A variety of crooks, losers, and working stiffs living in the shadow of Hollywood find their various personal crises overlapping in this intricately woven melodrama. Lee Woods (
James Spader) is a cold-blooded hit man and Dosmo Pizzo (
Danny Aiello) a soft-at-heart gangster; they've been sent to murder Roy Foxx (
Peter Horton), the former husband of also-ran Olympic skier Becky Foxx (
Teri Hatcher). Lee's girlfriend Helga (
Charlize Theron) is unhappy about his habit of killing people, and she attracts the attention of Alvin (
Jeff Daniels) and Wes (
Eric Stoltz), two cops who've been put on vice detail but don't have the heart to bust the prostitute they've been trailing. Alvin dreams of becoming a homicide detective, so when he discovers that he might be on the trail of a murder, it's like Santa Claus showed up in mid-July to hand him a present. Dosmo manages to escape the crime scene, only to foil a murder attempt by Lee, forcing him to hide out in the home of Hopper, a pretentious English art dealer (Greg Cruttwell), whom Dosmo holds hostage along with Hopper's long-suffering assistant, Susan (
Glenne Headly). In the midst of all this, a down-on-his-luck television director (
Paul Mazursky) contemplates suicide (the main stumbling block is finding someone to take care of his dog) while also being pestered by an actor with equally bad luck (
Austin Pendleton) and meeting a compassionate nurse (
Marsha Mason) on a visit to a cemetery. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide