Sentimental and Tedious

An awkward merging of murder mystery with social studies, The Caveman's Valentine is ambitious and more than a little tedious. In this, it is similar to Eve's Bayou, the first film directed by Kasi Lemmons. That slice of Louisiana melodrama garnered some very generous reviews, and it was clear that Lemmons had interesting ideas as a filmmaker. Perhaps bolstered by that reaction, The Caveman's Valentine is proportionately more ambitious, and it falls down with a louder thud.

Lemmons takes a literal approach to presenting the point of view of the main character, a raving street person. He is Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson), a once-promising Julliard musician who now lives in a cave in some rocks in Central Park; he believes that the evil in the world is sent down by an all-seeing Big Brother called Stuyvesant, who beams gamma rays or something from the top of the Chrysler Building. His madness encourages Lemmons to create crowded visions (including surrealistic glimpses inside the "brain typhoons" of Ledbetter's mind) and a soundtrack full of trippy noises, which scurry around the sound mix like gremlins in the Dolby.

Romulus is a cliché, but he is certainly alive in Samuel L. Jackson's performance, which is every bit as Old Testament as you would expect. For a while the movie threatens to become a hardcore My Man Godfrey, after Romulus strikes up a friendship with a rich Manhattan lawyer (Anthony Michael Hall, in terrific satirical form). Very quickly, however, the murder mystery arrives -- a young man is found frozen in a tree outside Romulus's pile of rocks -- and the dread-locked schizophrenic becomes a sleuth. Solving the mystery, in turn, becomes a way for him to reconcile with his daughter (Aunjanue Ellis), a policewoman.

The trail leads to a Long Island farm, where a Mapplethorpe-like photographer (Colm Feore) holds sway over his slave-like assistants (of whom the dead boy was one). Despite the occasional visual pyrotechnics, this all plays itself out in conventional fashion. Lemmons seems torn between really giving us a strange, offbeat hero or settling for a wacky homeless man we can still root for. Much livelier are the scenes in which Romulus intrudes on the overstuffed world of the Anthony Michael Hall character (whose high-rise apartment is decorated entirely with 1930s furniture, because the Great Depression was a good era for bankruptcy lawyers).

Kasi Lemmons is a talented director, but the conception of The Caveman's Valentine -- the dreary formula of the whodunit -- tamps down her skills. It may have a good liberal conscience, and genuine sympathy for the rare perspective of a homeless person, but this movie is a fundamentally sentimental exercise.