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Thursday, July 7, 2011

AN APPRECIATION
Bright Lights, Big City (1988)
When All Else Fails, The Music And Eyewear Will Get You Through


Michael J. Fox as Jamie Conway in James Bridges' drama "Bright Lights, Big City", based on Jay McInerney's book.  MGM/UA
 
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW
Thursday, July 7, 2011

I loved Bright Lights, Big City as a book.  Jay McInerney's novel was a treat to read back in the Eighties.  I must have swallowed the book whole in about five minutes flat because it depicted the city that I lived in at the time so well.  In Mr. McInerney's distinctive tome New York City came alive so vividly, in some ways just as much as it did in Tom Wolfe's phenomenally enjoyable and atmospheric classic novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

I cared for neither of the adapted film editions of these two fine literary works however, although I liked James Bridges' drama "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988) a lot more than Brian De Palma's "Bonfire" film because it had good cosmetic style, if not good cinematic style.

The "Bright Lights" film atmosphere is relatively sunny given the subject matter involved, and Michael J. Fox is decent though miscast as drug-addicted Gotham Magazine editor Jamie Conway, a man haunted by the memories of a failed marriage to a woman (Phoebe Cates, excellent as Amanda) who abruptly left him.  Mr. Fox portrayed confusion and disarray well enough but his moonlighting as a drug addict wasn't quite as convincing. 

Still, what I recall fondly about "Bright Lights, Big City" are its music soundtrack and eyewear.

Both the music and the eyewear captured the late-1980s New York City attitude and energy so well in "Bright Lights, Big City".  There was Donald Fagen, one half of Steely Dan, who devised the film's jazzy soundtrack with Rob Mounsey, including the film's great closing title song "Century's End" that plays so breezily with its jazz-flavored melody.  The song leaves you feeling that Jamie Conway stands a chance after all he's been through.  "Century's End" gives Mr. Bridges' film the oomph that curiously Mr. McInerney's screenplay, adapted from his own book, did not.

Full of cliché and characters who are poorly sketched, convenient as lampposts for Jamie to walk into, "Bright Lights, Big City" showed off some of the 1980s' hottest techno and dance sounds, specifically the M/A/R/R/S dance smash "Pump Up The Volume" as well as Prince's "Good Love" and music from Bryan Ferry, the great Oscar Peterson,  Narada Michael Warren, Depeche Mode and New Order.  The film's electronic and synthesized rhythms supersede its decor. 

Jamie Conway wears a suit like the one I used to wear when I worked on a trading floor at a financial markets company in New York City around that time.  And I had those Ray-Bans that Mr. Fox's character walks around the West Village in (see above photo), except they were black.  I wore them with pride.  I remember sauntering up Fifth Avenue on my lunch hour when I wanted to get well away from the tension of the trading floor.  I wore the heck out of those Ray-Bans.  I had a blue Walkman.  I paced.  I paraded.  I wanted to preen so bad.  Maybe I did, but I just forgot.

Just as Tom Cruise made Ray-Bans famous in "Risky Business" (1983), Michael J. Fox gives the brand name eyewear a muted cool in "Bright Lights, Big City" five years later.  Mr. Fox wore the Ray-Bans in the editorial offices where his character worked.  He wore them on the New York City subway train when he read the New York Post.  Those Ray-Bans represented a hollowed-out soul, one powdered over by drugs, more so than they did a renewed, carefree "what the f--k" kind of cool, a cool that Mr. Cruise so successfully carried off as Joel Goodsen.

Where "Bright Lights" is concerned, it is somewhat interesting that "Less Than Zero" (1987), a drama released a year prior and set on the opposite coast in Los Angeles, delved into drug culture with better performances from a then-much less storied cast (Robert Downey Jr., James Spader, Jami Gertz, Andrew McCarthy.)  "Less Than Zero" has endured as something of a semi-Brat Pack classic.  By contrast, "Bright Lights, Big City" has been largely forgotten.  Mr. Bridges' film showcased a better cast that apart from Mr. Fox and Ms. Cates included Frances Sternhagen, John Houseman, Kiefer Sutherland, Swoosie Kurtz, Dianne Wiest, Sam Robards, Tracy Pollan, Kelly Lynch and, in a cameo as a bartender, David Hyde Pierce, but nearly all of the actors were underwhelming, nowhere near as vivid as the characters of Mr. McInerney's book.

In Mr. Bridges' film, everybody but the tin soldier in Ms. Sternhagen's office repeatedly asks Jamie if he's alright, when we know and can see that he's anything but.  Jamie wallows in self-denial but the film doesn't anchor him as a character the way the book does.  "Bright Lights, Big City" tries to round itself and its protagonist out by inserting Jamie's family travails into the drama, but on the big screen such affairs look sappy and overwrought rather than tender and sentimental.  In the end it's hard to care about the film's characters or the film itself, which as a story and a piece of cinema appears to be going through the motions.

"Bright Lights, Big City" gets its outer edges and the Big Apple right but the substance at the core sorely lacks. 

You know what still works though?  When all else fails about "Bright Lights, Big City" the movie, it's those Ray-Bans and that great music that work and make you forget about the rest of the film, even 23 years later.  "Bright Lights, Big City" is almost sweet and likable thanks solely to those elements.  When Mr. Fox's Jamie says he'll trade his sunglasses for a loaf of fresh bread, he has a knowing look on his face.  Through the drug-haze those Ray-Bans have kept Jamie afloat for the whole film, and that fresh bread is about to give him a new lease on life.

"Bright Lights, Big City" (1988) is on DVD and streaming on Netflix Instant.

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