‘People I Know’ is not worth knowing

There’s nothing uncommon about failed films, far from it, but “People I Know” is a rarity. Inept in an almost delicate way, this is no “Malibu’s Most Wanted” but an ambitious, high-minded flop that wants to do good in the world, a failure with a pedigree, if you will. It’s not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that’s what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can’t take your eyes off.

In truth, “People I Know” is so earnest, so would-be meaningful, so insistent in its search for life’s deeper truths, that one hesitates to chastise it just as one would hesitate to wake a sleepwalker. The world might be a better place if films like this succeeded, but wishing will not make it so.

Written by top contemporary playwright Jon Robin Baitz (“The Substance of Fire”) and directed by Dan Algrant, best known for his work on “Sex and the City,” “People I Know” is a kind of modern-day riff on “Sweet Smell of Success.” It takes us through a hellacious 24 hours in the life of high-powered publicist Eli Wurman, a collection of cliches played by Al Pacino like, well, a collection of cliches.

A Jew from Georgia who likes to say “maybe I’m just a cracker from down South,” Eli is a New York publicist to the stars who’s seen better days. He once worked keeping the likes of Montgomery Clift and Big Mama Cass out of trouble (“Fat lot of good you did them,” someone accurately points out), but now he’s reduced to worrying if Regis Philbin is going to return his phone calls.

But hark, Eli Wurman is a flack with a soul and a social conscience. Not only was he fourth in his class at Harvard Law, he marched with King at Selma and has an in with Arianna Huffington. Yes, that Arianna Huffington.

Even now, he’s trying to put together a benefit to raise money to defend innocent Nigerians who are being deported from New York without due process. But Eli still has to pay the bills, and his last major client is temperamental movie star Cary Launer (Ryan O’Neal, displaying the charisma of a surfboard), who shows up in the middle of the night and announces, in what one assumes is showbiz-eeze, “I got an awkward.”

The awkward is a TV starlet/sometime girlfriend named Jilli Hopper (Tea Leoni), who has contrived to get herself arrested. Eli’s assignment is to bail her out and get her on a private plane back to L.A. But instead of being grateful, Jilli mocks Eli for dealing with a star’s dirty laundry. “When,” she demands to know, “did this town start arresting you for having fun?” Even Eli can’t answer that one.

The extremely messy consequences of having Jilli back on the street are hardly the only problem Eli has to deal with in this trying day. He’s brokering a deal between a fire-breathing Harlem minister (Bill Nunn) and a billionaire Jewish power broker (“West Wing’s” Richard Schiff) to help his woebegone Nigerians; he’s got to have a tender meeting with the weepy widow (Kim Basinger) of his dead brother; and he has to find time to endure a painful penile probe to investigate blood in his urine. This last is probably symbolic, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

“People I Know’s” problems, and they are numerous, start with the script, the kind of heroically misconceived work only a talented writer sent down the wrong path could produce. Not even faintly believable though clearly inspired by the real world, “People” also suffers because it’s filled with the kind of overly earnest, “written” banter that plays better onstage than on the more naturalistic movie screen.

Though the women are more successful than the men, none of the actors is much help here, especially not star Pacino, who chews up Baitz’s ripe dialogue and should be prevented by international convention from doing roles that require accents, especially Southern ones.

A better director would have sat on Pacino more, which would have helped, but Algrant, who came up with the original idea behind Baitz’s script, is so enamored of this concoction that he doesn’t see how basically bogus it all is. When Eli Wurman surveys the wreckage and says, “I don’t think I have any more days like today in me,” he speaks for all of us.

*

‘People I Know’

MPAA rating: R, for language, drug use and brief sexual images

Times guidelines: Adult subject matter

Al Pacino...Eli Wurman

Kim Basinger...Victoria Gray

Ryan O’Neal...Cary Launer

Tea Leoni...Jilli Hopper

Richard Schiff...Elliot Sharansky

Myriad Pictures presents a South Fork Pictures production, in association with Galena/ Greenstreet Films, Chal Productions, In-Motion AG and WMF V, released by Miramax Films. Director Dan Algrant. Producers Michael Nozik, Leslie Urdang, Karen Tenkhoff. Executive producers Kirk D’Amico, Philip Von Alvensleben, Robert Redford. Screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz. Cinematographer Peter Deming. Editor Suzy Elmiger. Costumes David Robinson. Music Terence Blanchard. Production design Michael Shaw. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

In general release.