It’s regrettable that James Toback’s behavioural
excesses may now be more widely known than his films, but given how his best
work is seeped in a compulsive-seeming rush of sex and power and appetite, it
also makes a certain displaced kind of sense. The enjoyably eccentric Love
and Money is one of his more ambitious projects, given that the plot
encompasses global commodities markets and potential revolution in a South
American country, but hardly has an epic feel about it, the prevailing tone
driven much more by personal obsession. Ray Sharkey plays Byron Levin, a
dissatisfied bank employee living with his book dealer girlfriend and
no-longer-tuned-in grandfather (King Vidor!), approached by Stockheinz, a
wealthy businessman (Klaus Kinski!), to help persuade his best friend from
years back not to nationalize his country’s silver business (the best friend,
naturally, is now the country’s President), all of which occupies Byron less than
his instant desire for Stockheinz’s wife (Ornella Muti). For much of the time,
there’s a sense that things could veer in one direction as easily as another,
with little explanation required (as embodied in Levin’s hilariously inadequate
explanations for his extended absences from home); the movie toys with
political sentiments, while its depiction of the fictional country “Costa
Salva” is flagrantly thin and unconvincing. The use of Vidor and the recurring
motif of the piled-up old books suggests an affinity with classicism, but
there’s a restlessness to the movie, a sense of searching for new alchemies in
complex times: if not fully achieved, it’s a fascinatingly bumpy journey (although
one that ends strangely abruptly, as if Toback’s attention were already moving
on to his next and best, Exposed). And you can’t overlook the moment
when Byron’s failure to get aroused can only be cured by hearing The
Star-Spangled Banner (see, at heart it’s all about American values!)
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