Review of Four Rooms (1995) by Mathieu B — 29 Jun 2010

How to Pick a Single Number?

The problem with this movie is its very gimmick. The fact is, having four segments by four creators means four different levels of quality. It really is that simple. It also means that it's hard to pick a single number for the overall product. Shoot, even in one unified work, it's difficult. Pick a trilogy--any trilogy. The one where they never say the word "mafia"? The one with the hobbits? The one with the droids? Or how about those four movies with everyone's favourite archaeologist? Okay. Doubtless, you can pick your favourite. Doubtless, you can pick your least favourite. But can you put a single number for the entire series without a lot of serious thought? Which, honestly, is yet another problem I have with the current system, here. I can rate box sets, or at least sometimes, but I can't do a review of each part of the series separately, and even if I normally could, you can't do that with a review of this movie, because it is, after all, just one movie.

What we have here is the Bad Night of Ted the Bellhop (Tim Roth). He is, improbably enough, the only employee working the graveyard shift at the Los Angeles Mon Signor Hotel on New Year's Eve. (It's later implied that there are maids working, but we never see them, and while there must be someone working in the kitchen, we never see them, either.) Each of the eponymous rooms presents a different problem, with a coven of witches in the Honeymoon Suite, a couple playing psychosexual games in Room 404, the misbehaving children of an ominous man and his drunken wife in Room 309, and the drunken revelry of a movie star and his hangers-on in the Penthouse. And not only is Ted the only person on duty, it's his first night on the job. (Which, naturally, makes the conceit even more improbable, but what do you do?) Ted's boss, Betty (Kathy Griffin), tells him that the hotel's reputation is at stake, but by the end of things, Ted really doesn't care, and you can't blame him.

I have to tell you, the final segment is ruined by my perpetual thought that Quentin Tarantino talks too much. The fact that they're consistently using the wrong episode name--it's "Man From the South," not Rio or Reno, both of which someone uses--is not a big deal; I haven't ever seen the episode in question, so how much does it matter? A bigger problem, however, is that Tarantino is another director who casts himself in bigger parts than he should. We talked about this with M. Knight Shyamalan, whose newest movie I'm probably not going to bother watching, and it wouldn't take much thought to come up with other examples. He doesn't actually do that bad a job at directing other people, though he seems willing to let Bruce Willis just play Bruce Willis, and his Ted the Bellhop is far from the worst-acted of the four. (Proving that directors do influence acting!) But he's cast himself as the fabulous new movie star, darling of Hollywood, and it's hard to be sure he's doing it ironically.

It is easier to know that of Antonio Banderas, I think. Ted suggests that Banderas's character, who doesn't get a name, is a gangster, and the way Banderas holds himself does nothing to dispel anyone of that notion. He also gets the funniest line of the movie. And yet it's not actually all that funny of a line, you see. It's the juxtaposition of the insanity inside the room and the calmness of his delivery. Most of the rest of the cast is hamming it up, mugging away madly, but Banderas, and therefore probably director Rodriguez, knows that comedy is nothing without a straight man. Presumably, that's intended to be Ted's purpose as well, but the tendency of the screenwriters seems to be to present him as conscious of his own wackiness. What Banderas does here is slip into the world without pause. Most of the other actors are winking at the camera, certainly including pretty much everyone in the rooms before and after his, but Rodriguez--an uneven director--here has the intelligence to let the situation be funny without forcing the characters to know it is.

I dislike the second room, and I was just as annoyed as Ted to find Angela (Jennifer Beals) returning for the fourth. I am not hugely familiar with director Alexandre Rockwell, but I notice that he doesn't have much in the way of credits for me to become familiar with. Allison Anders, director of the first room--which has the warm familiarity of the disjointed belief structure of any group of Pagans--doesn't really have much in her filmography, either. The mid '90s were a time when everyone got very interested in independent film, but it doesn't really seem as though most of the Rising Stars did much with their talents. Rodriguez has done some blockbuster stuff, including special effects-heavy children's fare, but even Tarantino has, realistically, spent most of the last fifteen years coasting on goodwill from his two "breakout" movies. Shoot, he has ten more credits as an actor than he does as a director, and even that isn't very many.