Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #217 Harvard Man (2001)
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When James Toback got MeTooed his ridiculous defense was that as a Serious, Important Artist who made Serious, Important autobiographical Films about sex addicts who struggle to control their feverish compulsions the idea that he might be a predator unable to control his feverish compulsions was patently absurd.
Didn’t these monsters, with their “facts” and “evidence” and “heart-wrenching accounts of criminal sexual behavior occurring over a period of decades” realize just how highly Toback thought of himself? Didn’t they understand that in Toback’s mind at least, he is the greatest of all artists? How could they not realize that not allowing James Toback to make self-indulgent wank-fests in which gorgeous women hurl themselves at his many surrogates is tantamount to killing cinema as an art form, if not art itself?
Why don’t these jackals realize that nothing in the world is more important to James Toback than James Toback’s movies about James Toback?
From the vantage point of 2021, Toback’s filmography represents a criminal as well as a creative and commercial enterprise. Being a working filmmaker with powerful connections gave Toback an excuse to invite beautiful young women to his hotel room for “interviews” and “auditions” for his latest project that quickly and predictably devolved into frenzied masturbation followed by threats should the mortified woman in question be tempted to report Toback’s habitual outbursts of unwanted onanism to family, friends or law enforcement.
According to Vanity Fair, Toback dangled the prospect of scoring a role in Harvard Man as a carrot to lure Selma Blair and Rachel McAdams into a hotel room for the purpose of sexual assault. McAdams managed to get out before anything could happen. Blair was not as lucky and says that Toback threatened to hurt her family if she told anyone.
As with Louis CK, Toback’s queasily personal movies look much different in light of their sexual transgressions. Their masturbatory nature doesn’t seem anywhere near as harmless in light of the revelation that they subjected horrified women to masturbation in a variety of professional and quasi-professional settings.
The 2001 semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Harvard Man is the ultimate self-indulgent James Toback wank-fest/loving- homage-to-James Toback. That’s no small feat considering that just about every movie that Toback makes is a self-indulgent wank-fest that doubles as a feature-length valentine to the sex criminal who wrote and directed it.
But even by Toback standards this is an appalling vanity project infinitely more interested in empty self-mythologizing than entertainment. Like everything Toback does, it was made for an audience of one: James Toback.
Harvard Man opens with Alan Jensen, our hero/James Toback surrogate, an athlete as well as a scholar and a philosopher, smoking some of that wacky Tobacky while fucking evil mafia princess Cindy Bandolini (Sarah Michelle Gellar) so good that she deems him the “greatest fuck in the world.”
Toback wanted to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, which would have resulted in a less terrible film, but had to settle for a woefully miscast Entourage’s Adrian Grenier.
Grenier is a callow male starlet with a head full of cotton candy and glitter. Buying him as a high school graduate is a bit of a stretch, let alone an intellectual and spiritual seeker exploring Life’s Great Issues at one of its finest institutes of Higher Learning.
Grenier is a quintessential lightweight, a pretty boy coasting on his looks and facile charm. That’s what makes him perfect to play a handsome half-wit like Vinnie Chase. It’s also what makes him an absolutely bewildering choice to play both a Toback stand-in and a brilliant intellectual grappling with the meaning of life when not sinking jump shots or hitting lay-ups as a point guard on Harvard’s basketball team.
With the exception of Al Franken’s daughter, every female character in Harvard Man is sexualized to an absurd, even comic degree. Every woman is a turn on, a kink, something for Toback to fantasize about.
Alan’s other sex partner is Chesney, a philosophy professor played by Joey Lauren Adams because Toback obviously can’t think of anything in the world hotter than a beautiful young woman name-dropping all of his favorite philosophers in a breathy little girl coo.
These aren’t characters: they’re expressions of fetishes and pretty boring ones at that. Toback also thinks that it’s totally sexy when women are into other women, as long as they’re sufficiently feminine-looking and also bisexual so the fellas can get in on the action as well.
So he makes Rebecca Gayheart’s character, Kelly Morgan, a bisexual FBI agent who’s also into swinging with her husband Teddy C (Eric Stoltz) and is having group sex with Chesney and many other beautiful young women because that gives the creep in the director’s chair a boner and Harvard Man is nothing if not an exhaustive, exhausting compendium of the boring, vanilla stuff that turns James Toback on.
Cindy loves our hero’s magnificent cock but being an evil woman she loves money even more. So even though her godfather papa gave her one million dollars as walking around money she convinces Alan to throw a game in exchange for one hundred thousand dollars he can use to help his simple, salt-of-the-earth midwestern parents.
In the midst of all this macho melodrama our rebel philosopher anti-hero takes three sugar cubes worth of what we are told is the most powerful LSD on earth and has a trip inspired by Toback having an eight day long acid trip in 1965 that plays a central role in his loving self-mythology as the transcendent spiritual experience that made him who he is today and taught him the folly of drugs.
Who needs drugs when you can get high on your own impossibly bloated ego, the way Toback does?
Toback just barely bothers to lazily visualize Grenier’s psychedelic freak-out by having faces melt into trippy blobs and voices overlap. Grenier’s wild-eyed turn as a cartoon acid casualty who is, like, on a total god trip, man, deserves its own wing in the Museum of Terrible Drug Acting.
For a movie that prides itself on being edgy and transgressive, luridly sexual and unapologetically sleazy, Harvard Man inexplicably seems to see marijuana and LSD as dangerous transgressions (they’re against the law, after all!) and not a rather mundane element of the college experience.
Taking all that acid might have changed Toback’s life and mind forever but he’s unable to conceptualize that experience as anything other than a dumb druggie cartoon.
I had the misfortune of interviewing Toback when he was promoting a documentary about Alec Baldwin and himself trying and failing to get a modern-day version of The Last Tango in Paris made.
Audiences were supposed to come away from the movie saddened that Hollywood no longer had sufficient reverence for geniuses like Toback and Baldwin and are unwilling to take the kinds of chances that lead to great, important art.
Even back then that struck me as self-pitying, self-aggrandizing nonsense. Now the idea that Toback feels entitled to go on making movies like Harvard Man for as long as he wants, that the universe owes him that at the very least for his incredible contributions to cinema strikes me as not only patently false but also evil and unhinged.
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