Martin Brest’s fascinating Gigli marks a return to personal filmmaking for a writer-director whose movies have zigged and zagged since his auspicious feature debut, Going in Style, in 1979. While Brest can deliver a slick Hollywood production (Beverly Hills Cop, Scent of a Woman) seemingly on demand, his best work combines a high level of Hollywood-style craftsmanship with often devastating reversals of conventions, particularly when it comes to happy endings for his protagonists. Generally, these comically pained anti-heroes are embarked on either criminal or semi-honest (Robert De Niro’s bounty hunter in Midnight Run) pursuits which they believe will solve their immediate problems. All they discover is that their problems are much bigger than they thought they were and that, when the inevitable ensuing farcical disasters are cleared up, they have an idea of how to go about solving them.

     Gigli is the darkest treatment Brest has undertaken of this theme to date. Ostensibly a romantic comedy, it has no romance to speak of and only a tiny bit of comedy. Grief often irrupts into Brest’s films, but this one is rife with it. Set in Los Angeles, most of its action takes place in interiors that, though they are not literally blacked out, have at best an indirect or filtered light. When the action moves outdoors, Brest’s familiar use of long lenses, even for two-shots, cramps the space so that the bright local sunshine enters the frame diffused and pixilated. The conclusion is set on a beach with beautiful young dancers in bathing suits, a happy enough vision. But the dominant final image (despite what looks like studio tinkering to impose a "happy" ending) is of a lonely man in a black leather jacket with his back turned to the camera facing an endless highway.

     But Gigli isn’t another downer L.A. movie. It’s an insightful and provocative depiction of contemporary narcissism set within the unexpected confines of a serio-comic crime story. Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is a sad-sack muscleman working for a Beverly Hills street-corner Mafioso named Louis (Lenny Venito). Brest opens the action with a sharp and witty contrast between Gigli’s self-conceit (as he smugly threatens a man who owes Louis money) and Louis’s contempt for his ineptitude (Gigli doesn’t bring the right amount of money back). The contrast between ambition and accomplishment, façade and self, and thus the need to shape the world to conform to his picture of himself is rapidly, wittily and, in cinematic terms, beautifully established.

     For reasons that should remain obscure for the sake of plot twists, Louis orders Gigli to kidnap a mentally handicapped teenager named Brian (Justin Bartha) and hold him hostage. Gigli grabs the kid, but discovers that Brian is a handful. He keeps demanding that Gigli take him to "the Baywatch," apparently the beach where his favorite show is filmed, which is "where the sex is." Gigli uses crude tricks to put Brian off, but they work, and though the would-be thug is barely in control of the situation, he manages to coax/trick Brian into his apartment where he will keep him on ice.

     Of course, Gigli is no match for someone with even a soupcon of wit, and that someone comes knocking on his door in the person of Ricki (Jennifer Lopez), an attractive young woman who says she needs to use the phone. Ricki turns out to be another of Louis’s hires, the gangster having decided that he needed a couple of guards to watch each other as well as his hostage. Gigli, in a move commensurate with his personality (disorder), soon tries to make love to Ricki, but she quickly tells him she’s a lesbian – and she’s not kidding.

     Ricki’s lesbianism provokes a crisis in Gigli; he can’t figure out a way to respond to her sexual indifference. His narcissism requires that she respond to him sexually, but she’s incapable of it. Moreoever, Ricki is narcissistic herself, and her lesbianism is a function of it. In a memorable scene that takes place one night in Gigli’s apartment, Ricki performs an elaborate series of exercises while Gigli looks on. Ricki easily coaxes Gigli into quietly boasting of his body, its sexual prowess and its ability to please women. Then, as she works out and exhibits her body, Ricki describes how much she loves the female body and how well-suited it is for her pleasure, how much, in fact, it resembles a mirror. The main difference between them is, at this moment in the movie, Gigli seems on the edge of disintegration while Ricki is acting sadistically.

     Brest cross-cuts between Ricki and Gigli, never showing them together and thus increasing the atmosphere of alienation. But the loneliness and emotional distance has been present all along. Brest started his career during an era when long lenses were all the rage, but he’s kept using them beyond the point where they ceased to be fashionable. On his camera, the lenses isolate characters from their backgrounds and narrow the boundaries of their world. Inside Gigli’s apartment, Brest is limited in how long a lens he can use. But working in Gary Frutkoff’s acutely envisioned set, the director employs doorways, hallways, furniture, and whatever else is at hand to divide up the space and keep the characters away from one another.

     The only person in the movie who is able to reach out, who sees the world as something apart from himself, is Brian. This may seem like too extreme a juxtaposition when he’s held up against Gigli, but not so when he’s compared to Ricki. Gigli doesn’t offer us opposing camps of well-adjusted and maladjusted people, but a sliding scale of emotional malfunction.

     Brest is not particularly well-served by his two stars, though he gets as good a performance out of Affleck as anyone ever has. A bigger problem than the competency of the pair’s performances might be the genre expectations their presence produces in the minds of filmgoers. But that’s simply a matter of popular prejudice. Brest, for his part, has succeeded in making another intriguing movie.