Obsession, Culture Clash at Heart of Sharp, Witty ‘Love’

As the determined enemy of all things modern, British cult novelist and “erstwhile fogy” Giles De’Ath (it’s pronounced “day-ath,” thank you very much) is not a person one expects to find in a movie theater. In fact, if he hadn’t accidentally locked himself out of his London flat on a rainy afternoon, he wouldn’t be there at all.

Expecting to see a refined E.M. Forster adaptation, Giles accidentally wanders into “Hotpants College II.” Suitably horrified, he’s about to leave when he catches a glimpse, just a glimpse, of a face on the screen. It’s mega-dreamboat Ronnie Bostock, “one of Hollywood’s most snoggable fellows,” and against all logic, reason and expectation, Giles is overwhelmed and a magnificent obsession is born.

Starring John Hurt in one of the great performances of his career as the transfixed writer and “Beverly Hills, 90210’s” Jason Priestley as teen idol Bostock, “Love and Death on Long Island” is sharp, sophisticated and completely delicious, a purposeful comedy that focuses on the power of screen images to uproot lives and the poignancy of amour fou, totally mad love.

“Love and Death” (taken from Gilbert Adair’s novel of the same name) is also the impressive feature debut of British TV’s writer-director Richard Kwietniowski. Wildly unlikely yet completely believable, droll enough to practically define the word, this film uses exactly calibrated bursts of dry wit and killing dialogue to uncover mania where others wouldn’t even dare to look.

What gives “Love and Death” a special grace is the exquisite, nuanced performance of veteran actor Hurt, Oscar-nominated for his work in “Midnight Express” and “The Elephant Man.” Hurt’s grasp of the role couldn’t be surer--who, after all, is in the actor’s league when it comes to the quizzically raised eyebrow?--and his ability to squeeze all possible humor out of lines like “I’ve never really approved of the pre-Raphaelites” is unquestioned. There is an entire universe in Hurt’s face, a world of bemusement, bafflement, comic hauteur and disdain that is intoxicating to observe.

At first Giles’ fascination with Ronnie Bostock takes a conventional route. He scours fan magazines for color photos, pasting them in an album grandly titled “Bostockiana.” And, not caring that Sight & Sound has called them “puerile romps without a single redeeming feature,” he tries to catch up on “Skidmarks” and “Tex-Mex,” earlier items from the Bostock oeuvre. It’s a difficult proposition when a) you don’t realize VCRs have to be connected to TV sets and b) you can’t tell a TV from a microwave.

Then the madness goes up a notch. Giles imagines himself on a TV quiz show where the category is Bostock; he visualizes his new hero as the subject of the Tate Gallery’s classic painting “The Death of Chatterton”; he even starts constructing a new novel around “the discovery of beauty where no one thought to look for it.”

Inevitably, Giles decides to track this beauty to its source--and this from a man who hates to so much as leave his apartment. He makes a pilgrimage to the small Long Island town where Ronnie lives with a model named Audrey (Fiona Loewi) and puts his own considerable personal charm at the service of worming his way into the young man’s life.

Under Kwietniowski’s completely controlled direction, this film delights in exploring the clash of cultures that’s inevitable when De’Ath hits Long Island and discovers places like a diner called Chez d’Irv. When the writer ignores a “Thank You for Not Smoking” sign and informs the astonished cabdriver, “As I am, I don’t expect to be thanked,” it’s a moment of such heedless and hilarious urbanity you want to stand and cheer.

When the oblivious actor (nicely played by Priestley, tweaking his own teen idol image) and the conniving writer--two people who speak the same language only in theory--finally meet, it’s an irresistible case of worlds colliding. Yet it’s a mark of the skill with which “Love and Death” has been made that as his mania plays itself out, Giles never becomes ridiculous, never turns into a melancholy version of “Lolita’s” Humbert Humbert.

The combination of Hurt’s magnificent presence and Kwietniowski’s uncompromising writing and direction give the lovelorn writer a dignity and an emotional heft he never loses. Not even when he’s in the throes of the desperation born of what even De’Ath knows enough to call “the most irrational desire of all mankind, the desire to fall in love.”

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief strong language, thematic elements and some sexual content. Times guidelines: adult themes.

‘Love and Death on Long Island’

John Hurt: Giles De’Ath

Jason Priestley: Ronnie Bostock

Fiona Loewi: Audrey

Sheila Hancock: Mrs. Barker

Maury Chaykin: Irving Buckmuller

A Skyline/Imagex production, released by Lion’s Gate Releasing. Director Richard Kwietniowski. Producers Steve Clark-Hall, Christopher Zimmer. Screenplay Richard Kwietniowski, based on the novel by Gilbert Adair. Cinematographer Oliver Curtis. Editor Susan Shipton. Costumes Andrea Galer. Music The Insects, Richard Grassby-Lewis. Production design David McHenry. Art directors Fleur Whitlock, Emmanuel Jannasch. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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* In limited release.