Content area
Full Text
Reading "Slaves of New York" by Tama Janowitz, some of whose stories ran first in the New Yorker, it's possible to imagine one or two directors who might make something of their trendy slightness. But James Ivory is not the first name to rush to mind; not even the hundred-and-first.
So brace yourself. The impeccable team of Ishmail Merchant and Ivory have turned from such usual sources as Henry James ("The Bostonians," "The Europeans") and E.M. Forster ("A Room With a View," "Maurice"), whose works are as raucous as a furled umbrella, to the messy, unfettered savagery of Janowitz and her clamorous loft-living lowlifes. The result (at the AMC Century 14) is exactly as peculiar as you might imagine.
First, the film makers have let Janowitz be her own adapter, always a risky business and even more so here since she has taken a steamroller to her already affectless Lower Manhattanites. All of them but Bernadette Peters' Eleanor emerge-to use one of Kurt Vonnegut's more succinct character descriptions-as ugly, stupid and boring. Peters, who can never be boring, is merely waifish and masochistic. And miscast.
Stash Stotz (Adam Coleman Howard), whose precious downtown apartment Eleanor shares, is a surly little creep somewhere in his early 20s....