Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie Review

“Do you really want to do this? We’re at the door of uninhibited disclosure.”

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 7, 2009

Can you love two people at once? When posed with the question, one character on the British sitcom Peepshow—which, if you haven’t seen it, is absolutely worth tracking down—sums it up awkwardly, but tidily. “No, sure, obviously you can,” he says, “but you don’t. You work out who you like best and pretend not to like anyone else.” The extent to which that’s true is open to personal interpretation, but the dilemma presents ample opportunity for dramatic conflict, and has been memorably explored recently in the philandering of Mad Men’s lusty advertising execs and in the bizarre love quadrangle that comprises the bigamist family on HBO’s Big Love. It’s a question that pulls at the root of civilization itself, and it’s the central conceit of writer and director James Toback’s 1997 drama Two Girls and a Guy, a film that explores the nature of fidelity and truth in the context of modern love.

Two girls, a guy, and a tub.

The set-up couldn’t be any simpler. Carla (Heather Graham) and Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner) meet by chance in front of an apartment building in New York City, where each is waiting for her boyfriend. Through some casual conversation, the two strangers suddenly realize that they’re both dating the same man, Blake (Robert Downey Jr.), an actor/musician/entertainer who has yet to hit the big time. Obviously, he has some explaining to do. Carla and Lou hide out in Blake’s inherited loft, and when he returns home after a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, he gets the surprise of his double-sided life. With the curtain pulled back and his sham revealed, Blake is forced into some clumsy backpeddling, offering pitiable excuses and lame justifications before trying to prove a tenuous point with a faked suicide attempt that leaves his bathroom covered in Karo syrup and food coloring. Carla and Lou are not impressed, but instead of storming off and walking out of Blake’s life forever, they stick around and try to figure out—through some nebulous, highly sexualized and unashamedly frank dialogue—exactly what causes Blake to be such a “lying, cheating, manipulating,” um, mothercopulater.

Like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the film is propelled solely by conversation. Only, instead of a breezy stroll through Parisian streets, the characters here are confined to Blake’s sparse but opulent loft. This gives the film the sense of locality inherent in a stage play, but the effect is in no way stagy or artificial, simply because the characters are so realistically drawn and the dialogue sounds unforced and almost unscripted. In fact, one scene, in which the women confess their own infidelities, was pieced together from 200 minutes of improvised conversation.

The standard temptation would be to have Carla and Lou descend into cat-fighting and name- calling, and while there is an element of competition—I think part of the reason they don’t leave is to find out who Blake really loves—the director takes these two characters in some unexpected directions. As Blake takes a bath to wash off the fake blood, Carla and Lou have a girls-only style connection, getting drunk off of tequila and braiding Carla’s hair. They have a kind of solidarity in being mutually slighted, and the two enjoy pinning Blake down argumentatively and watching him wriggle. That said, there comes a moment when Carla pulls Blake into an empty, Japanese-inspired room to engage in some adult recreation of the oral variety. It’s an unabashedly sexual scene, but the eroticism is curbed by the painful image of Lou sitting outside the paper sliding door, both listening and trying not to listen. While Carla is cherubic, elegant, and shrewd in her arguments with Blake, the pixyish Lou is, in her own estimation, “cute instead of beautiful, streetwise instead of clever.” After the liaison, when Carla briefly leaves to make a “personal” phone call, Lou plays her emotional hand by telling Blake that if he had just been more patient, and less of a coward, he might’ve gotten exactly what he secretly wanted—a ménage a trois. Meanwhile, a poster for Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim hangs on the wall like a cinematic wink.

Both Natasha Gregson Wagner and Heather Graham give self-assured performances—though Graham outclasses Wagner in every scene—but Two Girls and a Guy belongs to Robert Downey Jr. The mid-1990s weren’t the easiest time for Downey, who was in a state of on-again- off-again sobriety, but he channels some of that angst into this role, which requires him to engage in some self-reflective meta-acting. Playing an actor who struggles with truth as it relates to his career as a professional falsifier of emotion, Downey crafts a character that is at once utterly translucent—he’s a clear narcissist with Oedipal tendencies—and maddeningly opaque when it comes to telling whether or not he’s being honest. There’s a scene when he faces himself in a mirror and seemingly breaks down, repeating over and over that he’s got one last shot to pull his life together. Gradually, this pained self-awareness gives way to actor-like vocal exercises and stretched facial expressions, as he was displeased with his performance and needed some additional time to warm up. Blake does some despicable things, but Downey never plays him like a clichéd Casanova. There’s a real person buried somewhere under all those layers of façade, and when the film’s finale levels a punch straight at Blake’s emotional gut, we’re likely to gasp in pain with him, our sympathies unexpectedly earned.

Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For a nearly 12-year-old film made for only one million big ones, Two Girls and a Guy looks good on Blu-ray. I wouldn't say great, but the film's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer does seem true to source, never hindering the presentation with any technical obstacles. Clarity is mixed throughout the film. Close-ups, in general, show a terrific amount of detail. If you examine the shots of Heather Graham outside the apartment, you'll notice sharp facial textures; there's no waxiness at all and even individual strands of hair are finely reproduced. However, mid-to-long range shots have a tendency to go a little soft, especially during the indoor scenes—which constitute the bulk of the film. The image is never outright blurry, but the edge is taken off on occasion. Most of this seems due to the focus pulling, which is sometimes imprecise. The film's color palette is never particularly interesting, but it is consistently stable throughout, with a look that blends warm, yellowish indoor lighting with cool winter light coming through the windows. Black levels are adequately deep, and while there are a few instances of minor crush, it's never distracting or overt. The film's grain structure is also unobtrusive; it get slightly heavier during the darker scenes, but there's no evidence of DNR or any other digital manipulation.

Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As a completely dialogue-driven film, you'd be correct in assuming that there aren't any real sonic showpieces in Two Girls and a Guy. The film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is mostly front-heavy, with an emphasis on voice and music. It's clear that a lot of post-production ADR looping was done for the dialogue, and my only real qualm about the audio presentation is the slightly artificial quality of the actors' voices. There's just something a little off about the way everyone sounds; it's as if the voices don't quite match the apparent acoustics of the loft where the film takes place. Still, the dialogue is easily discernable and never muffled or compressed. Expectedly, there's not a lot of engagement from the rear channels aside from the occasional piece of incidental music that blares from Blake's boom box. During the first scene outside of the apartment, there's a good bit of New York street ambience, but it's all pushed into front channels, creating a soundfield that's somewhat cluttered and unbalanced. The music, however, frequently fills out all of the channels with a modestly full sound. The only other audio hiccup I noticed was a slight crackle when Lou drops an especially loud F-bomb.

Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

R-Rated and NC-17 Versions of the Film
There's really not much difference between the two cuts—it only amounts to a few seconds of footage, all relating to the orally enthusiastic scene between Heather Graham and Robert Downey Jr. The separate versions are selectable from a screen before the main menu.

Commentary by James Toback, Robert Downey Jr. and Natasha Gregson Wagner
Toback starts this track off by detailing how he wrote the script after seeing Downey during an "unfortunate moment" on television—his arrest on a drug charge. Downey has the best comments here—blurting out "I had a boner!" and calling the R-rated cut the "circumcised" version of the film—but unfortunately his thoughts are in the minority. Toback dominates, and he thinks way too much of his own film, frequently claming certain sequences contain one of "the best ________ in cinema history." Insert "lines" or "sex scenes" or "tongue kisses," etc. Do note that the commentary is only available during the R-rated cut of the film.

A Conversation with James Toback (1080i, 20:43)
In this new featurette, Director James Toback takes us through the origin of the script—it was written in four days—the casting process, his directing style, and the consternations that arose with the ratings board, which objected to the film's sex scene. Toback is somewhat megalomaniacal and self-congratulatory—he even admits this during the end of the interview— but he is well-spoken about the film and offers a few new insights into its creation.

Theatrical Trailer (SD, 2:24)

Two Girls and a Guy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Two Girls and a Guy, despite the catchy, evocative title, isn't exactly a romantic comedy. There's no romance involved at all—sex and selfishness form the basis for the trinity's relationship —and the comedy is of the cold and cynical variety, derived from the absurd human situation that Blake haplessly creates. However, as a drama, and more specifically, a character study, the film is effective in exploring the tension between monogamy and man's inborn impulse to spread his seed far and wide. The material isn't for everyone—this is an extremely talky film that deals with some blunt sexuality—but those looking for something with more substance than your average rom-com may want to venture a rental or a cautious purchase.