`Loser' recalls `The Apartment' without its richness, moral vision

Movie review

XX "Loser," with Jason Biggs, Mena Suvari, Greg Kinnear. Directed and written by Amy Heckerling. 98 minutes. Several theaters. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of language, subject matter.

Amy Heckerling wrote and directed "Clueless," the drollest teen comedy of the past decade, then oversaw its conversion into a television series. More recently, her 1982 film, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," was named one of the top 100 American comedies in an American Film Institute poll.

Back in the multiplex business again, she's created "Loser," which she describes as the "the anti-`Clueless.' "

In Heckerling's own words, it's a story "about the people who don't have the money to buy new things, the people who don't have it all, who don't fit in." It's based on her own college experiences as a teenager whose life revolved around raising money for tuition and living expenses.

In short: Don't expect a lot of laughs. In spite of the fact that "Loser" is being sold as a teen comedy, it doesn't find all that much humor in the humiliation and relative poverty of its central characters. Fair enough, but Heckerling doesn't find too many other reasons to find them compelling for an hour and a half.

Nerdy, puppy-like Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs) and potential doormat Dora Diamond (Mena Suvari) are both trying to make ends meet and make friends at New York University. Neither is faring too well. She's having an affair with her promiscuous, mentally abusive literature professor, Edward Alcott (Greg Kinnear), while he's persecuted by his obnoxious roommates, who eventually vote to throw him out of their dorm.

Paul finds a room in a Greenwich Village animal shelter, where he takes care of the dogs and cats, resigns himself to the smell and looks forward to studying without too many interruptions. For reasons that won't bear much scrutiny, his ex-roommates decide to take over the place and party.

Coming back late from a concert, Paul discovers that the animal shelter is a wreck, the pets are out of their cages, and the unconscious Dora (who was supposed to meet Paul at the concert) has overdosed on some unknown chemical. He takes her to the emergency room and nurses her back to health.

The script for "Clueless" was loosely based on Jane Austen's "Emma," though no credit was given within the film itself. "Loser" seems more than loosely based on Billy Wilder's "The Apartment," though again no debt is officially acknowledged.

Once the roommates take over Paul's "apartment" and Dora gets her stomach pumped, "Loser" follows the plot of "The Apartment" so closely that it becomes predictable. And while the ever-game Kinnear gets to be even slimier than Fred MacMurray was in Wilder's film, Suvari lacks Shirley MacLaine's charming resignation, and Biggs fails to equal Jack Lemmon's eloquent study in urban loneliness.

Not that it's their fault. In fact, Biggs and Suvari, who were previously paired in last summer's comedy hit "American Pie," are quite good within the limits of the script. Suvari has some wonderfully explosive moments with Kinnear (who gets most of the script's laugh-out-loud lines), and Biggs does his best to suggest that Paul is growing up fast.

But Heckerling's writing just doesn't convey the richness of "The Apartment" or its moral vision. "Loser" is less about ethics than it is about getting these two people together. In the end, it just seems like the kind of teen romance Freddie Prinze Jr. was too busy to make.