Delirious

The hardest films to grade are the ones that don't consistently perform at the same level. It's easy to praise something near perfect or shred something worse than awful. It's harder to decide exactly how much you like something when you love parts and loathe others.
Such is the case with Delirious, the latest from writer/director Tom DiCillo. At times, most of the time maybe, it's a grade A character study of a sleazy, egotistical, destructive, and strangely vulnerable paparazzi photographer named Les Galantine played by Steve Buscemi as a smarmy, and potentially unhinged wannabe with gripping intensity. It's a volatile, engrossing character portrait in which Buscemi does some of his most remarkable work in years. Then again, there are also endless lame pop culture parody segments here that are not even "Saturday Night Live" worthy. For example, there's an entirely frustrating Britney Spears-esque pop star character named K'harma (a misused Alison Lohman) who is being sued by her parents and mourning the loss of her abusive rocker boyfriend all without a modicum of basic humanity to her story. She films beyond tacky music videos (tackier even than the real ones shot by Spears and Co.) and yet the movie never takes a moment to study her potential feelings of exploitation. She gets one subtle scene, in a bathtub no less, where she confesses to hating cameras, but with so much fodder from the current collection of teen girl lolitas to explore, you'd think DiCillo could have done more with her. She's essentially as 2-dimensional as a similar character in this year's earlier pop music satire, Music and Lyrics, a film of a far lower caliber than this one at its best.

The film also scores big with a homeless teenage vagabond character named Toby played by Michael Pitt. He teams up with Les after a chance encounter and together they develop a complicated, fascinating friendship that grows increasingly darker and more deceptive over time. Buscemi and Pitt work brilliantly together and the measure of their interpersonal dynamics by DiCillo is inspired. He captures two very distinct characters, each with passions and flaws of their own, neither wrong, neither truly bad or truly good. It's a fully realized conundrum when the grateful but motivated Toby realizes that breaking away from Les is his only chance of making his own mark in the industry.

The shift from Toby vs. Les onto less interesting stories about Toby's romance with K'harma and eventual brush with superstardom is a virtual death knell for the film. Once the symbiotic pity party of Les and Toby's friendship falls out of focus we're left to feed off the bottom with K'harma and an equally vapid agent named Dana (the also misused Gina Gershon) hogging the screen. To make matters worse, Toby's fame derives from a show that's too stupid even for the dumbest network to realistically sponsor, and when we've witnessed such a real emotional break between Toby and Les such mundane parody feels ugly and stupid.

The movie ends in decent shape but it's already gone so far off the rails by then it almost doesn't matter. The last 20 minutes or so are pretty much dreadful save for the very final fascinating, repulsing, and shocking moment. The first half is a stylish, sadistic joyride, something of an Almost Famous for the soulless fame generation. The second half is some sort of spoof thriller in which everyone's IQ drops radically and people become willing to lie, kill, and imprison one another for fame and glory. I suspect the ludicrous bits were intended as winkingly outrageous parody but they play simply as ludicrous plot holes. I still can't help but love a great deal of this film, and admire the work of Buscemi in creating one of the more electrifying film characters I've seen recently.

Grade: B-