Sex and the single-minded

'Just Looking' hardly worth a glance

In this story: Banished to Queens Story? What story? RELATED SITES

By Paul Tatara
CNN.com Reviewer

(CNN) -- When popular TV actors try to make the transition to motion pictures, more often than not they're pegged as "sitcom" talents. With rare exceptions, they're accused of being too small as performers to fit the big screen.

However, Jason Alexander -- that brilliant embodiment of everybody's favorite shmuck, George Costanza, on TV's "Seinfeld" -- gets his abuse from a different angle. It almost feels like name-calling to say that his first film as a director, a 1950s-based coming-of-age story called "Just Looking," plays like a long, tedious episode of "The Wonder Years." But that's exactly what it's like. The movie languished on the shelf for a over a year before its release, for pretty obvious reasons. Screenwriter Marshall Karp consistently opts for zippy one-liners in lieu of realistic exchanges that gradually clarify the characters' hopes and desires. The dialogue too often falls into a false, bippity-boppity rhythm that sounds like actors trying to outdo one another.

The biggest drawback, though, is that the main storyline is so single-minded, you can't stay interested in it for more than 20 minutes. The narrative is stuck in neutral for most of the film's running time.

Ryan Merriman stars as Lenny Levine, a sarcastic 14-year-old Jewish kid who lives in the Bronx with his newly remarried mother (Patti LuPone) and fat, obnoxious stepfather (Rich Licata). Lenny enjoys keeping up with the Brooklyn Dodgers and riding his bicycle, but his main obsession is sex. He sets the lofty goal of seeing two people in flagrante delicto before the summer is over, going so far as to spy on his mom and stepdad when they're going at it in their bedroom.

You'd have to be desperately horny to want to see your mother have sex with a grossly overweight man. Apparently, the kid's hormones are doing the watusi.

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Lenny is still coping with the unexpected death of his biological father and he isn't getting along with his stepdad, so his mom insists that he spend the summer with his pregnant aunt and Italian grocer uncle (Ilana Levine and Peter Onerati) in the wilds of Queens. She thinks the change of scenery might do him some good. Lenny, who's a bit of a grump, doesn't want to go at first, but he finally complies to make mom happy.

In Queens, he works as a stock boy at his uncle's store, and quickly makes friends with John (John Franquinha), an equally sex-crazed kid. John and a couple of teen-age girls (including Amy Braverman, whose character is the most seriously lecherous of the bunch) have established what they call a "sex club," though they only talk about the dirty deed. They never actually do it, which is probably just as well: Lenny probably wouldn't know how to proceed if he got the opportunity.

As is usually the case in this type of picture, John knows a young woman with the kind of body and inviting disposition that sets young boys reeling. She's Hedy (Gretchen Mol), a nurse and part-time bra model. Hedy hires Lenny and John to do chores for her, and she pays well, but the boys are mostly interested in how she fills out tight sweaters.

Lenny gets it into his head that he's going to see Hedy making love with her boyfriend before he has to return to his family in the Bronx, and he goes to great lengths to bring his dream to fruition. This leads to further voyeurism, further discussions of fornication between the kids, and some utterly predictable bonding between Hedy and Lenny.

Alexander has very little sense of directorial rhythm. Everything ambles along at the same medium tempo, with sudden bursts of doo-wop music only pointing up the lack of verve in the images. A handful of scenes are close to awful, but everything else just kind of sits there inoffensively.

There's really next to nothing to say about the story, except that it's not a story at all -- just an anecdote that gets dragged out to movie length. You can get away with that if the dialogue is sharp enough, but no dice this time.

Though the cast is just fine, the only actor who generates any impact is Mol. With her hubba-hubba build and fresh-scrubbed, Eisenhower-era features, she's perfect for the role. You can understand a horny schoolboy's obsession with her -- indeed, you can understand practically anybody's obsession with her, horny or not.

It's become something of a sport lately to snicker at Mol because she was touted as the Next Big Thing back in 1998, and it never happened. But she can't be blamed for her current lack of success. Entertainment journalists are so quick to anoint people as these days that actors sometimes find themselves sucker-punched by fleeting fame.

Mol will be back, and she'll eventually get her hands on a script that takes advantage of her legitimate movie star-ness -- but not in this film. Providing 90 minutes worth of ogling material isn't likely to shoot anyone into the stratosphere. In Hollywood, as in Lenny's world, there are tons of people to ogle.

"Just Looking" contains talk of sex between teens, voyeurism, and a little bit of nudity. Expect very little, and that's exactly what you'll get. Rated R. 97 minutes.

Just Looking

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