Writer-director
James Bridges had a distinctly sociological and journalistic bent. His films
delved into hot-button political issues (the 1979 nuclear meltdown thriller The
China Syndrome),
brought articles about lifestyle trends to the big screen (1980's Urban
Cowboy, 1985's Perfect)
and adapted autobiographical novels about narrow cultural milieus, like the
classic 1973 law-school drama The Paper Chase and 1988's yuppie-tastic Bright
Lights, Big City, where
he replaced original director Joyce Chopra. Bridges films sometimes captured
the cultural zeitgeist—China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy—and sometimes the zeitgeist
escaped them, as with Perfect and Bright Lights, Big City, which re-imagined Jay
McInerney's literary doppelgänger as Alex P. Keaton gone to seed.
In
the role that failed to shake up his image, Michael J. Fox, America's favorite
teenager (even as a late-20s Canadian) plays McInerney's fictional surrogate, a
fact-checker at an upscale, New Yorker-like magazine who sublimates his grief over
his mother's death and his model wife's abandonment into a nightlife full of
clubbing, binge drinking, and blow. All the while, Fox works on an
autobiographical novel and stumbles blearily toward redemption. Pity the film's
self-destructive protagonist: He wants to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, he's
doomed to be Jay McInerney.
Screenwriter
McInerney retains much of his novel's heavy-handed symbolism, and some of its
second-person narration, via a Fox voiceover. Cinematographer Gordon Willis
gives the film a seductive visual sophistication that no amount of padded
shoulders, regrettable perms, and questionable fashions can extinguish, and
Jason Robards has a juicy cameo as Fox's inebriated would-be mentor. Big
City is a
film of glossy surfaces and facile pretensions, aided and hindered by Fox's extraordinarily
likeable, utterly unconvincing lead performance. An air of boyish wholesomeness
clings to the adorable Back To The Future star no matter how seamy his surroundings;
even when he's supposed to be neck-deep in a vodka and cocaine haze, he never
seems to be riding anything more dangerous than a wine-cooler buzz. Too bad
he's caught in a movie that all too accurately captures the tenor of its time
with its slick, superficial, coked-up, money-drunk emptiness.
Key
features:
A pair of fawning featurettes, a predictably details-oriented Willis commentary,
and a McInerney commentary that details how closely the film recreates his
wasted youth.