roles: Raul Julia’s outgoing, bigger-than-life Mexican drug official, Commendante Escalante; Walsh’s corrosively nasty narcotics detective and a lovely bit by Kenneth G. Moore as the lifeguard, Woody.

It’s odd that Gibson’s character never has an edge of danger about him. But it’s nice to see the actor have the chance to play balmy bemusement--he does it so engagingly. For all that exterior machismo, his character’s very helplessness is what makes it dovetail so neatly with a woman whose very profession--and you suspect, avocation--is seeing that people are properly fed, nurtured. Who could resist a woman who brings your recuperating child angel-hair pasta? Russell has a great line about Pfeiffer’s character; having investigated her, formally, he’s discovered that she’s “honest and kind and principled,” almost the exact opposite of himself. Russell and Pfeiffer make both sides of that line believable.

None of it, however, is enough to turn the movie around, not even Conrad Hall’s sumptuous camera work, which gives some scenes the unbelievably lush colors of a Tequila Sunrise. It’s enough to send you out of the theater thirsty. Unfortunately, it sends you out hungry too, for a whole movie to offset this upscale grazing.

‘TEQUILA SUNRISE’

A Warner Bros. presentation of a Mount Company production. Producer Thom Mount. Executive producer Tom Shaw. Writer, director Robert Towne. Camera Conrad L. Hall. Production design Richard Sylbert. Editor Claire Simpson. Art director Peter Lansdown Smith, set decorator Rick Simpson. Music Dave Grusin, music supervision Danny Bramson. Costumes Julie Weiss. Sound Kay Rose. With Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kurt Russell, Raul Julia, J. T. Walsh, Arliss Howard, Ayre Gross, Ann Magnuson, Kenneth C. Moore, Budd Boetticher.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).