MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Big Bang’ a Witty, Venal Look at Filmmaking

As the genial documentary “The Big Bang” opens, its director is wooing a money man across a dinner table with that patented combination of cool and fervor that constitutes the perfect pitch. The filmmaker may be a little fuzzy about his project, but it came to him at the Shangri La Hotel when he realized he knew how it all started.

“How what started?” the backer asks, carefully.

“The cosmos ,” the director expands, “with the orgasmic explosion of God.”

And that’s what he wants the backer to put up money for a film with no stars, no script, no sets, just a buncha people talking about the Big Question. And besides God and orgasms, they’ll touch on creation and disintegration, life, love, sex, crime, madness, death, everything.

Of course, this opening is all a bit disingenuous. The money is already, as they say, on the screen. Prospective backer Joseph Kanter, whose last time out was as a co-executive producer of “Ironweed,” is “The Big Bang’s” producer; the ebullient James Toback (“Fingers,” “Love and Money”) is its director, and the film is already underway. And for a movie whose staple element is conversation and revelation--blurted or weighed for effect--it’s a surprisingly interesting way to spend an evening.

Although the guests never do solve the Big One, “The Big Bang” (at the AMC Century 14 and Beverly Center Cineplex) has wit and unfolding moments of poignancy, unexpected depths and a flash or two of pure venality--just enough to keep the eyes open wide and the jaw a little dropped.

Toback blandly describes his guests by their professions. In outline, it sounds like the cast of an epic disaster movie: a model, a philosopher/nun, a writer, a medical student, a gangster, two children, an astronomer, a painter, a “survivor.” A few people may spot New York restauranteuse Elaine Kaufman of Elaine’s, NBA notable Darryl Dawkins, violinist Eugene Fodor, New Yorker magazine humorist Veronica Geng, jazz saxophonist Julius Hemphill, former light heavyweight boxing champ Jose Torres and producer Don Simpson.

You can find tragedy, irony, banality, self-importance. There are lives pulled back from suicide by a sheer act of will, stories that have the patina of many repetitions and some that seem to come out spontaneously, even in this hot-house environment. There may even be a surprise or two, like filmmaker Simpson’s account of his hellfire and damnation Southern Baptist upbringing in Alaska, and of a life lived in retaliation for it. (“Love is not something that I understand. . . .”)

As frequently happens, intrinsic natures come across absolutely. Some are self-effacing and all the more interesting for it: Anne Marie Keyes, a philosopher who is a member of the order of Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary and was this year one of the international team of observers at the elections in Nicaragua; novelist Barbara Traub, an Auschwitz survivor, is marked by a remarkable clarity and lack of self pity; Elaine Kaufman is a nice, brisk whiff of New York smelling salts.

Sometimes-actor (for Toback) Tony Sirico is defined by the movie as a “gangster”; is that what gangsters call themselves? Aren’t they all entrepreneurs? Or venture capitalists? A few, like Darryl Dawkins, come on strong--”I’m 6-foot-11 inches of steel and sex appeal and I try to live up to that”--then develop unexpected vulnerability. And some, pick your candidate, just sail off like hot-air balloons.

While the deliberately crisscross editing of Stephanie Kempf keeps the R-rated film moving briskly and probably glosses over a few wobbly thought processes, it sometimes breaks up a narrative or makes it unnecessarily melodramatic. Yet, all in all, this is fascinating stuff.

And when Don Simpson--cheerfully grandstanding an image--says, “I would kill somebody with absolutely no compunction if they transgressed me. . . . I have seen people killed--I have seen them killed in the act of self-defense, not by me, by somebody else--it was justified, and you know what . . . that’s show biz,” one or two people may be more inclined to believe the tone and the words of the man than any previous image concocted by a publicity department.

‘THE BIG BANG’

A Triton Pictures release. Director James Toback. Producer Joseph H. Kanter. Cinematographer Barry Markowitz. Supervising editor Stephanie Kempf. Executive in charge of production Tony Conforti.

Running time: 1 hour, 18 minutes.

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