Ray Pride

James Toback ("Fingers," writer of "Bugsy") ought to be one of our greatest filmmakers, but he isn't, and "Harvard Man" shows why. Yet, its formal and narrative restlessness, coming from a 58-year-old filmmaker suggests a kind of moral ADD that is never less than provocative. More than ten years in the stewing, Toback's moral tale of "sex, basketball and Heidegger" posits angelic Adrien Grenier as a Harvard basketball player who shaves points in order to get a loan from girlfuck daughter-of-Italian-Mafiosi Holy Cross cheerleader Sarah Michelle Geller, after his parents' house in Kansas is blown down by a tornado. His own voracious intellectualizing leads him, against the advice of philosophy professor and womanfuck philosophy teacher Joey Lauren Adams, to down a few cubes of Sandoz-formula acid while out on the prairie. Absurd, you may say. It sure is. Yet the jumpcutty nervousness, the sexual compulsion, the rattiness of the underbudgeted production, the spews of smart jabber and idea-ridden self-justification that spills from everyone's mouth suggests a first draft even after a decade of contemplation, or decades, as the case may be, as it's based on a college freakout of Toback's. Like his recent "Black and White," it's great stuff to watch but you wish Toback would do more of the work for the audience. What the fuck is this cloud of brilliance and toxins and relentless objectification about? The last scene offers a suggestion, and then there's this closing shot as "whaaaaat?" as any of the film's other tenacious idèes fixe. Don't get me wrong; I think it's a thrilling, misshapen, virtuous movie, and to allow sturdy philosophical musings to trip off the tongue of someone like Adams, relentlessly cast as a helium-voiced kewpie, is just one example of Toback's perverse wit. Then again, there's a ridiculous performance by Eric Stoltz that, well... You already know if you're seeing this thing or not. 115m. Panavision.

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