Condensed and Americanized version of Dennis Potter's seven-hour miniseries for British television: an author of "detective novels about a gumshoe who warbles," hospitalized and immobilized with a head-to-toe case of psoriasis, escapes into memory and imagination. The whole thing, not just the sessions with the resident head-shrinker (a disguised Mel Gibson), is heavily psychological: figures from the writer's real life populate his fiction, and the 1950s rock-and-roll and film noir date to the time of his traumatic childhood, and his skin disease gives outward form to his inner repression. (Then, too, the whole thing is semi-autobiographical.) It doesn't quite jell -- the lip-sync musical numbers in particular -- and the offbeat directing career of Keith Gordon has never seemed more "off": he lacks the production values of Herbert Ross in Pennies from Heaven (another Potter phantasmagoria), and he lacks the taste of Resnais in Same Old Song (a Potter hommage). With Robert Downey, Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, and Carla Gugino. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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