MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Dick’: Problems With Details

The chief trouble with “The Trouble with Dick” (at the Nuart) is that it rings so hollow in all its details: Though it revolves around the milieu of a professional science-fiction writer, it treats that genre so patronizingly and unknowingly that S-F buffs are bound to be offended. And for a movie that aspires to delineate the inner world of an introverted author, the script feels as though it were written by someone who never even knew a writer, let alone was one.

Tom Villard is the title Dick, whose queries to publishers and come-on lines to ex-girlfriend Susan Dey are being rejected with equal unanimity and whose mental deterioration is the focus of the farce-like but laughless plot. From the very beginning Villard plays the troubled character--supposedly an intellectual young man with a major novel to his credit--as something very near a human vegetable, so when his nervous breakdown actually begins, the regression seems negligible.

Dick’s breakdown is brought on not only by the rejection in his life but also by his alternating sexual dalliances with his desperate landlady and her teen-aged daughter (an obvious homage to “Lolita.”) By the time this handsome but blank and apparently vapid fellow starts cowering in a corner, babbling non sequiturs, you may be reminded of the torturous last half-hour of “Dead Ringers,” without any of its wit, pathos, urgency, style or logic. Here, amazingly, this leads to a happy ending that comes out of nowhere.

Throughout the picture, we’re treated to fantasy scenes of Dick’s current S-F opus, a short story called “Galactic Chain Gang,” in which an escaped convict (character actor David Clennon, deserving better) fights for his life on an arid prison planet peopled by aliens and a mysterious beauty. This hokey low-budget-film-within-a-low-budget-film is about on the heightened S-F level of “Robot Monster,” but you actually end up looking forward to it, since it beats the real-life banalities of Dick’s dreary story, in a screenplay by the film’s director Gary Walkow. Unfortunately, his ambitions in dramatizing an interior state far outweigh his abilities here.

If this were a cautionary drug tale, it might work; in the montage under the title credits, we see a bottle of lithium which would go a long way in explaining Dick’s dullish behavior, but there are no further references to it. What’s left without it is a character who is completely passive and reactive and who never demonstrates an ounce of the intelligence that might be required to write so much as a Jackie Collins novel. “The Trouble with Dick” (Times-rated: Mature for language) has far more troubles than even its unfortunate hero.