Pious morality and total amorality have one thing in common: Neither is
sexy. Not remotely.
Intended to be a story about romance — of friends finding out that
their one true love is their best friend — “Friends & Lovers” is a cold,
stupid bore about people with no goodness, just geniality; no inner life,
just impulses.
The story is about a group of young adults on a ski weekend. The
father (David Rasche) of one of the group, is the host. Dad is using the
weekend as a way of scoring points with his sourpuss son (George Newbern).
The script’s crassness is staggering. A man (Stephen Baldwin) bets
that the size of a woman’s nipples corresponds with the size of her lips.
From there, he does everything he can to see the woman with her shirt off.
In “Friends & Lovers,” this is considered jolly, exuberant behavior in a
30-year-old. (In fact, this juvenile pig is the woman’s romantic destiny.)
As the object of his affection, model Claudia Schiffer has a Ginger
Rogers-type role: Men come on to her, and she looks the other way and
smiles. But Rogers never had to contend with guys saying hello and then
sitting on top of her. In “Friends & Lovers,” Schiffer moves naturally and
has no trouble with dialogue. But with a movie like this, who knows if she
can act?
Cast members who appear at least partially nude are Alison Eastwood
(Clint’s daughter) and Neill Barry, who plays a fellow so well-endowed that
women run away from him, shrieking and giggling. In light of that, it comes
as no surprise that Barry helped write the story, with writer-director
George Haas.
Robert Downey Jr., the movie’s sole virtue, is in a handful of scenes.
Everything he does lets the audience know that he’s slumming. Downey is
funny as a German ski instructor with a thick accent — he mugs, purses his
lips and rolls his eyes.
Like some illegitimate son of Laurence Olivier, Downey makes a virtue
out of shamelessness. But the movie can’t pull off the same trick.