George Hickenlooper's "The Man from Elysian Fields" is a very promising
new film.  Unfortunately, dismal writing makes it self-destruct quickly
and ignominiously.  It features Mick Jagger in the role of a male-escort
service owner, who deep down believes in monogamy.  Really.

Jagger, who is clearly not typecast here, plays a kindly Devil, trading on
Andy Garcia's despair as a penniless writer to buy his soul and, especially,
body.

Jagger (can we call the knighted rocker Sir Mick now?) is excellent, as
he was before, in "Freejack," "Bent" and "Performance." Garcia, however,
is quickly defeated by leaden writing (Philip Jayson Lasker's melodrama
about "the writer's life" has neither life in it nor anything writerly),
but James Coburn has a wonderful turn as the famous, dying writer whose
wife (Olivia Williams) turns to Jagger's Elysian Fields Escort Service.

Very rich and very lonely ladies, the film posits, want most of all to be
taken to the opera by a handsome young man in a rented tux. It is, in fact,
the main purpose of opera as an art form.

And so, to illustrate the point, Garcia and Williams are off to the
opera, where an out-of-focus tenor (named in the cast list as Joseph
Paur) sings the "Flower Song," obviously dubbed from a very fine recording
that I (blush) could not identify.

Visually, it's just about the worst excuse for "a scene at the opera"
since the alleged San Francisco Opera setting in that other escort-service
drama, "Pretty Woman." The one in "Moonstruck" was a bit better, but
nothing equals "The Fifth Element." Talk about production values!

But here's the main question: do escort services get a percentage from opera
houses?

Janos Gereben/SF
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