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DIRECTED BY: Alison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino

FEATURING: Tim Roth, Sammi Davis, Valeria Golino, Madonna, Ione Skye, Lili Taylor, Alicia Witt, Jennifer Beals, David Proval, Antonio Banderas, Tamlyn Tomita, Lana McKissack, Danny Verduzco, Kathy Griffin, Marisa Tomei, Paul Calderón, Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Willis

PLOT: On a particularly crazy New Year’s Eve at a rundown Hollywood hotel, a harried bellman’s first night on the job is highlighted by the wild goings-on in the various guestrooms, including a coven of witches, a dysfunctional married couple, a pair of disorderly children, and a film director’s sadistic game of chance. 

COMMENTS: Every now and then, someone gets the bright idea to assemble an anthology film, bringing together a unique roster of top-flight directing talent. They’re almost never a success, financially or critically, but they keep coming back, and every age gets their turn. In the mid-90s, it was time for the young guns of the new Hollywood to join forces for a project set in a crazy hotel, and Four Rooms is the result.

All four filmmakers were coming off big successes, and while few people would ever look for common ground between, say, Gas Food Lodging and Desperado, it’s not completely impossible that the common setting and diverse storytelling styles could combine to make for an interesting melange. Unfortunately, all four seem to have settled on “unbridled chaos” as a guiding principle for their segments. It’s comedy by way of breathlessness, which is typically more exhausting than amusing. In addition, they’re counting on Tim Roth to be a unifying element, providing his own brand of untethered mania. Alas, they don’t seem to have checked in with each other on how they were using Roth, which means we really get four (and arguably five or six) different versions of Ted the Bellboy, a character developed via exquisite corpse.

The first story, Anders’ “The Missing Ingredient,” is a joke with no punchline. A collection of witches, ranging from glamour queen Madonna to crunchy granola Taylor, have gathered in the Hotel’s honeymoon suite to resurrect one of their sisterhood, lost to a curse years ago. By turning the whirlpool tub into a cauldron and adding such items as blood and sweat, they can restore her, but the only thing missing is naive babe-in-the-woods Skye’s assigned contribution: semen. The solution? Seduce the bellboy. And this is exactly what happens. Roth goes full-on Hugh Grant here, stammering and sputtering his way through Skye’s come-ons. He poses exactly no obstacle to the witches’ ends, and in fact, they provide their own impediments by sniping at each other. Beyond that, the story has no stakes at all, which makes Anders’ choices all the more curious, such as her seeming ignorance of how to use nudity. She has somehow managed to convince half her cast to go topless, and it’s surprisingly not the half with Madonna in it. (Fair play: the witless jokesters at the Razzie Awards named Madonna as Worst Supporting Actress—clearly just a chance to be mean to Madonna, since she’s far from the worst actor in the film, and possibly not even the worst actress in this segment.) Notably, Anders’ segment is the only one that doesn’t try to put a button on the ending. It just sort of stops. 

In “The Wrong Man,” Rockwell devises a scenario where a long-married couple juice up their relationship by torturing each other (physically and emotionally) and dragging an unwitting third person into their web. That would be Roth, who dabbles in physical comedy in this installment. It is extremely unclear what either party is getting out of this psychosexual madness; Proval seems to have escaped from Goodfellas with his wiseguy aggressiveness, while Beals spends the entire segment bound and mostly gagged—probably by choice, but it’s hard to be sure. The final joke has the benefit of irony, but also strips the whole story of any rationale.

“The Misbehavers,” courtesy of Rodriguez, is easily the standout attraction. In this story, Roth is actually clever, wearing a patina of John Cleese in his exasperated determination, and is well-matched against the impossibly suave Banderas (he dips Tomita in the elevator in a parody of a romantic gesture sexier than the genuine article) and his two irreverent children. It suffers from some of the same things that afflict all Rodriguez productions: an adolescent love of the gross, a reliance on tough talk, and violence to substitute for stakes. (He also seems to have a little fun at the expense of Tarantino’s legendary foot fetish.) But the thing moves with a vigor the other three segments can only envy. Banderas overacts just the right amount, pivoting from smoldering Valentino to fearsome assassin on a dime, while children McKissack and Verduzco display a mischievous charm that presages the Spy Kids series. The chaos builds with satisfying speed and surprise to perfectly set up Banderas’ last joke. It’s a good story, looking outstanding due to the company it keeps.

After a brief interlude in which Roth mimics Michael Caine (and also featuring a very funny Tomei in full stoner-apathy mode), we turn to the final segment, “The Man From Hollywood.” Tarantino tries to create an easy checklist for defining the term “Tarantino-esque,” including lots of fast-talking, swooping cameras, and bits of dialogue engineered to shock the pearl-clutchers. Front and center is the man himself, in full-on self-parody mode; but, as Roger Ebert notes, he “unfortunately does not seem to understand why he is funny.” QT spouts aimless riffs on the career of Jerry Lewis, adopts inappropriate accents and dialects, and flings curse words like he’s dealing cards. His philosophy actually takes the form of a line of dialogue: “My kind of way of telling him is kinda going all around the world, but it’s the journey that’s worth it.” It isn’t, though, especially when he’s talking over the likes of Beals (the only actor besides Roth who gets more than one segment, and is still underutilized) and the uncredited Willis, who pinballs between his mover-shaker “Moonlighting” personality and an ill-executed swing at pathos. (Something extremely weird: Willis had to go unlisted due to a union dispute, but he is still called out by name in a credit for his personal hairstylist.) All this is in service of a blatant borrowing of an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the Roald Dahl story from which it was adapted. It lands with a pretty funny, entertainingly shocking punchline, but if you think about it for five seconds, you realize the whole thing has been a shaggy dog story. And that’s how Four Rooms ends: with you being used by the film, and the cast rushing about literally trying to clean up the mess.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a band of director-writers who seem to believe that to be blase about the shocking is the same thing as to be avant-garde and innovative…  all the segments involve situations in which people behave outrageously but no one seems to think any of it odd… Maybe if you’re a young, raw Hollywood aspirant, you believe that it’s a sign of sophistication to be unrattled by the bizarre. To me, this is just the early indication that we are in the last stages of a general societal nervous breakdown.” – Barbara Shulgasser, San Francisco Examiner (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Four Rooms

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