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Featured Actress: Sarah Michelle Gellar - A pre-Entourage Adrian Grenier leads an all star cast through the scenic locales of Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts in this story about a college basketball player that gets mixed up with a bad apple of a cheerleader (a feisty, sexy Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her gangster father after his family is made homeless by a tornado which their home insurance failed to cover. To get the money his parents' need, he must rig a huge game for the gambler and lose the point spread. In the mean time, he beds and trades barbs with his philosophy professor (sultry Joey Lauren Adams) and experiments with various dugs including some home-made LSD that results in one bravado scene from director James Toback that finds Adams being nuzzled up to by a fully nude native girl that literally steps out of a Gauguin painting (played by an unknown Italian actress because Toback couldn't find a Polynesian girl to fit the bill).
On the whole, the movie feels like a confluence of heady ideas set against a pretty simple plot that's muddled not only by Grenier and Adams's philosophy debates about drugs, but by also a subplot involving two corrupt FBI agents played by the sorely miscast Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Stoltz. In fact, the questionable casting of this picture coupled with some jarring editing and a great deal of steadicam work conspires to sink the movie despite Grenier's rather solid performance keeping it afloat. Adams displays range as the concerned professor/lover, but it's hard not to think of her here as a missing blonde member of the Tilly family (try not to think of Jennifer each time Adams speaks softly in that Tilly trademarked baby voice). And while Gellar certainly tarts it up as the bad girl cheerleader and seems game during some simulated sex and drug use moments, it's still a tough sell. Things get even weirder when Gayheart, Stoltz and Polly Shannon get their freak on while snorting coke and being secretly photographed by Grenier.
Overall, not one of Toback's best movies, but definitely not his worst, Harvard Man is worth a look if only to see the terrific backdrop of Cambridge captured nicely in the films very widescreen format.
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