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LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND | PAGE 2 OF 2 Casting Hurt as Giles was an inspired stroke. This most masochistic of actors -- he makes Dirk Bogarde seem as breezy as Cary Grant -- uses what he calls his "spaniel's face" to sly comic effect. Sitting alone in his study, happily scarfing a pizza (Ronnie's favorite food) and laughing at one of Ronnie's pictures, scarcely daring to believe how much he's enjoying himself, Giles is silly and touching. He'd fit right in among all the 14-year-old girls at "Titanic" sighing over Leonardo. (Kwietniowski doesn't compound Giles' snobbishness. Instead of being condescending, the excerpts we see from Ronnie's teen comedies have a lively, parodic accuracy.) Taking a stroll to privately dispose of his fan magazines, Hurt looks as absurd as a figure out of Magritte. In one scene, Giles is watching a movie in which Ronnie dies. A stricken look comes over him, and as he inclines his face to the television screen as if to bestow a kiss on the visage of his dead love, the video image suddenly cuts to another actor and Giles starts back. It's a small moment, but a lovely one, a swift comment on how, in a movie, everything rushes by, giving us scant time to hold on to what we cherish most. Hurt has some of his best moments playing the movie's fish-out-of-water jokes: Giles announcing to an appliance-store clerk that he's interested in purchasing a video recorder, all the while intently studying microwave ovens. And a few scenes later, a delivery boy brings the VCR and finds out Giles hasn't realized you need a television to go with it. In the second half of the movie, Giles flies to America to seek out Ronnie on Long Island, and Hurt becomes a scheming Humbert venturing forth into the New World. Kwietniowski has expanded this section from the final pages of Adair's novel, and in the process he's come up with a small, amusing role for the incomparable Maury Chaykin as the owner of a local diner ("Chez d'Irv"), and a better one for Fiona Loewi as Ronnie's fashion-model fiancée, Audrey. It's Audrey whom Giles uses to connive his way to Ronnie, engineering a "chance" meeting with her, then convincing her that he's interested in using his writing talents to lift Ronnie out of teen movies. For Giles, Audrey is a steppingstone. It's a measure of Kwietniowski's decency that he doesn't treat her that way. Loewi negotiates a tricky transition from Audrey's delight that a cultured person like Giles believes in her fiancé's talent to wounded anger when she discovers the real nature of Giles' interest, and she's very affecting. It's too bad Kwietniowski hasn't done something similar for Priestly as Ronnie. As Ronnie becomes a presence who exists outside of Giles' consciousness, what works in the first-person narrative of Adair's novel doesn't serve as well in the movie. Priestly is fine, but there's not enough for him to do except parody his own teen-idol status. That he even took the role speaks well for him, but his best scene -- when he realizes how Giles feels about him and tries to respond kindly to something he's unprepared for -- suggests there's more to him than his willingness to be an in-joke. Kwietniowski has done the best job possible of dramatizing such a dense, difficult, compacted book. (There is, for example, no dialogue in the novel). The problem is that, in the process, the book's obsessiveness -- as Giles' elation turns into dark, desperate possessiveness -- seeps out of the movie like air from a slow-leaking tire. "Love and Death on Long Island" is amusing and civilized and, finally, rather slack. Kwietniowski resists Adair's real subject -- the treacherous seductions of pop culture. He has said, almost optimistically, "I like to think that what happens to Giles when he goes in to see the wrong film could in theory happen to anybody in any cinema, anywhere in the world." That's as much a calamity as it is a happy accident. SALON | March 13, 1998  Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.