Consenting Adults

This is odd. The director and co-star of "Sophie's Choice" teamed up again and made one of the most confusing movies. Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play a laid-back couple whose new neighbors (Kevin Spacey and Rebecca Miller) aren't quite what they seem. Spacey's role gives a faint hit of Lester Burnham, but there's no real way to compare "Consenting Adults" with "American Beauty". The movie is just weird. I'm befuddled as to how Alan J. Pakula, the man behind "Klute", "The Parallax View", "All the President's Men" and "Sophie's Choice", could fall down to this. Admittedly, not everyone can have a perfect record, but something as low-quality as this? Just bizarre.

. . .but the weirdest thing is - it is eerily similar to the Aykroyd/Belushi film "Neighbors." Heavily derided in it's time, it matters not whether you liked it, it had some really weird elements to it. NOW - take out the weird elements and leave a basic plot: "Exciting" guy with a bad bleach-job and his sexy wife move in next door to thoroughly-mundane guy and his attractive wife; who, by the way have a sexless marriage. Kline/Belushi are set up as "marks" immediately, and almost as immediately the new neighbors begin a contrived "seduction of the innocent". Soon, the mundane guy finds himself trapped in an existential hell of Blondie's making(Spacey/Aykroyd). Well. Consenting Adults is not a good movie - or even interesting. Spacey gives a charismatic performance as usual, but the script lacks any originality. This was another entry in the ". . .from Hell" high-concept series of scripts from the early-90's. Babysitter. . .Cop. . .Neighbor. . .Dentist. ..I wish I could say that the best parts of this film ended up on the editing room floor - considering the cast - but there's no way this script was ever anything but stale.

Here's a film I thought was unfairly criticized by the national critics. Panned by about everyone, I thought this thriller was pretty good.

Yes, there is one major credibility gap in a key segment which I, too was ridiculous. (How can you make love to your neighbor, even in darkness, and not know who it is?!) Also, there is a clichéd ending, but that's not unusual in films.

Overall, however, I thought it was entertaining and nicely filmed. I'd like to see this on a DVD with a better transfer. The main actors - Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio - were all interesting, especially Spacey's villain character. It was also interesting to E. G. Marshall, who was a big star on television years ago. I'm sorry his role was so short.

The film also had good suspense. All of these are why I think the film is a lot better than it's considered.

This movie had been in my Netflix Queue for sometime and I decided to give it a watch after meeting Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio in person (very gracious lady). Anyway, I'd seen the film before, but it had been many years. After viewing it again this time around, I came to the same conclusion. The first half of the story is very engaging and interesting. Kevin Spacey is brilliant in one of his early roles. Mastrontonio and Kline are also very appealing. You like the characters and you care about them. However, the second half of the film, the "thriller" portion, is so lame and unrealistic that I completely lost interest. It's as if the writers simply gave up on how to finish this film off. They created very interesting characters, set up a nice story, but the story didn't have anyplace interesting to go. I'd love for someone to try a rewrite of this thing. Anyway, not much going on here with this film. The only relevance it has is if you are a Spacey, Kline, or Mastrontonio fan. Rating 5 of 10 stars and that is being somewhat kind.

Besides characters played by Moe Howard or Stan Laurel, it's hard to remember a leading man who was as amazingly stupid as Kevin Kline's Richard Parker. The thing is, neither Kevin the actor or Richard the character seem to know that Richard is stupid, and the people around him, including the film's director, don't know it either. You want to pull for Richard because of what's happening to him, but he just keeps reacting in such an inane way, and digging his hole so much deeper that it's hard to care.

As far as Kevin Spacey goes, didn't his SEVEN character present himself as less of a psycho, at least on the surface? Apparently, Priscilla isn't much smarter than her husband, and the local police don't have much more going on than either of them.

This climax tries hard to create the mood of suspense in PLAY MISTY FOR ME or FATAL ATTRACTION, but by that point, after ninety minutes of watching these annoying people create their own hellish situations, why would it matter? Of course, the villain is even more annoying than the would be heroes, so you probably won't want to root for him, either.

It's difficult to remember when any of the three leads played less charismatic characters. If this film had been made in 1945, I might have cast Lou Costello, Bela Lugosi and and a leading lady more inept and annoying than any that I can think of, off the top (Jean Stapleton wasn't working yet at that point, was she?). Better casting choices today might be George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Theresa Heinz Kerry. You can figure out who would play which character, based on everything I said.