January 15, 2003

THERE ARE FOUR simple words that, when written down, might put fear into the hearts of filmgoers: "Steve Guttenberg, cinematic auteur."

If there's a massive scratching of heads, a quick review of this actor's filmography should jog the memory. He started out with barely perceptible parts in films like the '70s B disaster classic Rollercoaster (he was "Federal Agent #3") and worked his way up to the A-list disaster/camp classic Can't Stop the Music. During the '80s he momentarily courted screen immortality as Eddie, the guy who quizzed his fiancée on football, in Diner. Then he found his niche playing nice-guy schlubs with goofy grins in a series of hits: Cocoon, Three Men and a Baby, Short Circuit, the Police Academy franchise. Yes, that Steve Guttenberg.

Like the films themselves, the actor seemed just likable enough to inspire harmless sensations of saccharin-sweetened fun and bland enough to become nearly forgettable five minutes after the fact. He hinted at a range and depth at times, but his strength was an ability to play an aw-shucks everyman perfect for the mildest of palettes. The '90s could be accused of being less than kind to his fading star, as he dropped off the public radar and saw his films go straight to video. He seemed destined to reside in the limbo section of celebrity status, that point between the "Where are they now?" file and the permanent seat on The New Hollywood Squares. The thought that he might have a vanity project in the works probably never occurred to anyone.

The actor has returned as a quadruple threat with P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, a film he stars in, cowrote, coproduced, and yes, took the directorial leap with. But please, don't call it a comeback. It's hard enough to call it cogent, or even competent.

Struggling actor Jimmy Zoole (Guttenberg) has hit rock bottom. His one-man show of Hamlet (with hand puppets, no less) closed after one night. His best friend passed away months earlier, something Jimmy has never completely recovered from. His girlfriend (Cynthia Watros) left him on New Year's Eve and, to top it all off, his cat has just gone to that great scratching post in the sky.

This last piece of bad news comes just as Jimmy discovers that the young thief, Eddie (Lombardo Boyar), who has regularly been looting his flat, is hiding under his bed, having been walked in on midcrime. After Jimmy knocks Eddie out, he hog-ties the crook to his sink and intends to keep him hostage throughout his nervous breakdown. Before the night is over, of course, the two will engage in the type of introspective soul-searching, life-changing confrontations and noxious faux-philosophical dialogues that smack of, to quote one character, "off-off-awful-Broadway theater."

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead actually started out as a novel by actor-author-playwright James Kirkwood before mutating into just such a play in the mid '70s. According to the press notes, it had a respectable enough off-Broadway run before being eclipsed by another Kirkwood-written work, some minor production called ... A Chorus Line. The play then came to the West Coast with the dream cast of Keir Dullea and Sal Mineo(!). It was described by its author as "a cross between The Odd Couple and Midnight Cowboy," a comment that goes a long way toward explaining the schizophrenic mixture of broad farce and brutality Guttenberg attempted to tap.

An experienced filmmaker with a strong, steady hand might have been able to make the jagged parts cohere into a whole. But under the neophyte hyphenate's touch, a solid middle tone is never struck and many elements that date the play – the clichéd jokes about the showbiz fringe, the self-pity platitudes, and the predatory-homosexual stereotypes – are left intact, agitating what's already dodgy material. Worse yet are the performances, which range from gratingly inept (Watros's wooden line readings put planks to shame) to cloyingly Method-moody (Boyar) to Guttenberg's shameless mugging; his past roles were never renowned for their subtlety, but as a director, he's allowed himself to turn every gesture or expression into an exaggerated three-ring circus pitched past the rafters.

The threat of The Day the Clown Cried, the mythic Jerry Lewis Holocaust comedy that he refuses to release, will forever mean that a more misguided celebrity pet project lurks on the horizon. But the sheer badness of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead ensures a footnote in the annals of star-driven embarrassments at best or a complaint to Amnesty International at worst. The momentary glimpse of a talent that seemed to peek through Guttenberg's trite lead turns is nowhere to be found here, and the tentative misgivings one feels when that aforementioned fateful four-word phrase comes up turn into harsh realities by the time end credits have rolled.