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

Berman and Pulcini -- also the directors of American Splendor, about the late comic-book writer Harvey Pekar -- have a clear affection for oddballs, and the movie they've made is compassionate and open-hearted. (They co-wrote the script with Ames.) In places it swerves too close to coyness: There's an annoying narrator who shows up now and then to annotate the action in a Masterpiece Theatre voice. But they're not out to make a piece of whimsy, and they manage to capture the frayed-edge essence of what it means to live in New York, among other people who are just as odd -- and maybe even odder! -- than you are.

Dano isn't a particularly charismatic lead: In general, he reminds me of the puppet figures in a Brothers Quay animation, and as Louis, his most common expression is a wan little crescent of a smile. (At one point he laments, "I wish I had joie de vivre," and I'm thinking, "You're not the only one, bub.") But he, like Kline, at least knows how to use his height and his carriage to his advantage, and in his most moving scene, we don't even see his face: He's gone out for an evening with one of Henry's lady friends, a fragile heiress played, with snapped-twig fragility, by Marian Seldes. An evening of Champagne at the ghostly-wonderful Russian Tea Room has worn her out, and Louis returns her to her mansion. The maid silently points the way to the bedroom upstairs, and Louis gently lifts his new friend into his arms and ascends the staircase -- we watch from behind as he moves along, step by careful step, in a very slow and tender kind of dance.

Thankfully, Kline, whenever he's on-screen, energizes Dano. This really is his movie. (Although John C. Reilly, in a supporting role as Henry's neighbor, Gershon, another classic New York eccentric, gives him a run for his money: He looks like the equivalent of an urban mountain man and speaks with Jean Hagen's Singin' in the Rain voice.) There are many of us who would happily watch Kline in anything, and this role suits him beautifully: Watching him is almost as good as serendipitously coming into a small fortune after the death of a long-lost relative. Henry's clothes were extremely nice once, though they've seen better days. He sleeps in a dingy, rumpled tuxedo shirt, accessorized with a tatty satin sleep mask; his sportcoats surely sport many hidden moth nibbles. But Kline wears Henry's wardrobe as if it had all just been hand-picked from Paul Stuart. So in between dropping words of wisdom and crisp bon mots (he has sworn off the Whitney Museum, claiming its exhibits are "all toilet seats and sex organs"), he always gives us something grand to look at.

We also get to see Kline dance, if only a little bit. Henry "exercises" in the mornings by executing a freeform Martha Graham-style pagan dance routine (in sweat pants, no less). And in one lovely sequence, Henry, Louis and Gershon stage an impromptu ballroom dance on a Long Island beach: Henry is teaching Louis how to step-and-glide, and it's all going rather well, until Henry throws his back out. Suddenly, there's much Shakespearean cursing and cussing, capped off by some of the most sensible words ever spoken: "Get me off this godforsaken beach -- I need alcohol and civilization." Henry is a man who knows how to live, and Kline welcomes us into the Russian Tea Room of his mind.

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