In directing debut, Pine’s writing and acting are dead in water
Like “Chinatown” with no stakes or “The Big Lebowski” minus the laughs, “Poolman” is a neo-noir comedy that shares just one quality with its superior influences: a palpable love for Los Angeles in all its corrupt, cruddy glory.
The brainchild of native son and third-generation actor Chris Pine (his dad Robert voices a talking iguana in the film), this is the kind of thing that’s usually called a vanity project. But can that term really be applied to a directing debut that makes its star and co-writer — Pine is all three — look this bad?
An argument can be made that Captain Kirk 2.0 makes a more attractive, scruffy hippie type here than Jeff Bridges did in “Lebowski.” But at least the Dude could deliver his lines. Darren Barrenman, Pine’s title caretaker of the modest Tahitian Tiki apartment court’s swimming pool, waves his hands and bulges his eyes while reciting reams of overwritten dialogue; he always seems on the verge of hysterics, and more than teetering on verbal diarrhea. The resulting effect is that nothing he babbles matters.
When he’s not having disturbing visions of menacing trees while meditating underwater, Barrenman is disrupting City Council meetings with impassioned pleas to save old buildings from rapacious developers and bring back the red car trolleys. He’s a sincere, if none too bright, booster for his vision of a better L.A. This makes him easy pickings for June Del Rey, DeWanda Wise’s femme fatale, who (in the film’s best performance) dangles an evil rich folks/crooked politicians con
spiracy before the Poolman’s ever-wide eyes. The kind of guy who still avidly watches “Chinatown” on VHS tape, Barrenman is soon playing detective through an incoherent maze of looming drought, “Golden Girls” drag performers and — not a West Coast thing, but what the heck — egg cream sodas.
“Poolman’s” half-baked jumble of SoCal spoofery includes easy stereotypes too, like a load of characters being failed showbiz types, or Barrenman’s girlfriend Susan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a Pilates instructor who really wants to marry him but can’t stop sleeping with his friends. Danny DeVito and Annette Bening play a couple at the Tahitian Tiki who are, respectively, helping Barrenman make a documentary about himself and providing motherly psychotherapy. They also aid what passes for his investigation; whenever the mystery plotline starts going somewhere, the narrative momentum gets derailed by some kind of extended antic, one of Barrenman’s numerous meltdowns or* an extended, pointless dissertation about, say, lobster sashimi.
Almost none of this undisciplined presentation is funny (non-comedian Ray Wise, of “Twin Peaks” fame, registers the film’s sole well-timed line delivery). The crime story, though potentially an interesting reverse osmosis of “Chinatown’s” water business, is undermined by glib surprises and clumsy explanations when more serious connecting of clues might have been intriguing. Part of the problem is that Pine has purposely placed the action in an undefined time period that’s partially an arid near-future, but looks like an era before cell phones when Barrenman composes delusional fan letters to Erin Brockovich on a typewriter.
Was that a satirical gambit? A loving nod to something or other that’s eternal about L.A.? Who knows? “Poolman” would have to make some kind of thematic sense, or at least find tonal balances that aren’t constantly out of whack, before anyone can guess what Pine thinks he’s up to.