For Love or Money in 'Elysian Fields'

George Hickenlooper's "The Man From Elysian Fields" is a shimmering fable of innocence and experience set in contemporary Los Angeles and Pasadena (its title is a nod to Virgil's "Aeneid"). Phillip Jayson Lasker's tartly knowing script, with the kind of witty dialogue that's all but vanished from American movies, recalls Hickenlooper's "The Low Life" in its depiction of the struggle to make it in L.A., and, as a romantic odyssey, Hickenlooper and film critic F.X. Feeney's Orson Welles adaptation, "The Big Brass Ring."

"The Man From Elysian Fields," however, represents a substantial advance for Hickenlooper in assurance and clarity. With its poetic, moody camera work by Kramer Morgenthau, a frequent Hickenlooper collaborator, this is an elegant film with often surprising twists and an intermingling of naivete and sophistication. It is bolstered by a dream cast: Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn and Anjelica Huston.

Garcia's Byron Tiller is a former advertising man who threw over his career to devote seven years to writing "Hitler's Child," in which he imagines that Hitler and Eva Braun had a son who was then raised in Argentina. Improbable as it seems, the novel received some good reviews, but soon vanished off the shelves.

Tiller, his wife Dena (Margulies) and their small son live in a messy, run-down cottage with a dirt frontyard in one of Pasadena's seedier sections. Dena has been a rich man's rebellious daughter who remains passionately in love with her husband and takes a romantic view of poverty.

When Byron's latest manuscript--in which King Arthur's sword Excalibur is symbolic of hope for a group of migrant workers--fails to excite his agent, he understands how tough it's going to be to support a family. But he's had a chance encounter with Luther Fox (Jagger), a well-tailored, well-spoken Brit with an office on the same floor as Byron's agent in a fine old Hollywood Boulevard building.

Suave and insinuating, Luther has actually read "Hitler's Child," admiring the writing but dismissing its farfetched premise. He offers Byron a job at his firm, Elysian Fields, which turns out to be a tony escort service. Byron, chagrined but desperate, reluctantly agrees and envisions he'll be dispatched to one of the wealthy grande dames who make up Luther's clientele. Andrea Alcott (Williams) turns out to be rich, young and beautiful; she's also the wife of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Hemingway-esque novelist Tobias Alcott (Coburn), who happens to be Byron's literary idol.