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The product description gives as good a plot summary for the film as you're going to need to decide if this may be for you, so I'm not going to add my own. I came to look up the film after I realized that over the years I'd watched (and liked) quite a number of fillms featuring Ethan Hawke without ever looking up anything because he was involved with the production. And all of a sudden that seemed like an oversight. Of the films I hadn't yet seen, this seemed as good as any to start out with. And I feel I stumbled upon a real little gem. It's not a particularly beautiful film, the characters are all rather less than likable, the camera work is, well... let's be charitable and call it interesting, and yet it's not a bad little film.
The three actors involved are all excellent. The characters feel real. And there is a certain tension. Right from the get go we feel that Hawke's character is setting the scene for things to come. He's decorating the dingy motel room with empty beer cans, the contents of some he is seen consuming while others are poured down the drain. His character is high, near psychotic, when Robert Sean Leonard arrives on the scene. But we, the viewers, know - or at least suspect - that he's nowhere near as high as he seems. It's clever and it works well.
The casting of Hawke and Leonard as former school mates also works well. They've played class mates before (in Dead Poets Society), maybe that helps. While Hawke plays a loser without direction and high on substance, Leonard's character is moderately successful and even keeled if a bit smug (actually, it's not altogether unlike Leonard's well adjusted Dr Wilson in House, who provides a balance to Laurie's psychotic Dr House). Thurman also works well as both men's high school flame Amy. She is uncharacteristically unglamourous here, but her performace is top notch. And her character brings an interesting twist to the plot.
It's a good film, and I enjoyed watching it. Mind you, it's not an uplifting tale of friendship, or even reconciliation. It's all about rather nasty mind games, a bit along the lines of Closer or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? On a much more modest scale. Nicely acted and well worth watching all the same.
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