Beyond the Multiplex

April 27, 2007 | Spring has turned damp and chilly on the Eastern seaboard, and the go-to celebrities after two days of the Tribeca Film Festival seem to be Tiki Barber and Howard Stern. You can't get away from these guys! Here's what Barber and Stern said to each other as their orbits crossed while doggedly working the line of reporters and photographers outside the premiere of "The Hammer," a boxing comedy that stars Adam Carolla:

Stern: "Hey, Tiki."

Barber: "Howard! How you doin', Howard? What's up?"

Cold weather and bad B-list celebrity repartee might seem like a depressing combination, especially for the launch of an event that depends on a self-inflated sense of importance. But New Yorkers are a resourceful and resilient people, at least when it comes to self-inflated importance, and no one seemed perturbed. Large and cheerful crowds (although some distance short of a sellout) packed into the Tribeca Performing Arts Center for the festival's first two semimajor premieres.

There were artier flicks on display at several smaller venues, including French director Pascale Ferran's take on "Lady Chatterley" and Julie Delpy's trendoid romantic farce "2 Days in Paris." I plan to cover more serious fare (those included) in the days ahead, but hey -- it was opening night, and Tiki and Howard needed me at the velvet rope. I have no idea why they showed up for "The Hammer," in which Carolla plays a 40-year-old carpenter who tries out for the Olympic boxing team, but as mediocre comedies go it was perfectly OK. They couldn't possibly have enjoyed it as much as the woman I sat next to, who spat up bits of spleen into her Diet Pepsi at every one of Carolla's self-deprecating deadpan bons mots. (That joke about not talking about your hairy ass -- you're killin' the girls with that one, Adam.)

We'll get back to Carolla's simultaneously bland and troubling fight flick in due course. But the second underachievement-themed film of the night, "Gardener of Eden," which premiered late on Thursday before an even more boisterous gathering, strikes me as more important. Mind you, I'm not saying it's good. But it's not boring. Directed by Kevin Connolly (best known of late as the character Eric Murphy on HBO's "Entourage," although he's had many other film and TV roles), "Gardener of Eden" is one of those self-consciously dark indies that feel like a mash-up of numerous hipster films of yore. It has the lightweight suburban angst of Kevin Smith, the profanity and conversational backwaters of Quentin Tarantino and at least a little of the nightmarish vision of Darren Aronofsky. It also has that romantic subplot about the boy and girl who are thrown together by a mildly ironic coincidence, but you don't have to borrow that one. It's just there, like dust mites.

Lukas Haas, with stringy hair looped around his huge ears so he looks like an especially homely and especially large hobbit, plays a New Jersey teenager named Adam who has been kicked out of college. He works in a deli, lives at home and hangs out with a bunch of high school friends who are going nowhere special and beginning dimly to realize that what lies ahead isn't pretty. Giovanni Ribisi just about eats the movie whole in a few scenes, playing the cynical kid a few years older than they who has become the town's leading drug dealer.

Adam has a special destiny, or something. His life changes when he finds, er, when he touches ... well, let's just say when something really, really gross happens that Connolly's camera dwells on in hyperrealistic detail. (His cinematographer is the estimable Lisa Rinzler.) Or maybe his life doesn't change. Maybe the weird, gross thing just happens and ping-pongs around in Adam's head while he moves from one loserish episode to the next. Adam may be having a breakdown, or a breakthrough, that recalls Holden Caulfield and Donnie Darko and the Kevin Spacey character in "American Beauty," all at the same time. One night as he's wandering the streets, unemployed and angry, planning to commit a crime himself, he ends up accidentally apprehending the town's serial rapist. (Did I mention there's a little "Taxi Driver" in here too?)

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