Review of The Low Life (1995) by Baby G — 05 Sep 2008

I'm not sure what it is that make people admire and relate to movies about failure. Well, wait, I take that back. People like to watch other people fail because doing so let them indulge either their sadistic schadenfreude ("these people fail in the ways I don't") or their masochistic melancholy ("these people fail in the same ways I do"). What I really don't get is the appeal of watching movies where the failure is unmitigated by success or redemption of any kind, where the attempt of art to mirror life mistakenly becomes a portrayal of only the negative side of that life.

The main characters of The Low Life are a collection of slackers, misfits, and also-rans who, upon finding that life (or Los Angeles) was not going to hand them their dreams on a silver platter, decide to settle for passionless, boring and unambitious existences. Would-be-writer John (Rory Cochrane) is emotionless and withdrawn, his friends complain like whining children, and his potential love interest can't or won't remove herself from an unending cycle of rich but creepy potential husbands whom she could never really love. Nearly everyone in the movie is self-absorbed to the point of near-blindness. And the one character who manages to stay unselfish and positive in the face of his own failures--John's roommate Andrew (Sean Astin)--is not only socially maladjusted to the point of annoying everyone, but is eventually killed in a random car wreck and mourned by all of three people, his parents and John.

There have been other movies that explore the hopeless grind of an unfulfilling life or the frustration of dreams that just won't come true, and been successful and popular in doing so. But most of those movies were either supposed to be funny (Office Space), redemptive (American Beauty), or both (Swingers). The Low Life had the benefit of a strong cast (Astin and Kyra Sedgewick are two bright spots), but its characters' blase negativity, bitter boredom, spoiled whining and unsatisfying routines end up making the audience almost as bored as they are.