About Last Night

A MAN AND WOMAN MEET AND TRY TO HAVE A ROMANTIC AFFAIR, DESPITE THEIR PERSONAL PROBLEMS AND THE INTERFERENCE OF THEIR DISAPPROVING FRIENDS.

For better or worse, David Mamet's hit play Sexual Perversity in Chicago is watered down into this romantic comedy about a couple (played by Rob Lowe and Demi Moore) who get together and then fall apart due to Lowe's character's inability to commit. Jim Belushi is on hand as the gratuitously swinish best friend who looks at women as meat, and Elizabeth Perkins is entertainingly arch as Moore's gal pal and Belushi's nemesis. There's nothing about this 1986 film by Edward Zwick (cocreator of TV's thirtysomething and director of Glory and Courage Under Fire) that is at all reminiscent of Mamet, but that doesn't make it bad or dull. While one can feel the script straining to fill in gaps where chunks of the original play have disappeared, Zwick often successfully tells the story without words at all, relying on the actors to convey pure emotion. Lowe is good, and the then-willowy Moore's understated performance reminds one of the actress she might have been before she became a spectacle. --Tom Keogh