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.
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.