2 Days In The Valley movie review (1996) | Roger Ebert (2024)

“2 Days in the Valley” has two subjects: twisted human behavior,and the complexity of its own plot. It looks like a crime movie, but crime isthe medium, not the message; the crimes are an excuse for quick connectionsamong strangers. What the writer-director, John Herzfeld, is mostly interestedin are his peculiar characters, and the labyrinthine ways he can assemble themin the same story.

Hismethod has been used before (the movie will remind you of Altman andTarantino), but he's good at it. Herzfeld begins with inexplicable scenes andunexplained actions, and then connects the dots until everything comestogether. The ending is neat and ingenious; the story is so complex, you wonderif he started there and worked backward.

Iwill not attempt a plot summary, which might take as long as the movie itself.Instead, here are some of the characters. Dosmo (Danny Aiello) is a hit man notwithout a trace of sweetness; he's afraid of dogs and likes to cook. Lee (JamesSpader) has hired Dosmo as a partner. He's a sad*st who likes to pull out astopwatch and give his victims 60 seconds to put their affairs in order. Hislover is the icy Norwegian blond Helga (Charlize Theron).

Dosmoand Lee break into a bedroom being shared by a man named Roy Fox (Peter Horton)and his ex-wife Becky (Teri Hatcher), who is an Olympic skier but never placedhigher than fourth. The woman is rendered unconscious, the man is killed, and .. . but I'm getting into the plot.

Thereare two cops: Wes (Eric Stoltz) and Alvin (Jeff Daniels). Wes has alwaysdreamed of being a homicide detective, but finds himself on the vice squad,where he lacks the heart to entrap a sweet, harmless girl (Kathleen Luong) whoworks in a massage parlor. The cops stumble onto the murder scene withoutintending to and are thrilled to be working on a real crime.

Meanwhile,we meet Hopper (Greg Cruttwell), an obnoxious British art dealer, who has akidney stone attack and is rescued by a man in a stolen car. Hopper's secretary(Glenne Headly) nurses him, although he constantly insults her with offers ofbreast implants and liposuction. Then Dosmo enters their lives by rolling downa hill after escaping from an exploding car, and holds them hostage whilecooking them pasta.

Andthen there's Teddy Peppers, played by the director Paul Mazursky. Teddy is asuicidal screenwriter-director whose career has gone into the toilet. He planshis suicide but doesn't want to leave his little dog homeless. In one of themovie's best scenes, he encounters an actor (Austin Pendleton) who smilinglyinsults him without mercy, pointing out every milestone on his descent to thebottom of the industry. Meanwhile, a real homicide detective (Keith Carradine)is assigned to the murder, and his path crosses those of the vice cops and theSpader character, who is impersonating a cop.

Allof these characters inhabit the San Fernando Valley, which is to Beverly Hillsas hell is to Dante's Inferno. We sense that they're people who see successevery day, who taste it and smell it and rub shoulders with it, but never havebeen able to grasp it. Like the Olympic skier, they've never placed higher thanfourth. Yet they obsess about image; the art dealer, who has no sexual interestin his secretary, wants to pay for her plastic surgery because it will make*him* look better.

Theplot underlies even the most inexplicable scenes and eventually links even themost widely separated characters, but what makes the movie fun is the dialogueand the behavior. I especially liked the Mazursky character, who dumps his Emmyin a trash can, and the Aiello character, who consoles the art dealer'ssecretary: “It's just part of his nature to be cruel--don't take offense.” Themovie illustrates a world view shared by a lot of people in Los Angeles: Ifthere are only six degrees of separation between any two people in the world,there are only two or maybe three separating everyone in the Valley from therich and famous who light up the pages of the National Enquirer. A cop can becomeJoseph Wambaugh. A personal trainer can become Steven Seagal. A hooker canbecome Heidi Fleiss.

Onthe surface, there are great distances between those who have made it and thosewho are still on hold. But then you find they actually know one another in themost unexpected ways, often having to do with sex and ambition. It's fun towatch “2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to thinkabout the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.