Michael Douglas doesn't have all the rights to playing rotten guys, but he has most of them. His Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street" set a standard, and apparently just to keep in shape for the sequel, coming out later in the year, he stars in a very good movie, "Solitary Man." He is not as single-mindedly greedy as Gekko, but his portrayal of Ben Kalmen displays a man with a sleaze quotient somewhere north of genius, a sex drive to put rabbits to shame, and class and honesty that he obviously learned at the knee of Bernie Madoff.
Kalmen is an automobile dealer in the New York area who formerly billed himself as "the tri-state area's honest car salesman." When we meet him, criminal behavior in business, reprehensible behavior as a husband and selfish, dishonest behavior in every other part of his life, have left him a man just about out of options. His former wife, a sympathetic Susan Sarandon, holds him at arm's length. His girl friend (Mary-Louise Parker) has been shamed to the point where she does what she should have done years earlier. Imogen Poots, a teenager who gets her own revenge, has a splendid role, and plays it splendidly, as Parker's daughter.
The nice people are men, played warmly and sympathetically, if warily, by Danny DeVito and young Jesse Eisenberg, but then, they face little risk from the emphatically heterosexual Douglas. DeVito is a friend of long standing who understands Douglas, gives him a job in his college-town diner. That doesn't last very long because Parker's revenge comes with a reach that goes from New York to Cambridge, Mass. Eisenberg is a college student impressed by Douglas' breezy, confident, car-salesman manner, but he's smart enough to soon see through it. Eisenberg's girl friend is even smarter, realizing sooner what Douglas has in mind and shaming him badly. Unfortunately, men like Ben Kalmen never feel the shame.
As a good friend of mine says, "No one is completely useless. He can always be used as a bad example," and that's Douglas. As rotten as his behavior may be, he is a brilliant actor, and his Ben Kalmen is a gripping bad example. David Levien and Brian Koppelman are co-directors, working from Koppelman's screenplay, and they have done excellent work.
"Solitary Man" opens today at Plaza Frontenac.
–Joe