Mercy

[Mercy ]

Directed by Patrick Hoelck

At IFC Center

Runtime: 87 min.

Jammed in to skintight slacks and sweaters and dress shirts that strain over his muscular upper body, the sexy Scott Caan is a walking avatar of preening male vanity as novelist Johnny Ryan in Mercy. Johnny is the kind of writer who churns out romantic novels on an old typewriter during the day, and goes hunting for tail at night, treating women as disposable as condoms. All of that changes, however, when he meets his match in the razor wit (and cheekbones) of book critic Mercy (Wendy Glenn), who loathes his novel and publicly denounces him as someone who knows next to nothing about love. Intrigued instead of stung, Johnny seeks her out for literary advice, and the two fall in love.

But Mercy, with its washed-out warm tones and low-key dialogue (the film was written by Caan), is more than a vanity project about a man turning his life around with the help of a no-nonsense woman. There’s a frayed romanticism to Caan’s script that belies his swaggering air of machismo; this is a man who understands the price of love, even if Johnny can’t, or more probably, won’t. Filled with minor pleasures (including a smoke-filled scene between Caan and his father, James Caan), Mercy slowly turns from a shallow glimpse at one man’s emotional maturity to a weepie saved by its tough-guy reserve, divided into chapters “Before” and “After.”

Caan’s version of L.A. (brought to pitch-perfect life by director Patrick Hoelck) is one of beautiful women and polished bars, where men and women on the make go home to barely furnished apartments that serve merely as places to sleep and fuck. Johnny claims his apartment décor is minimalist; Mercy counters by telling him he needs to complicate things, fast.

If one can forgive the pretentious flourishes (Johnny clattering away at a typewriter instead of a computer; Caan writing himself a role as a man almost preternaturally irresistible to women), Mercy becomes a stinging and gorgeous romance of the kind that are rarely made anymore. Slapstick is missing, and though there are the requisite lunkheaded friends, their contributions are kept mainly to a minimum. Caan proves himself more than just testosterone-fueled comic relief with this one; whether his best films will continue to be those he writes himself remains to be seen.