Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: the World Trade Center towers appear a few times in this movie. It’s no big deal, although a lot of critics will try to make one out of it. But as its title indicates, writer-director Edward Burns’ latest exploration of modern relationships isn’t about the buildings of New York, and the only politics he wants to get us thinking about are sexual.
Eschewing cutesy romantic-comedy contrivances like runaway brides or Hollywood marriages, Burns strips the film down to realistic basics; essentially, Sidewalks of New York is ordinary people talking about love. Sure, they’re exceptionally good-looking ordinary people, and they do a great deal of talking. But that’s what makes the film such a refreshing change from the rom-com pablum we’re accustomed to swallowing. Like another recent talky film, Richard Linklater’s brilliant Waking Life, this one is more about the ideas than about plot, or even about the characters themselves. In bed, on dates, at work or at home, the six main characters are just people trying to figure out how to find happiness with another person in an increasingly insular world.
Burns tells us about all these people through docu-style interviews in which they answer questions about sex and love, marriage and fidelity—the same issues that pop up in the scenes from their intertwined lives that we see between the shorter interview segments. Tommy (Burns) meets Maria (Rosario Dawson) in a video store when she wants the tape he’s renting; meanwhile, Maria’s ex-husband Ben (David Krumholtz) meets Ashley (Don’t Say a Word’s Brittany Murphy, at her ultra-vulnerable best) in the diner where she works; Ashley, in turn, is the mistress of Griffin (Stanley Tucci), an insecure, emotionally dead dentist whose wife Annie (Heather Graham) feels alienated and unwanted. As these six characters interrelate, the “right” pairings slowly take shape. (Too slowly in some cases; we can see them coming fairly early on, although to Burns’s credit, everything doesn’t resolve as tidily as we might expect in a romantic comedy.)
The verité style is meant to make us forget we’re watching actors in a story. It generally works, but some of Graham’s and Tucci’s dialogue doesn’t feel spontaneous, and Burns isn’t above using one romantic-comedy contrivance: the quirky-friend character foil. In fact, every one of the six main characters has one. Tommy has his co-worker/roommate Carpo (Dennis Farina), an egotistical would-be stud who espouses the “big dog” theory of gender relations; Ben has his bandmate, who has the fashionable piercings to go with his rock-star attitude. Annie’s old-fashioned views about marriage and sex are offset by her quirky friend’s unapologetic horniness. But then again, as is usually the case, the quirky friends have some of the best (and funniest) lines in the film. Besides, bitching about quirky friends in a romantic comedy is like bitching about death scenes in a tragedy; they just go with the territory.
Like Linklater, Burns gives us little more than characters talking to each other because he’s primarily interested in getting us talking to each other. His New York is shorthand for modern America, a place as full of possibilities for getting to know each other as it is full of people; yet everyone just drifts along the sidewalks like shreds of litter, identities that occasionally bump into each other in the night, but rarely connect in any meaningful sense. In our failing marriages, empty little affairs and dating-scene one-nighters, we’re missing the point. It isn’t about sex, or even love. It’s about intimacy.
(3/4)