Beyond the Multiplex

"Interview": Journalism, celebrity, dark night of the soul, blah blah blah
I've done a fair number of celebrity interviews in my time, and sure, once in a great while you wind up sharing a drink and a few moments of phony intimacy with your subject. (I dimly remember an episode with Nick Nolte -- dressed in surgical scrubs, his eyeglasses held together with tape -- at a hotel bar in Wrightsville Beach, N.C.) But I'm sorry to say I've never gotten anywhere near the juicily immoral territory explored by Pierre Peders, the burned-out, self-loathing journalist played by Steve Buscemi in "Interview," which Buscemi also directed and co-wrote.

Pierre is a veteran political reporter who's been assigned, for reasons that at first aren't clear, to interview Katya (Sienna Miller), a one-named star of prime-time soaps and teen-oriented horror films. He barely knows who she is and claims he's never seen her movies, but somehow or another their botched interview ends up going all night in Katya's downtown Manhattan loft, where they booze heavily, bicker, make out, videotape each other's true confessions and generally indulge in histrionic joint neurosis. Katya says Pierre reminds her of her dead father, and Pierre says Katya reminds him of his dead daughter, and it's all very prickly and dark and unsavory.

There's a certain compositional elegance to "Interview," and both actors give composed performances as near-sociopathic personalities with bad boundary issues and no clear emotional bottom line. It quickly becomes exhausting trying to figure out when Katya or Pierre is being sincere; they don't know themselves. This veneer of pseudo-adult psychological realism doesn't stop the film from being trashy, awkward and implausible, something like a stage play that might have seemed challenging in 1976. If Eugene O'Neill had tried to write a play about celebrity culture and the decline of journalism, this would be it. (Come to think of it, Arthur Miller did write such a play; you might describe "Interview" as a lesser cousin of Miller's "After the Fall.")

Buscemi seems to have been playing damaged middle-aged guys since he was about 17, and can do this sort of thing with his eyes closed. (For some of the movie, they are closed.) Miller's gotten a lot of ink for this role, and she's pretty good, but in my book playing a young female celebrity as a conniving, cock-teasing manipulatrix does not qualify as groundbreaking drama. I suppose it's pedantic to insist that no real-life Pierre would be given this assignment, and that no real-life Katya would be allowed to have a long unchaperoned visit with a reporter, nor would be so stupid as to do blow in front of him, lie to her boyfriend in his presence or stick her tongue down his throat.

"Interview" is adapted from a 2003 film of the same name by the late Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who became internationally famous as a symbol of Europe's "Muslim problem" after he was murdered on the street by an Islamic fundamentalist. Van Gogh was a protean and prickly character, famous for his vulgar remarks about Muslims, Jews and liberal politicians of all faiths and ideologies. His legacy is complicated, and his films mostly make sense within the context of contemporary European social and political debates. Whatever we may make of van Gogh's life and death, Buscemi's talky, stagey "Interview" -- the first of three van Gogh adaptations planned by American actor-directors -- doesn't make much of a case for him as an important or original artist.

"Interview" opens July 13 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release expected to follow.

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