M O V I E S Two Girls and a Guy Written and directed by James Toback Starring Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ALSO THIS WEEK Sliding Doors Gwyneth Paltrow misses her train and forever alters her life in this romantic comedy Sour Grapes "Seinfeld" co-creator's big-screen dud - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK Nightwatch Dark, dank, disgusting, sadistic and no fun at all: It's the perfect post-"Seven" thriller Wayne Wang Thinking outside the "Chinese Box" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE ARCHIVES MOVIES TELEVISION INTERVIEWS FEATURES

Director James Toback's tale of a compulsive womanizer and the women who confront him combines brains with unrestrained eroticism. BY CHARLES TAYLOR | In "Two Girls and a Guy," his first movie in eight years, writer-director James Toback achieves a mixture of braininess and combustibility that seems to be where he was headed all along. Toback's early movies, "Fingers" and the wickedly enjoyable "Exposed," never resolved the tension between the filmmaker's intellectualized approach and the pulpy melodramatic scenarios he cooked up. You could imagine the plots of those pictures boiled down to screaming tabloid headlines: "Concert Pianist's Secret Life: I Was a Hit Man for the Mob!" or "Supermodel Caught in Terrorist Crossfire." Toback loosened up with the gentle romantic comedy "The Pick-Up Artist" and the documentary "The Big Bang" -- pictures as elegantly made as his earlier films, but more casual, more immediately likable. That approach pays off in spades in "Two Girls and a Guy," which begins loose and funky and crosses over into a dark-hued intensity. Toback is once again trawling his favorite territories: the battle between sexual compulsiveness and romantic fidelity, and the irresistible, unresolvable, maddening tension between men and women. But there's a new relaxed confidence to his approach that's finally much more effective. You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared. What starts as a hip little urban sex farce turns out to pack a bittersweet wallop. The set-up is pure romantic comedy. Waiting around outside a SoHo building, two girls, Carla (Heather Graham) and Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner) discover that they share the same boyfriend, an actor-musician named Blake (Robert Downey Jr.). Breaking into his loft, they wait for him to show up so they can confront him. The girls accuse; the guy tries to defend himself. The argument (in dialogue that is bracingly, liberatingly frank and profane) goes around in circles, taking breaks for drinks, an impromptu bout of sex between two of the characters, Blake's increasingly worried phone calls to his ailing mother and the girls-only camaraderie that springs up between Carla and Lou. Except for the opening scene, the movie's 82 minutes take place entirely within Blake's loft, mostly in real time. Blake is, in a sense, a more desperate version of Jack Jericho, the character Downey played in Toback's "The Pick-Up Artist." Blake has his tried-and-true lines (one of the funniest bits in the movie involves Carla and Lou reciting his pillow talk to each other with the polish of two vaudevillians launching into a comic routine), but unlike Jack, he's not about to toss them out when the right girl comes along. For Blake, every girl is the right girl. When Carla and Lou demand to know how he could lie to them, how he could tell each of them that he was so in love he couldn't even get hard for other women, they've got him only half figured out. He's a bullshit artist all right, but a genuine bullshit artist. He insists that he hasn't lied to either of them, and he's so beguiled by the women who cross his path that he really does mean what he says to each one -- at least at the moment he says it. A few hours later, it might be a different story. Toback's detractors (who've tended to review his movies in terms of his reputation for womanizing) may jump on this as a bit of special pleading on the director's part. But what people never seem to get about Casanovas is that they screw up themselves as much as anyone else. Maybe more -- some women see through them, but they never see through themselves. Rhapsodizing over the "connection" he claims he has to Carla and Lou, Blake is ever ready to convert his own foul-ups into the women's lack of faith in him. This is womanizing shot through with delusions of romantic grandeur, and no director has caught its comic, slightly pathetic spectacle in quite the way Toback does. And no actor could have played this role better than Downey. He nails that air of privileged self-absorption you find in moderately talented, fucked-up kids drawn to the arts. (We've all known a Blake sometime in our lives; every college drama department has one or two.) Blake is a baby-faced narcissist, and that's the secret of his appeal. When he puts his doe eyes to work, women can mistake his determination to get what he wants for utter fascination (Blake mistakes it for that, too). The marvel of this performance is what Downey reveals when he no longer has his seducer's bag of tricks to fall back on. In the midst of playing farce, the most gifted farceur of his generation switches gears to reveal the emotional wreckage Blake is headed toward. There can be no doubt, watching Downey here, that he's drawing on the personal hell he's been through in the last few years. When Blake looks into a mirror and spews out his stage patter, his pick-up lines, his stern pep talks to himself, and lets each one dissolve into babble, Downey appears to be drawing from a well of alarm and self-disgust. But he's too much of an actor to simply offer up voyeuristic titillation. He goes beyond Blake's self-involvement to suggest a man in real pain. Downey's last scene knocks the wind out of you: You may feel you need a moment or two before you can get up out of your seat. N E X T_P A G E _| Heather Graham shines

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