THE REAL BLONDE

• Starring Matthew Modine, Catherine Keener, Daryl Hannah and Elizabeth Shue
• Directed by Tom Di Cillo
• Rated R, with nudity, profanity and violence; running time 105 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, We give this film a 7

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(April 17, 1998) -- "It seems like everybody is getting stupider and stupider," a couple of different characters observe in The Real Blonde.

Yet, as writer-director Tom DiCillo shows in his quirky and funny new film, it's not a terminal condition. People survive their own idiocy, though there are inevitably victims along the way.

DiCillo, who wrote and directed last year's engagingly offbeat Box of Moonlight and 1995's hilarious Living in Oblivion, expands his purview from smaller, more contained films. Here, he tells a sprawling and interconnected story about the difference between what people think they want and what they really need.

He has peopled his screenplay with a half-dozen characters who go chasing after ridiculous dreams when, as Dorothy observed, their heart's desire was right there in their own back yard.

Joe (Matthew Modine), for example, wants desperately to be an actor, though he spends most of his time in a tux, working as a waiter for a martinet-like caterer (Christopher Lloyd). He lives with Mary (Catherine Keener), a make-up artist -- and bridles that, after six years together, she still forces him to wear condoms (rather than using some other form of birth control).

Joe's pal Bob (Maxwell Caulfield) has just landed a role on a soap opera. An inveterate womanizer, Bob thinks he will achieve happiness when he finally finds a woman who is a real blonde -- as opposed to the bottled kind he usually encounters.

Joe struggles to find acting work; though he can do a great version of a speech from Death of a Salesman, he doesn't understand how to finesse a meeting with an agent who can get him work (a delicious cameo by Kathleen Turner). He affects a snobbish attitude toward working on a soap, then desperately agrees to a one-day job in a Madonna video.

Mary feels powerless in her life, particularly because an old wino routinely makes suggestive remarks to her everyday on her way to work. So she starts taking a self-defense class (from an instructor played by Denis Leary) to find a way to express her inner rage.

Bob, meanwhile, has been sleeping with a gorgeous model -- until he discovers the blonde of his dreams in his soap co-star Kelly (Daryl Hannah). But that kind of proximity to true blondeness works reverse magic on his masculinity, to his chagrin.

DiCillo bounces back and forth among these characters, pausing to take humorous potshots at a variety of targets: music video (we see a reporter for a cable network called Empty-V), fashion photography, self-help, the art world. The targets are familiar, even easy ones -- yet DiCillo has a wicked enough wit to go beyond familiar, easy jokes.

Real Blonde refuses to progress down conventional avenues, or even explain some of its digressions. That can lead to unsatisfying detours, including one discomfiting one about physical abuse that is never really explored.

But the film still feels fresh and unique, because DiCillo seldom takes it where we expect. Though its ending has a sentimental tinge, tying up some loose ends too glibly, it earns its feel-good finale, if only because DiCillo doesn't promise smooth sailing after charting rough waters.

Modine makes Joe a likable but outspoken character, who can't help but say what he thinks, even when the politics of the moment dictates otherwise. DiCillo takes advantage of Modine's bland screen persona, using it to show why Joe has never been able to connect as an actor.

He draws a wonderfully edgy performance from Catherine Keener, a regular in his films and an actress who should work more often. He even gets sympathetic and thoughtful work out of Elizabeth Berkley, as the object of Joe's fantasies.

The Real Blonde is unconventional fare for a studio-released film. But DiCillo is an American original, with a cutting comic voice about contemporary foibles.