Trading Favors Movie Review

The previews for Trading Favors make it look like one of Brian Krakow's wet dreams: Nerd Lincoln Muller (Devon Gummersall) links up with Bad Girl Alex Langley (Rosanna Arquette) and they do wild and wacky things all the way to sunset…and beyond! If you rent this one expecting a comedy, you'll note that it plays like one until things turn ugly and it becomes something else altogether. Arquette is electrifying as always and Gummersall more than holds his own opposite her. Chad Lowe pops up in a funny bit as Marty, the convenience store clerk, and George Dzundza, who's never been light as a feather, looks dangerously over the scale as Lincoln's sad dad, Wallace. (I pray that he's padded.) Peter Greene is a mean brutal sicko incongruously named Teddy. In a sisterhood-is-powerful stroke of casting, Frances Fisher is a librarian! Note the director, who does a bang-up job. (I mention this only because some of the coolest women I've ever met also went with some of the un-coolest jerks I ever went with, so it's good to see that Fisher and Sondra Locke are working together. For the benefit of 21st century readers, the initials of their Oscar-winning, change-the-locks-without-notice jerk-in-common are C.E. Look it up!) If you've ever rented Mitchell Leisen's 1940 Paramount film Remember the Night (scripted by Preston Sturges) with Barbara Stanwyck as the Bad Girl and Fred MacMurray as the Sweet Schnook who falls for her, you might think that Trading Favors is a skewed update. It isn't quite, but it often plays that way for large chunks of the running time.

1997 (R) 103m/C Rosanna Arquette, Devon Gummersall, George Dzundza, Peter Greene, Julie Ariola, Alanna Ubach, Jason Hervey, Craig Nigh, Mary Jo Catlett, Lin Shaye, Richard Riehle, William Frankfather, Frances Fisher, Chad Lowe; D: Sondra Locke; W: Timothy Albaugh, Tag Mendillo; C: Jerry Sidell; M: Jeff Rona. VHS