Don’s Plum

Was it the butt of Leonardo DiCaprio? Or was the career of Tobey Maguire not served by the image of an unworldly vegetarian? The screening rights of Don’s Plum by débutant R.D. Robb had to be defended in court, anyway. As a result, at home in America, cinema distribution is not allowed.It sounds like a childhood dream. You are a young film student in Los Angeles and your best friends are called Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. You sit in the bar with them, drink, smoke, do some other things your parents had better not hear about and one day you all decide you could make quite nice film about it. It’s the early Nineties, so Leo and Tobey are not famous yet. That’s more or less how it happened. But how drunk and stoned were the young actors during the recording? What was improvised and what was taken all too literally from life? Don’s Plum shamelessly exploits American clichés about the Saturday night fuss and shows a sobering combination of ego tripping and loneliness. A film about images. What do people think about me? DiCaprio and Maguire (or their agents) were afraid that that would not be very good after Don’s Plum. That is in turn a form of dramatic irony. Because if they really are acting, they do it with moving and clumsy commitment. And otherwise, R.D. Robb is just a great documentary maker.(Dana Linssen writes for NRC Handelsblad and is editorinchief of De Filmkrant.)