Flawless

Joel Schumacher, who followed his two Batman installments with the lurid 8mm, tries a hand at comedy of sorts with this high-concept tale of a homophobe (Robert DeNiro) who takes voice lessons from a drag queen (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Walt is a decorated career cop; Rusty is just...decorated. Their interaction is initially limited to his yelling out the window to the facing apartment for her and fellow (?) crooners to "shut the f--k up!" when they gather to rehearse Patti LaBelle tunes for the club where Rusty is emcee. When a stroke suffered while running upstairs to investigate a disturbance in his own building leaves Walt partially paralyzed and slurred of speech, his p.t. recommends singing as therapy. So Walt holsters his pride, and before long not only is he feeling better, but he's dancing on a float in a G.L.A.A.D. fundraising parade. Okay, I made that last part up, but it's less outrageous than the direction the real plot takes, concerning Russian gangsters, stolen drug money, and a sex-change operation.

Flawless is saved, marginally, by Hoffman's performance as Rusty, who manages to be both flamboyant and understated -- quite a trick considering the drag queens you see in the media always do flamboyant, larger-than-life characters like Cher and Streisand (not many female impersonators do Ingrid Bergman). This isn't one of DeNiro's better movies, though. He gets the physical pathos and below-the-neck mannerisms right, but the director has Walt speaking through such a constricted grimace that most of his dialog was pretty obviously looped in later. More egregious is the script, which Schumacher wrote himself, the first time he's done double-duty since St. Elmo's Fire 15 years ago. He works in a nice subplot about Walt's love life before and after, but the seriocomic criminal hijinx belong in a different movie altogether. And about that ending -- for once I wish I'd quit watching a movie about five minutes before it was over. C+

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