Harvard Man

James Toback's Harvard Man is either a frequently loopy, but inconsistent satire or a badly misguided, miscast drama, with little Adrian Grenier as a college basketball star, mouse-voiced Joey Lauren Adams as a Harvard philosophy professor, and brittle Sarah Michelle Gellar as the favorite daughter of a Boston mobster. When Grenier agrees to throw the big Harvard-Dartmouth game for cash to help out his folks (whose Kansas house has been leveled by a tornado), his girlfriend Gellar decides to put down a big chunk of coin on that action, and before long, Grenier's in trouble with both the mob and the FBI (and he makes matters worse by embarking on an LSD trip that makes the world around him seem to melt and reconstitute itself). Toback (Black and White) thrives on discordant unions of image and sound, combining an indie aesthetic of handheld camerawork and jump-cuts with a Bach soundtrack. Ultimately, however, the film's theme of not trusting language or surface impressions is buried under the movie's superficiality, standard Tobackian shocking sexuality, and faux intellectualism. In short, Harvard Man fails to make the grade. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras include the option of watching the widescreen or full screen version, an audio commentary by well-spoken writer-director James Toback, and a trailer. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a film that will appeal to Toback fans and irritate others.] (D. Fienberg)