The film indulges in the intellectual rap session with both fascinated attention and wry humor: it is, after all, the pretentious proclamations and justifications of two privileged
men batting around the meaning of life in a restaurant where most folks couldn't afford to buy dessert.
This way he keeps the viewer — and possibly the director — genuinely off balance, shimmying up against a couple of massage parlor cuties (he's clobbered by a baseball
bat, departing consciousness with a lovely goofball pratfall), sussing out Martin Short's smarmy Dr. Blatnoyd (letting Short run circles
around the infield, the receptionist, and a nice pile of medical - grade cocaine), or playing telephone straight
man to Jeannie Berlin's Aunt Reet, a Catskills gargoyle with killer timing: «Maybe you're better off with the Nazis.»