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The man from Elysian Fields

Threat advisory: High - High risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Pleasure is his business.

Byron Tiller (Andy Garcia), happily married with a young child, is a writer whose last novel has ended up in the remainder bins. Down on his luck and struggling to make ends meet, he keeps bashing away, refusing to admit that perhaps he is not that good. One day, at wit's end and feeling sorry for himself, he meets someone who has actually read his book: a rather elegant looking Englishman who introduces himself as Luther Fox (Mick Jagger). Luther runs an escort agency, Elysian Fields, which provides extremely wealthy women with attractive, intelligent dates.

Desperate for any job - and Luther guarantees good pay and convinces him that it can be only temporary - Byron reluctantly agrees, keeping the whole thing hidden from his wife (Julianna Margulies). He soon finds himself face-to-face with an extremely attractive woman named Andrea Allcott (Olivia Williams), whose ageing husband Tobias (James Coburn) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist grappling with a novel that may be his last. Before long, Byron finds himself immersed in a world that he finds almost impossible to believe and even harder to explain.

Persons of interest

Andy Garcia .... Byron Tiller
Mick Jagger .... Luther Fox
Olivia Williams .... Andrea Allcott
James Coburn .... Tobias Allcott
Julianna Margulies .... Dena Tiller
Anjelica Huston .... Jennifer Adler
Michael Des Barres .... Greg
Richard Bradford .... Edward Rodgers
Xander Berkeley .... Virgil Koster
Phillip Jayson Lasker .... Screenwriter
George Hickenlooper .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Awards and film festivals:

Sundance Film Festival 2001: Official selection
Toronto International Film Festival 2001: Official selection

The man from Elysian Fields QuickTime movie trailers
FYI: According to ancient Greek belief, the Elysian Fields are a heavenly place where those who are favoured by the gods can go after death
Studios and distributors:

Palace Films * 20th Century Fox

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

A chick flick about stupid blokes who can't talk about their emotions and who think that they have to be the breadwinner thus destroying their perfect relationship. Keywords: talk, emotions, relationship.

Now films about writers are always going to be a bit dodgy because all writers do is sit at a computer and type. Two hours of that will put anyone to sleep, so the scriptwriter cheats. In Adaptation, a film about writer's block, Charlie Kaufman cheats by getting his brother Donald, also a writer, to add an action blockbuster ending. In The man from Elysian Fields, Phillip Jayson Lasker cheats by making the writer stop writing, thereby forcing him to get a life.

While having more depth than an action blockbuster, this film still doesn't have the depth it should. The six major characters are all clichéd: angst-ridden writer with more attractive wife, successful older man with younger, more attractive wife, gigolo who's tired of it all and falls in love with client, client who treats gigolo like a whore, bitter old gigolo who treats himself like a whore. (Not that there's anything wrong with prostitution - if you can do it for free you should be able to do it for money - I'm just quoting Luther Fox.) Besides which, men are sluts. Having a guy start doing it for money is not much of a challenge.