Lèse-Majesté
Racy Elizabethans, speedy Cruise
Timothy "Speed" Levitch is one lonely, angry nutball, by every conventional yardstick a loser who's had 40 plays rejected and crashes on friends' floors while earning his slender keep tour-guiding on a Gray Line double-decker bus. Manhattan is stuffed with people like Speed, but he was lucky enough to meet Bennett Miller, a talented New York University film-school dropout in search of a subject. Miller is lucky, too, for Speed is a deliriously logorrheic street lyricist and advocate for life as he sees it, which is through a thousand wildly associative prisms. In The Cruise, a double-decker bus tour with Speed and his stunned, captive audience is also a head trip through a mind for whom the city's landscape is a springboard for erudite perorations about world philosophy, punctuated by malapropisms and grandiose riffs on the order of things: "I see each double-decker loop as another loop toward my death, and therefore toward perfection."
Filming without a crew, Miller surely ran up reams of footage just hanging out with this walking torrent of words - he must be a great editor. And a great listener, for like many isolates, Speed is an orator, not a conversationalist: A self-confessed exhibitionist, he talks the head off anyone within earshot. With a falsetto voice whose pitch lies somewhere between sandpaper and Richard Simmons, cheeks pocked with acne, and a sartorial style drawn from Waiting for Godot, Speed hovers at the edge of pathos. Miller, though, has no interest in typing his subject as a colorful character or a tragic case. Neither is he willing to sentimentalize Speed, who, toward the end of the film, declaims from the Brooklyn Bridge a laundry list of grievances against all those who ever hurt him, from an early schoolmate, to his mother, to the curs who never read his screenplays. (They will now, oh yes.) Yet this thin-skinned poet of the streets loves the bridge on which he stands, loves the frescoes on a downtown building even as he rages against the coercions of the Manhattan street grid. New York and life have wounded Speed Levitch to bits, and still he finds them beautiful.
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