LOVE IN THE TIME OF MONEY
Great cast, wasted.
Running time: 90 minutes. Rated R (a disturbing violent image, strong sexual content and language). At the Cinemas 1,2,3 and the Quad.
WHAT persuaded a smorgasbord of top indie actors to go slumming in “Love in the Time of Money,” writer-director Peter Mattei’s nasty little slice of misanthropy, is anyone’s guess.
Talents like Rosario Dawson, Steve Buscemi and Michael Imperioli of “The Sopranos” struggle to add a touch of class, but they look as uncomfortable in their roles as their stock-standard characters do in the unnatural romantic mergers into which they’ve been shoe-horned.
Mattei borrows the daisy-chain structure from Arthur Schnitzler’s classic play “Reigen,” but reduces the narrative to a vacuous string of vignettes featuring nine gratingly stereotypical New Yorkers.
The result is an exercise in cynicism every bit as ugly as the shabby digital photography and muddy sound.
The first in a series of increasingly tedious trysts which take place during the late-’90s dot-com boom features a streetwalker (Vera Farmiga) and a carpenter (Domenick Lombardozzi), who goes on to hook up with Ellen (Jill Hennessy), the personification of the perfect wife living in a perfect home who is, guess what, lonely and bored.
She tells her art-collecting husband she wants to sleep with other men, to which he replies, “So do I.”
There follows a laundry list of uncomfortable encounters involving a struggling artist (Buscemi), who describes himself as “just a bit” of a “desperate psycho,” Dawson’s hot art gallery receptionist, a phone psychic (Carol Kane) and Imperioli’s suicidal broker, before the round-robin comes back to the prostitute and a trite “Sliding Doors”-style ending.
Everything’s crazy, everyone’s nuts and, in this cynical look at love and commerce, the daisy chain is strung with stinkweed.