'Your Cat' fails film transition
By Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times
| • | 'P.S. Your Cat is Dead'
PG (for language, crude humor, sensuality and violence 82 minutes |
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As a film, however, "P.S. Your Cat Is Dead" is more deeply felt than fully realized. Despite strong portrayals by Guttenberg and co-star Lombardo Boyar, and sequences that attempt to open the play up, it remains too much a filmed play, and worse, one that has not been effectively paced. It doesn't come alive until it's drawing to a close that's unexpectedly touching, if more than a little sentimental, but too late to redeem the preceding tedium.
Guttenberg's Jimmy Zoole is a dreary schlemiel who has spent 20 years deluding himself about his acting and writing abilities. He has a possessive, rich aunt (Shirley Knight) who has subsidized his dilettantism but exacted his self-respect in return. One New Year's Eve, Jimmy's sense of failure comes crashing down on him. His fed-up live-in girlfriend (Cynthia Watros) has left him a Dear John letter, then scribbled a note about a phone message from the vet saying that his ailing, beloved cat has died.
No wonder Jimmy is overcome with feelings of revenge when, under his bed in his loft apartment, he discovers and overpowers a burglar (Boyar) who has robbed him twice before, not only of computers and TVs but also of a small lockbox that contained the only copy of a manuscript of a novel he has been writing in longhand — and which had been swiftly disposed of by Boyar's disdainful Eddie.
Jimmy should call the cops, but having tied Eddie down on a table, this most impotent of men is overtaken by his sense of power over another person.Here is a situation that seems at once pathetic and, as it becomes protracted, not just a little sick. A sometime male hustler and party stripper as well as a burglar, street-savvy Eddie starts questioning his captor's heterosexuality. At this point, tension and curiosity as to whether he's guessed correctly should start building, but Guttenberg's slack pacing and the plot's various implausible interruptions turn the film into a singularly unappetizing spectacle. Guttenberg clearly took on too much in directing as well as acting.
