Who's in It: Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Ned Beatty, Mortiz Bleibtreu, Mary Beth Hurt, Willem Dafoe, Lily Tomlin
The Basics: Puffy-haired, pinky-ring-wearing, gay Southern gentleman Harrelson is a "walker," a sexless male escort for Washington, D.C., society ladies of a certain age. A walker goes to stuff like the opera benefit ball when the high-powered husband can't be bothered. Basically, it's a pampered rich woman's gay best friend who's also sort of on the payroll, but also not, if that makes any sense. And that explanation is way more interesting than anything that goes on in this crappy movie where Harrelson gets unwittingly involved in a murder investigation and stands by the pampered rich woman accused of the crime.
What's the Deal? Paul Schrader made American Gigolo and Light Sleeper, two cool movies with a similarly adrift and amoral character transformed by the badness around him. And it's not that I have a problem with a director who keeps making the same movie over and over; lots of the directors I love do that all the time. But Schrader has nothing new to say about his "Lost Guy." He just seems to want to use the character to throw in his two cents about how mucked up the U.S. Presidential administration is.
How He Intentionally References His Older Films: There are scenes lifted directly from Gigolo and Light Sleeper. From the former, it's a moment when Harrelson is in his meticulously arranged walk-in closet caressing articles of clothing. From the latter, it's a shot of Harrelson on a bed, alone and awake. It's meant as a nod to the past and to a thematic thread that started back in the days of Taxi Driver, but mostly what it does is make you wish you were watching one of those movies instead.
What Makes It Worth Looking At: Harrelson, giving a deeply weird performance as a super-old-school gay guy who plays canasta with the ladies and gossips and pretty much has no life outside of the one he makes with his best girlfriends. He has a bad-artist boyfriend (Run Lola Run's Bleibtreu, obsessing over Abu Ghraib with increasingly trite photo collages) whose job is to help Harrelson when he gets in the big scrape, but they're never together in the presence of the women. It gets really Boys in the Band-y when Harrelson, in an accent I think he got from watching Rue McClanahan on the Golden Girls season-one DVD, yells about how "ridiculous" their relationship is.
Other Weird Thing: The whole thing feels like it was written and shot 20 years ago and then had dialogue about computers and George Bush looped in afterwards. The production design makes everyone look like they're in the lobby of a Marriott in 1987.