Movie review: 'Filth and Wisdom'

Eugene Hutz (Credit: IFC)

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1 1/2 stars (out of four)

 To get to where you want to go, exploit “the cashbox in your body.” So says one of the striving London bohos in “Filth and Wisdom,” a film directed and co-written by Madonna, who is currently on her “Sticky and Sweet” concert tour, while hacking through a “Nasty and Expensive” divorce co-starring film director Guy Ritchie.

 That cashbox line may well have come from Madonna’s fellow writer Dan Cadan, but if ever a career was indebted to the concepts of flesh, marketing, flesh, self-promotion, flesh and steely resolve, and flesh, it was Madonna’s.

“Filth and Wisdom” began as a short. Narrator A.K. (Eugene Hutz), a mustachioed Ukrainian immigrant, harbors dreams of musical glory that he finances by working as a cross-dressing S&M specialist. He’s mad for roommate Holly (Holly Weston), aspiring ballerina by day, pole dancer by night. Vicky McClure, the best thing in this hollow affair, wants only to aid the African poor. She’s lusted after by her East Indian drug store employer (Inder Manocha). The blind professor played by Richard E. Grant lusts after A.K. I can’t remember a movie with so much theoretical longing and so little juice, comic, dramatic or in between.

Madonna shoots it all like a home movie made by someone who has been on the other side of the camera so often, doing music videos, “reality” no longer feels remotely “real.”

It’s rather sweet to think of “Filth and Wisdom” as Madonna’s reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz’s band, Gogol Bordello, took over. If “Film and Wisdom” helps the band’s profile, I’m all for it. I’m just not, you know, all for it.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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