Greetings

An extremely minor improvement over the unwatchable Murder a la Mod, Greetings follows three aimless young men (Jonathan Warden’s Paul, Robert De Niro’s Jon, and Gerrit Graham’s Lloyd) as they spend their days essentially killing time and messing with random bystanders. Director Brian De Palma has infused Greetings with an excessively freewheeling sensibility that immediately grates, as the movie’s pervasive silliness paves the way for an often interminable cinematic endeavor – with De Palma’s refusal to offer up any instances of plot or character development exacerbating the aggressively inane atmosphere. It’s clear from beginning to end that De Palma is essentially making all this up as he goes, as Greetings is jam-packed with utterly pointless sequences in which the actors improvise their way through a series of hopelessly inconsequential and irrelevant scenarios. (There is, for example, an unconscionably long and boring interlude detailing De Niro’s character’s small-talk-heavy encounter with a random New Yorker.) By the time it arrives at its seemingly endless final stretch, Greetings has firmly established itself as an inept relic of its time that forces one to rethink their De Palma fandom.

1/2* out of ****