REVIEW: Kevin Kline Seals Extra Man's Oddball Love Letter With a Kiss

While eccentric people can be found everywhere, New York is a particularly fertile environment for all sorts of odd little flowers to bloom and grow. In The Extra Man, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of Jonathan Ames' spry and delightful 1998 novel, Kevin Kline plays just one such flower, an elegant oddball who's awful and compelling at the same time.

A refined gent of the Upper East Side, Henry Harrison favors slightly frayed tweed jackets for daytime and vaguely dusty-looking evening clothes at night; he stacks suitcases on the kitchen counter and stashes mail in the freezer; and he firmly believes sex is the cause of society's problems. (Princeton University, he notes with consternation, was a great place once -- "but then they let women in.") Still, he has a powerful magnetism over everyone around him. "It's my constant disapproval," he explains gruffly. "Some find it fatherly."

The Extra Man is something of a love letter to the marvelous weirdos of New York. It idealizes them, of course, but who doesn't relish the movie-star treatment once in a while? The picture isn't rooted in a specific time -- the book was set in the early '90s, and the movie may as well take place in an indeterminate time between then and now. But it's very strongly rooted in place, a city made up of handsome brownstones with pigeons chortling happily outside the windows.

In some ways, the New York of The Extra Man is a dream city; but then, in some ways the real New York is a dream city, too. That's how the young protagonist, Louis Ives (Paul Dano) sees it. As the movie opens, Louis is a teacher at a Princeton prep school, but he loses his job after some unfortunate business with a purloined brassiere. (Louis has a penchant for cross-dressing that he can't quite come to terms with, a recurring motif of the story.) Determined to start anew -- and to live the genteel, cultured life he's read about in Fitzgerald novels -- he strikes out for New York, a city most young people can barely afford. Answering an ad for a roommate, he makes his way to the abode of Henry Harrison, a cramped and cluttered almost-three-room apartment. His tiny bedroom is right on Henry's way to the bathroom, but the price is right.

The adventure that unfolds in The Extra Man chiefly involves Louis' search for love and some sense of belonging: He awkwardly tries to romance a young woman he meets at his new job, played with the right mix of shrewdness and winsomeness by Katie Holmes. But the movie's greatest pleasures are to be found in the movie's other romance -- the strictly platonic one -- between Henry and Louis. Henry was once a playwright and now teaches literature part-time at Queens College, but his real job is as an "extra man," a companion for elderly rich ladies who enjoy a man's company. He's not paid for this honor -- and he wouldn't dream of attempting any sort of sexual liaison with any of these women -- but he's rewarded with nice dinners and trips to Palm Beach. Louis thinks he might like this lifestyle too, and so Henry takes some steps to indoctrinate him, as well as showing him other useful survival skills such as how to sneak into the opera for free during intermission.

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