No one ever accused director George Hickenlooper of being too upbeat. His films share a pessimistic world-view and a love for flawed antiheroes that has been out of vogue in mainstream Hollywood since the 1970's. While The Man from Elysian Fields is his first film as director that he didn't write or co-write, it shares the same sensibilities of his most personal films; namely a struggling artist's middle American values being a casualty of life in contemporary Los Angeles.
Andy Garcia is said artist, Byron Tiller. After his first novel received rave reviews but little sales, Byron is unable to get his second novel published. He can't afford to support his family, and after suffering a series of indignities to try and make ends meet, he strikes a Faustian bargain with a gentlemen pimp, Luther Fox (Mick Jagger) the owner and operator of Elysian Fields escort service. Tiller uneasily accepts his new role as a male escort, and low and behold his first client, Andrea Alcott (Olivia Williams of Rushmore), is the wife of a dying Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who needs help writing one last book before he dies.
From this rather novel premise (one of Garcia's first lines is 'it's a premise, it's allowed to be ridiculous'), the plot proceeds much as you would expect it to. But, hey, in tragedy, there aren't many places to go but down. What makes Elysian Fields worth watching are the performances. The late James Coburn is excellent as the crotchety old writer, Tobias Alcott. His ruminations on death are made all the more poignant by the fact that this was one of his final performances. Top billed Jagger is wonderfully understated as Fox, and Julianna Margulies does a good job of breathing life into the somewhat thankless role of Mrs. Tiller, the stock movie wife who is basically there to constantly tell her workaholic husband that she wishes he were home more.
What's really significant about Elysian Fields is the way that Garcia, Hickenlooper and screenwriter Phillip Jayson Lasker have crafted the character of Byron Tiller. The indignities that Tiller suffers at the start of the film (at the hands of the publisher who rejects his book, his father-in-law, who refuses to loan him any money and the former boss who refuses to hire him back) could have been a set up for the 'emasculated man re-masculated' plot. This popular revenge fantasy in which the white collar, white male rages against the machine (Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space) is rendered improbable when the hero is turning tricks. This is the emasculated man, further emasculated. Garcia goes for broke, giving a brave performance as the not always likable Tiller. When he makes a last ditch effort to assert his manhood against the deceptive Mrs. Alcott, she coyly rebuffs his ranting and raving and his castration is complete. Jagger, as Fox says it best when he reminds Tiller 'don't forget that they're paying you, not as a writer, but as a whore. I guarantee, they haven't forgotten.'
