
            Eddie (Sean Penn) is a coke addled casting director who shares home, business and occasionally women with Mickey (Kevin Spacey), and copious women and drugs with two other friends Arty (Garry Shandling) and best buddy Phil (Chazz Palmintieri). Over the course of a couple of days, Arty picks up a waif (Anna Paquin) who they all use shamefully. Mickey and Eddie converse constantly at home at work and by phone, trying vainly to square a love triangle involving Darlene (Robin Wright Penn). Phil meanwhile is an out of work actor who is considering getting his second wife pregnant because it will keep them together and yet is never around for her, prefering to agonise over his "talent". Tellingly in one scene Eddie is challenged that he keeps Phil around to remind him he isn't the lowest of the low. Phil clearly loves Eddie and needs his validation but Eddie probably has never actually cast him in anything. Mickey seems happy to stay the cleanest and most together of the four but is cynical and manipulative. A year later the film has moved on but the characters have not (although they probably think they have). Darlene is probably having an affair. Eddie is clean but can fall off the wagon at any moment. Phil is still agonising. Eddie fixes Phil up with Bonnie (Meg Ryan) a good time girl who, it emerges, is another person used and thrown away by the gang. At one point Phil hurls Bonnie out of a moving car - totally caught up in a noir like tough guy psychosis. The location inevitably is Mulholland, later the scene of a car crash that takes Phil leaving Eddie bereft. Before that there is time for Bonnie to return bruised and broken to end up ministering to Eddies emotional need with no one paying any attention to the potentially severe injury she is suffering. Phil returns and he and Eddie start, potentially, to be truthful with each other before lapsing back into philosophising. the boys love for each other takes precedence over and of the women. Phil leaves and returns carrying his own baby that he has kidnapped. The four hand the innocent child around like a toy in a hugely tension filled scene showing their utterly selfish irresponsibility. After Phil's funeral, the final scene is Eddie in the pool potentially drowning himself (not really) only for the abandoned waif, Donna, to reappear and offer him redemption...maybe he will grasp it, but probably not.the four have an amoral view of the world and an inflated sense of their own importance. The film is a scathing commentary about the self indulgence and navel gazing when Hollywood people tell each other shocking lies about how great they all are and then cocaine helps them take each other seriously. Eddie and Phil particularly enjoy cod philosophical explorations of their drug addled psyche, neither understanding the other. Mickey is flip and dismissive of this but is no better at seeing the world without the prism of his own ego. Arty is perhaps the most self conscious because he is a jewish caricature - anxious and apparently wise. The female characters are barely less self indulgent but definitely less well written; ciphers really - this is a buddy movie where none of the characters you'd want to be your buddy.
    

Where to watch Hurlyburly (1998) movie online

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Where to watch Hurlyburly (1998) movie online

Your region:USA

Hurlyburly is currently streaming on the following OTT platforms in USA

Your region:
USA