February 26, 1999 | Risa Bramon Garcia’s 200 Cigarettes is a slight but likable comedy about the not-so-quiet desperation of determined fun-seekers on New Year’s Eve 1981 in New York’s East Village. Garcia, a former casting director for Oliver Stone and other notables, has assembled an impressive ensemble of fresh faces and rising stars for her debut effort as a feature filmmaker. Better still, she and screenwriter Shana Larsen give many of these people some very amusing things to say and do.
There is more than a hint of American Graffiti in the way 200 Cigarettes juggles interconnected subplots while charting the cleavings and collisions of various young couples, friends and total strangers. Kevin (Paul Rudd) is depressed because of his break-up with Ellie (Janeane Garofalo), and must be browbeaten into going to a party with Lucy (Courtney Love), his best friend. Their friendship might develop into something more intimate, but only if Lucy can keep her eyes off a studly bartender (Ben Affleck) who has also captured the attention of two highly competitive beauties (Nicole Parker, Angela Featherstone).
Meanwhile, Val (Christina Ricci) and Stephie (Gaby Hoffmann), two under-age friends from Long Island, are looking for the loft apartment where Monica (Martha Plimpton), Val’s cousin, is anxiously awaiting the invitees for her New Year’s Eve party. The womanizing Jack (Jay Mohr) also may attend the party, if he can decide what to do about a twentysomething virgin (Kate Hudson) he deflowered the night before. And so it goes.
Lurking just beneath all the frantic goings-on is the unstressed intimation that the era of heedless hard-partying is drawing to an end, that AIDS and other nasty surprises are waiting just around the next bend in the fast lane. To their credit, however, Garcia and Larsen refrain from belaboring the obvious, taking their cue from the sage advice offered by Dave Chappelle’s disco-loving cabbie to Rudd’s lovelorn Kevin: “Don’t talk about death. Everybody knows they’re going to die, and they don’t want to hear about it from you.”
