The producers like the fact that some reviewer called this "an action movie for thinkers," but this is not an action movie in any sense of the word. Maybe if you're a paranoic with nightmares about gestapo-like booted-troops smashing in your door to take you away and shoot you, this would animate some of your worst fears, but for the nonobsessed there's really nothing here but three talking heads, two of whom talk themselves to death before the film ends. I think many will agree that the best review came from one of the four reviewers in the large auditorium at the press sceening I attended: loud snoring.

This is 95 minutes of self-indulgent and often pointlessly obscene dialog about a country that is never named and that we are given no reason to care about. I thought from one brief reference, in fact, that these were New Yorkers and the troops taking them out and shooting them were figments of what must have been their worst imaginings about the Reagan Administration (for these can't be Republicans), but the presskit assures us this is another country that shall go nameless. It isn't Russia, because Russians are at least interesting. None of these characters are ones I'd want to spend a half hour with, much less a stretched hour and a half. They are bores.

This is written by Wallace Shawn, the same mind behind My Dinner with Andre, another all-conversation script, but at least it has two interesting characters, neither one of whom as I recall had anything to say about masturbating. That seems to be the most interesting thing, at least in his own mind, about the character played by Mike Nichols here, appropriately named Jack. Admittedly, the script does at several points almost sound like literature and maybe for someone more literary than I, that's enough. The idea behind the title, that cultures need mourners to get them through their losses, has some poesy, but in my opinion, far too little.