Doing The Ultimate Deal

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CADILLAC MAN Directed by Roger Donaldson; Screenplay by Ken Friedman

You have met guys like Joey O'Brien (Robin Williams) before, most recently in Tin Men. He is the scuzzball salesman of every consumer's nightmares. For him, selling is more than a job and less than an honorable passion; it is not unlike date rape, against which neither resistance nor entreaty is an effective countermeasure. In Cadillac Man, he is discovered pulling up to a stalled funeral procession, to see if he can unload a replacement hearse on the desperate undertaker. While he's at it, he takes a shot at selling the bereaved widow one of his luxury cars, coyly suggesting it might be a nice memorial to her late, apparently generous husband.

Larry (Tim Robbins) is not entirely unfamiliar either. You have met him most memorably in Dog Day Afternoon. He is the not-quite-bright, entirely too volatile urban terrorist of every passerby's nightmare. For he is the kind of weirdo who one day decides to air his grievances by invading public space, grabbing a few hostages and seeing if the resulting police and media attention will ease the throbbing in his temples. Larry rides his motorcycle through the plate-glass window of Turgeon Auto, in grungy Queens, N.Y., where Joey works. He is looking for whoever is having an affair with his wife Donna (Annabella Sciorra), a secretary at the dealership.

But if glib Joey and loopy Larry are reasonably familiar figures, their juxtaposition in the same movie is wonderfully unexpected. Joey has troubles enough: debts to the Mafia and his former wife, affairs with two unstable women (Fran Drescher and Lori Petty) and a falling sales record. In fact, the only problem he has avoided is adultery with Donna. Yet when Larry starts waving his rifle and demanding to know who is cuckolding him, it is Joey who takes the blame.

Altruism -- his life for the many? No way. Loyalty to his boss, who is the real culprit? Quit kidding. Joey sees talking the would-be terrorist out of mass murder as the maximum test of his salesmanship. In his time he has cut the sticker price and upped the trade-in allowance on everything but death. He cannot resist the opportunity to do this ultimate deal. Besides, Larry is his kind of customer, infinitely suggestible, infinitely distractible.

And infinitely funny, in Robbins' variation on his performance as the dopey, fireballing pitcher in Bull Durham. Thought is for him a face-scrunching agony. Ideas -- rare occurrences -- render his countenance beatifically beamish. But since life is mostly utterly unpredictable to him, he is atwitch with dangerously unmediated impulses. Williams is his opposite, a man racing to keep up with a runaway brain, yet striving, hopelessly, to project an air of normality.

Theirs is a terrific comic duet, and writer Ken Friedman has backed them with a rich chorus of disapproval, including all the customers and salesmen also trapped in the showroom. Director Roger Donaldson, who has had his ups (No Way Out) and downs (Cocktail), is in his best voice here. It is the lower-depths snarl, angry and frustrated. It provides Cadillac Man with a steady bass line and makes it a rarity among recent films -- a comedy that is in touch with a recognizable reality.