'Permanent' bore

By Doug Levy Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

Ben Stiller (right) stars as real-life TV writer and heroin addict Jerry Stahl (left) in "Permanent Midnight."

One of the first things every good writer learns is that if your audience doesn't care about your characters, they're not going to care about your work.

"Permanent Midnight," the new film starring Ben Stiller as television writer Jerry Stahl, is a perfect example of why this is basically a universal truism.

The movie, adapted for the screen by director David Veloz, is based on Stahl's autobiography, which chronicled his rise and fall in the TV industry and the extensive drug habit which cost him everything he had.

Ben Stiller has already proved in the past that he is a fine dramatic actor as well as a comedian, most notably in last year's "Zero Effect."

His immersion in the role of the smack-addled Stahl is impressive, and the array of personas he takes on, from manic to repentant and subdued, to completely disconnected from reality, speaks further of his abilities.

The problem, however, lies in the fact that Jerry is a truly unlikeable character. Basically, he comes across as pure scum, as a man who is so self-involved and so caught up in his own self-hatred that he doesn't care what effect he has on the people around him.

Even before he shoots up heroin with his baby daughter next to him in a car, it's hard to really care less about the guy.

When he goes to a clinic to try to get clean (a scene which features the real Stahl in a cameo appearance), we're not really concerned whether he succeeds or not. Of course, we know he won't, anyway.

Despite what some might say, there's nothing glamorous about heroin, but that's not to say that just because your main character is a junkie, the audience can't be given reason to empathize with him.

After all, who didn't like Renton in "Trainspotting"? Or even Spud for that matter?

But in "Permanent Midnight" we never have any reason to feel sorry for Stahl -Êonly for those around him whose lives he makes miserable by dragging them into his downward spiral.

Liz Hurley, lovely as usual, plays Sandra, the woman who marries Stahl in order to get a green card, but ends up falling in love with him anyway - God only knows why.

If there's anyone we care for in this movie, it's her, but the fact that this is Stahl's story, and he's the one who hurts her so badly, just makes it even harder to sit through.

Add on top of all this a forced framing device, which involves Stiller and ER's Maria Bello in a hotel room, and you've got a film that is not only carelessly thought through, but poorly structured.

If an entire movie is told in a series of flashbacks, where we know our "hero" is just out of rehab, what kind of suspense is there for the viewer? Not to mention that the framing sequence is so ridiculously contrived that one would be hard pressed to take it as an actual representation of events.

Which brings up the final point, which is that just because a story is based on something which really happened, doesn't mean it can't be tweaked to be successful. There are obvious elements of this film which are at least in part fictional, and it wouldn't have been hard to give Jerry (the character) at least one redeeming quality on screen.

One can only hope that the real Jerry Stahl has something going for him that we don't see here because while a bad movie is just a wasted evening, we could be getting a glimpse at a wasted life.