MOVIE REVIEW : FRUSTRATED POTENTIAL OF ‘MEN’S CLUB’

Most movies frustrate you because of their lack of potential. “The Men’s Club� (citywide), has the opposite problem: There’s a good movie buried in it, but it stays buried--and, by the end, the annoyances outweigh the pleasures.

It’s about seven Berkeley-area professionals (doctors, lawyers and one ex-baseball star) who, during the course of an evening together, are unraveled and exposed by their sexual hang-ups. Their club itself is a pastiche of a women’s group: Trying to “get in touch with their feelings,� the seven erupt instead into hysterical camaraderie--tearing the house apart in a drunken knife-throwing debauch that gets one of them beaned by his enraged wife and the other six tossed into the night. The sextet transfer the session to a brothel--which strips them to the awkward and occasionally degraded core.

First, the potential: Stinging, smart, abrasive dialogue from scenarist Leonard Michaels. At least a dozen distinct characters--some of whom actually go through changes. A fine cast--including Roy Scheider, Harvey Keitel, Frank Langella, Treat Williams, Richard Jordan, Craig Wasson and David Dukes as the club. And, sporadically, intelligent direction by Peter Medak (“The Ruling Class�).

Now, the crippling drawbacks: A dramatic curve that peters out and plunges into nothing. (It’s almost as if someone’s nerve failed at a crucial point--unless you’re happy with the idea of three men’s clubbers jogging jauntily across a bridge as the capper to all the terror and foolishness of the night before.) The production and musical score frequently recall the minimal sets and soft jazz-rock of the average porno movie.

This porno ambiance is doubly unfortunate: Some audiences are likely to conclude that Michaels’ intentions were salacious (or even misogynistic) and that the prominent cast was wangled into making a sordid “boys’ night out.� Obviously, that’s not true. This is clearly an honest attempt that’s gone awry: a try at exposing the anxieties and absurdities of modern masculinity that’s turned depressingly into a cheap mix of “Who’s Afraid of Kate Millett?� and “Last Tango in Berkeley.�

But, despite the shreds into which “The Men’s Club� (rated R) collapses, some of the actors--especially Keitel, Scheider, Langella and Stockard Channing--achieve some raw, fierce or affecting moments. With a little more guts or patience--even a little of the high gloss wasted on dozens of more puerile projects--this might have been a fine, provocative movie. Instead, it’s simply perplexing, a dead end for the problems it tries to probe.