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Love and Death on Long Island A Classic That Stands on Its Head by Bruce Cantwell If there's one thing more satisfying than seeing a wonderful comedy, its seeing a wonderful comedy that has a streak of greatness in it. In its own way, Richard Kwieteniowski's contemporary comedy is infinitely more faithful to Thomas Mann's mordant, ethereal Death in Venice than Visconti's 1972 film adaptation. Going Visconti one better, Love and Death on Long Island is also the funniest film of the year. Giles De'ath (John Hurt) is a serious and seriously desiccated British author. A reclusive longtime widower, he abstains not only from interviews but from most of the trappings of Post World War II civilization. When impulse or boredom makes him accept a radio interview, his life is turned upside down. The interview has little affect on him. He doesn't even realize how boring he is. It's the change of routine that gets him. He forgets his keys. It starts raining. To get out of the rain he decides to duck inside a movie theater where an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel is playing. Unaware of the cultural development of the multiplex, he accidentally enters Hot Pants College II and after a few minutes of adolescent high jinx realizes that it's not merely a botched Forster adaptation but altogether the wrong film. He's ready to make his retreat when he's suddenly transfixed by the handsome young actor Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly). And...we're...off. Thomas Mann wrote an allegorical tale about Mann's obsession with beauty as an unexplainable longing for the transcendent. Early in the story, Mann gives his writer Aschenbach a glimpse of his future, showing him an ancient man wearing lipstick and rouge and dressed like a young dandy. Here, De'ath, having no doubt read Death in Venice, is aware of the absurdity of his situation from the get-go. For Aschenbach, the object of beauty was a boy on the brink of puberty. For De'ath, a beautiful B movie actor. Neither story is about homosexuality. No one would bat an eyebrow these days to learn that a famous literary figure was a homosexual, but for a man of letters to swoon over the star of Skid Marks, well National Enquirer here we come! John Hurt's transcendent performance is the heart and soul of this retelling. In one amazing scene, he watches a dreadful Bostock flick called Tex Mex on his newly acquired video system. As the camera slowly zooms on the dying hero, De'ath face unconsciously draws closer to the screen. When a cut to an old priest's face breaks the spell, he draws back, reverie shattered. Thomas Mann realized, even in his time, that contemporary audiences were too jaded to take an unabashed treatise on the soul-transforming nature of beauty seriously, so he took the oblique approach of placing his protagonist in an absurd situation. Perhaps today the only way to address such an eternal theme is by making it a comedy and casting a popular TV star. It's not easy to do a classic while standing on your head but John Hurt's balance is extraordinary.

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