Middling Men

Middle Men

Directed by George Gallo

Runtime: 105 min.

TV banality saturates Middle Men. It is more proof that the influence of TV-style superficiality—undramatic pacing, routine imagery—has ruined the imagination of both filmgoers and filmmakers. Few people these days can discern the difference. Writer-director George Gallo can’t even feel how his attempted porn movie epic is false cinema, essentially R-rated TV.

Gallo has made Middle Men to look just like an episode of Mad Men meets The Sopranos: It’s a series of slickly provocative domestic and business scenes meant to capture the everyday evidence of American cultural change, moral conflict and decadence. Just as contemporary TV dramas confuse the titillation of social decline and ethical corruption with providing a complex perspective on our national condition, Gallo’s story of three men who innovated the Internet porn empire, then were hounded by the federal government, is itself guilty of degeneration.

Texas businessman Jack Harris (Luke Wilson), who stumbles into a fortune during the early days of Internet entrepreneurship, is Gallo’s protagonist as well as his sponsored character. Gallo takes the TV-addict’s self-flattering approach that Harris’ turpitude is All-American rather than an example of individual avarice. Elevating Harris’ wheeling-dealing into an allegory for contemporary misconduct, Gallo fakes social-historical significance. He tries to emulate the moral ambiguity of gangster movie landmarks like The Godfather and GoodFellas without properly understanding their complications—or their failings.

Coppola and Scorsese let audiences indulge their own decadent and sentimental thrall—with the former’s family romance and the latter’s ethnic and community loyalty—all the while normalizing the world’s social relationship to crime. It’s a problem that HBO’s The Sopranos extended—copying without correcting—and eventually was compounded in such trivial movies as Blow and Wonderland. Middle Men resembles those two lousy films to the point that Gallo seems to have combined their drug-and-sex motifs into a Sopranos-meets-Mad Men cocktail of superficial complexity.

Nuances get lost in this TV-style recapitulation: When Harris goes west, leaving behind his sweetheart wife (Jacinda Barrett) to help two Los Angeles wastrels, Wayne Beering (overly actorly Giovanni Ribisi) and Buck Dolby (perfectly sleazy Gabriel Macht), turn their cyberspace ingenuity into a porn empire—by balancing their books and making deals with fence James Caan (doing a Jerry Springer voice)—he gets drawn into the low-life high-living of drugs, the Russian mob and easy sex. Gallo intends Harris’ predictable seduction by vice to have the same irresistible excitement as Henry Hill’s corruption in GoodFellas. He shamelessly imitates Scorsese’s swish pans: a long Steadicam shot prowls an L.A. orgy and each glossily decadent moment is punctuated with pop tunes—from Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” What’s more TV-pathetic than watching derivative tours-de-force?

Gallo made his reputation with the screenplay for 1985’s Midnight Run, but his Middle Men script seems amateurish and shallow: The story’s zig-zag chronology twists events and character motivation. Harris’ hindsight narration talks over scenes—a TV-device that distracts from the lack of historical or emotional context. Harris’ boast about “figuring out a better way for guys to jerk off” is a facetious cover for his own sexual priorities and moral hypocrisy. At least Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover understood and pinpointed the insidious thinking behind wholesale corporate pandering. Gallo not only misrepresents what he trumpets as the $57-billion-dollars-a-year Internet porn industry, but he gets Harris’ character wrong. There’s no comprehension of the calculating liar within the harried businessman.

“The more I indulge the richer it makes me. I gotta tell you that’s impossible to give up,” Harris says. It’s Gallo’s HBO-way of exculpating Harris’ greed. In a self-pitying plot development, Harris falls for young porn actress Audrey Dawns (Laura Ramsey), showing his essential naiveté and innocence. But the overall inanity is exposed during post-coital silence when the starlet tells Harris, “I can hear your thoughts.” They’re as loud as Gallo makes them visible. Fittingly dumb dialogue in one of this year’s dumbest films.