Sunday Pages: "Zero Effect"

A film by Jake Kasdan

Dear Reader,

On Friday, Ryan O’Neal died. He is best known for Love Story and Paper Moon, and rightly so. But for me, he will always be Gregory Stark, the tormented businessman he plays in Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect—one of my all-time favorite movies, and the best one no one’s seen.

Released in 1998, Zero Effect is a detective picture—it is loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and has all the beats and twists of a Raymond Chandler novel—but it’s also a romantic drama, a comedy, and a thriller.

The (very private) detective in question is Daryl Zero: eccentric, paranoid, reclusive, agoraphobic, proud, probably on the spectrum, but also, somehow, the best detective in the world. He’s part Holmes, part Bruce Wayne, part Gene Hackman in The Conversation, part auxiliary character from Real Genius. He seldom leaves his fortress of a hi-rise apartment. He lives on canned tuna and Tab. He plays guitar, badly. He doesn’t meet his clients in person. Instead, he sends out a go-between, a Watson to his Holmes: Steve Arlo, a meticulously dressed lawyer with a gorgeous live-in girlfriend he wants to marry, who has had it up to his eyeballs with Zero’s schtick and is on the verge of quitting.

These characters are played by Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller. You’d assume the former was the straight man and the latter the goofball, but no—in an inspired piece of casting, it’s the other way around. Here, Pullman gets to indulge his inner weirdo, and Stiller—after Reality Bites and Flirting With Disaster but before Meet the Parents and Zoolander—is the straight man who hates his job. Daryl Zero is a terrible boss, and Arlo is over it.

The movie opens with Arlo making the case for Zero as the world’s greatest detective. He tells tales of the glory days, the mysteries that confounded law enforcement worldwide that Zero solved in a few hours “without even leaving his house.” And then—and this is the genius of the film—Kasdan shows us that this isn’t just bluster. Zero really is the world’s greatest detective. In Zero Effect, said detective finally meets his match.

Pullman and Stiller are both terrific. Kim Dickens—who would later play Powers Boothe’s brothel-owning business partner in Deadwood—shines as Zero’s love interest/primary suspect. But the emotional center of the film, the character that gives it its heft and its gravity, is Ryan O’Neal. (I suspect that, once O’Neal agreed to do the film, Kasdan jumped for joy.) Gregory Stark is wealthy, spoiled, tormented, anxious, arrogant, narcissistic, dark, but also vulnerable, insecure, and desperate for salvation. It’s hard to convey all of that physically, with movement and facial expressions, but somehow O’Neal manages; the onetime boxer knows how to use his weight to great effect. The plot begins when Stark hires Zero to perform the most mundane of tasks: “I have lost my keys. I’d like you to find them.”

As much as I’d like to break down the film further, few people have heard of it, and even fewer have seen it, and I have no wish to spoil a masterpiece. Suffice it to say, the plot is riveting, and goes places you don’t expect. There’s a ton of memorable dialogue, including voiceovers of a journal Zero is writing (badly) about his craft. Example:

A few words here about following people. People know they’re being followed when they turn around and see someone following them. They can’t tell they’re being followed if you get there first.

And there is a part at the end, a single line Zero says, that breaks my heart every time.

O’Neal’s filmography after the first Reagan term is, as the kids say, mid. He could easily have phoned this in. Instead, he did the opposite, turning in a wonderfully nuanced performance—albeit one most people missed.

Why did such a brilliant film fail so spectacularly at the box office? For one thing, the marketing sucked. The trailers didn’t do it justice. Ben Stiller was starting to become a thing in 1998, so they tried to spin it as a Ben Stiller comedy, which it very much isn’t. The title doesn’t really convey what the movie’s about. The poster is flat-out bad: ugly and unappealing. And box office is always fickle, I suppose.

The better question is: Why has it failed to attract a cult following in the years since? That is a mystery even Daryl Zero cannot solve.

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ICYMI

Jen Mercieca was our guest on The Five 8: