Somebody To Love movie review (1996)

“Somebody to Love” could have been titled “Nobody to Love,” because its three main characters are locked in an endless waltz of disappointment. Ernesto will never win Mercedes, Mercedes will never win Harry, and Harry will never leave his wife. The movie, directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, doesn't much care; it's not a love story but an episodic slice of low life, populated by a gallery of strange souls.

Here you will see, for example, Steve Buscemi doing a surprisingly convincing job of playing Jackie, a transvestite who works in the same bar. You will see Stanley Tucci (from “Big Night”) as Mercedes' sleazy agent, faking phone calls. You will see Quentin Tarantino on another stop in his inexhaustible world tour of other directors' movies, playing a bartender with a theory about comedy. (Spotting the Keitel character, he has a great line: “Dude! `High Chaparral!' 1969!”) You will see Anthony Quinn as a lonely man who wanders over from his mother's funeral to visit Ernesto in a grave he is digging. You will see Perez in a duel to the death with self-help tapes to improve her English pronunciation. You will see Keitel's cowboy overjoyed to be cast in a cable movie named “The Life and Times of Tarzan,” only to learn he's expected to wear a gorilla suit. You also will see Keitel in leopard-skin underwear, mangling Shakespeare. And you will see the great director Sam Fuller crawl out of a wrecked Rolls-Royce, pop the cork on a bottle of champagne and offer Mercedes his philosophy of Hollywood.

None of this adds up to very much. By denying itself the possibility of a happy ending, the movie leaves itself with nowhere much to go. But it has style. The writing is quirky and amused with itself, and Perez throws herself into this role as if the world depended on it. From time to time, ever since I saw her in “White Men Can't Jump” (1992), I've found myself sitting in movies and asking myself this simple question: Would this movie be more fun with Rosie Perez in it? The answer has never been “no.”

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