In Tomlin’s film, written brilliantly by Jane Wagner, Trudy is the tattered but indomitable muse of the city. Standing “at the corner of WALK–DON’T WALK,” she sees all and reports all to her “space chums,” extraterrestrials who’ve come to investigate this out-of-whack planet. Trudy’s mind is certainly not in whack, but she suspects her breakdown may really be a breakthrough. With dazzling virtuosity, Tomlin mutates herself into an entire subspecies. There’s Kate, the posh snob who lives from hairstyle to hairstyle, suffering from “rich people’s burnout.” There’s Agnus Angst, the teenage performance artist, the spaced-out product of a lesbian mother and a “bio-businessman” father who loves his laboratory bioforms better than his daughter. “The last deep conversation I had with my dad,” says Agnus, “was between our T shirts.” There are hookers Brandy and Tina, experts on the nitty-gritty of romance. And there’s Lyn, who takes us through 20 years of feminist history, from euphoria to reality. This trajectory, at once hilarious and touching, is summed up by Lyn’s relationship to her husband, Bob. She fell in love with him because he was the only man she ever met “who knew where he was when Sylvia Plath died.” Years later she ruefully reports that “Bob is too much in touch with his feminine side. Last night I’m sure he faked an orgasm.”
Tomlin bubbles and bursts with the glorious inanities of being human; Bogosian is clenched, dark, a weaving, gliding cobra of the streets. His 10 characters are a Decameron of dreck, starting with a subway panhandler, who deftly manipulates fear and guilt as he points out to the passengers that he could be holding a knife to their throats. Bogosian swiftly turns into an English rock star in a TV interview, describing his victory over drug addiction with giveaway ambiguity: “You’re having such a good time, you don’t realize what a bad time you’re having.” Bogosian’s strong suit is a comic savagery that builds to explosive effect, as in his street crazy who sees nothing but waste and excrement. Tottering with rage, he describes with torrential profanity the planetary food chain, rain chain, crap chain, climaxed with an insanely funny picture of the “little fishies” desperately trying to get past the egg shells and condoms, “trying to wipe their eyes, but they don’t have hands, only fins.”
Bogosian is especially brilliant on lethal phonies, such as the showbiz lawyer living on the telephone, through which he has some poor shnook who’s about to have major surgery fired, fobs off his wife (“We’ll have sex tomorrow. I won’t forget. I’ll put it in my book.”), threatens a rival (“I’ll drink his blood”) and analyzes himself with stupendous inaccuracy: “I’m still committed to my ’60s idealism.” Bogosian’s big set piece is hi& evocation of a bachelor party among young Brooklyn Italians which becomes an apocalypse of clam dip, rippled potato chips, hired bimbos, porno movies and a donnybrook with a tableful of Hell’s Angels. As he puts it, guffawing with delight, “That’s the icing on the gravy.”
“Sex, Drugs” was deftly shot from the stage performance; “The Search” has been refashioned into a true film, moving smoothly between Tomlin on-stage and Tomlin on the street, costumed as her various people. This combines the intimacy of the stage show with the wider scope of film: it’s a richer experience. But the important element in both films is the personality of the performers. Tomlin and Bogosian are the positive and negative poles of the comedy of paranoia and anxiety. Both get the kinds of laughs that come from telling the truth, but where Bogosian is brutal, Tomlin takes the risk of being sweet. Tomlin is closer to Richard Pryor, whose first performance film, “Live in Concert,” was a masterpiece of comic empathy and insight. Pryor and Tomlin become their characters; Bogosian exposes them. That makes him in a sense the hip one, but he scares you where Tomlin liberates you. When Tomlin recently appeared on David Letterman’s show, you could see her innocence colliding with Letterman’s pop nihilism. When she launched into a delighted rim on her movie, Letterman patronizingly told her to “settle down.” Thank goodness she never will.
