TO say director Larry Clark loves to romanticize the low life is like saying Woody Allen has a fondness for Manhattan. In ”Another Day in Paradise,” his comparatively mild follow-up to the grotesque ”Kids,” Clark rolls in sleaze and squalor like a mangy dog on steaming roadkill.
”Another Day in Paradise” is the grit-crusted story of a patched-together crime family, a foursome of desperadoes who drive around doing drugs, having sex and committing crimes on the road to certain doom. The characters are all repulsive, having given themselves over to blank outlaw lives of dope, cruelty, sex and stupidity.
The pleasures to be taken from ”Paradise” are almost all cheap and voyeuristic: you keep watching the movie to see how degraded these wastrels will become. But without a larger moral context framing their actions, or a sense that the characters are morally aware enough to seek redemption, the drama quickly becomes attenuated. We’re left with a grim, cliched portrait of wretched sickos, nothing more.
That said, James Woods plays one hell of a wretched sicko. Woods is so ferociously good here that he nearly saves the grim, greasy picture. He plays a bad, crazy junkie named Mel, who offers juvenile delinquent Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser, a trailer-park Leonardo DiCaprio) a way out of the small-time larceny that gets him beaten to a pulp for chump change in the movie’s opening sequence.
Bobbie and his bony girlfriend Rosie (a slack Natasha Gregson Wagner) hit the road with Mel and his old lady Sidney (Melanie Griffith) in a black Cadillac. The cigarettes-and-smack-fueled journey takes them through mainlining jags at sleazy motels, various robberies, revolting rap sessions, a raunchy gay bar (where a feral Lou Diamond Phillips turns up as the meanest queen since Bloody Mary), and sundry seediness.
Mel’s outlaw vitality initially seduces the passive Bobbie, but it’s his combustible menace that ultimately binds the others to him out of terror. No one else in this grifter quartet can match Mel for spirited malevolence, and if Woods’ acting weren’t enough to unbalance the picture, the dramaturgy itself turns ”Another Day in Paradise” into a one-man show. Kartheiser and Wagner barely register. A puffy, ravaged Griffith is better than usual, and her woozy tenderness toward of Bobbie and Rosie provides what little humanity and tragedy there is in the soulless ”Paradise.”
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
Starring James Woods, Melanie Griffith. Directed by Larry Clark. Running time: 100 minutes. Rating: R. At Angelika Film Center, Houston and Mercer streets.