The Tao of Logue

Much like the film scholar who grapples with the question of how to both contextualize and contemporarily criticize a film from, say, the 1960s, so grapple I, the amateur film critic, with the question of how to do just that with a film from the year 2000. Traditionally, the much less time concerned piece ends up being one that is itself “timeless.” But this method overlooks the potential of exploring older films, either decades old or merely a decade, as a means for seeing what people living then were like; not necessarily how they were but how they saw themselves, how their entertainment portrayed them.

“The Tao of Steve,” pronounced “Dow,” is a very 1990s comedy released in the year 2000, when the nineties had yet to do the courteous thing and give way to the new millennium completely. It has the 90s motifs of extremely dated music, editing, and writing. It also passed, and to some extent still continues do to so, as a raunchy, lecherous film, in a style that today’s more “realistic,” Judd Apatow-produced comedies attempt to make their own.

. The action takes place in and around Santa Fe, NM, and follows a stoned, disheveled, overweight part-time kindergarten teacher named Dex, who holds both a degree and a considerable amount of knowledge in the field of philosophy. Not content to keep this knowledge in its time period, our hero Dex applies it to the art of seduction. Despite his appearance, the film would have you believe that Dex has slept with the entire female populace of Santa Fe and then some. He espouses his “Tao of Steve”-named for famous Steves such as McQueen, McGarrett (Hawaii 5-0) and Austin (the six million dollar man, not Stone Cold)- to and along with his friends, three of whom he lives with in a seemingly mansion-ian bachelor pad.

We first meet Dex at his College reunions-this film is the first time in my twenty-three years that I’ve heard of any such thing existing. Dex has a tryst with a married former academic colleague in the library stacks and picks up a student worker serving drinks, and still has time to fall for Syd, another former classmate and friend of his best friend’s wife. Syd, in town from New York City working on an opera, instantly catches Dex’s attention. They spend the rest of the movie flirting around and with each other, each learning something about the other and themselves in the process.

“The Tao of Steve” implemented the unlikely leading man; a tactic used both before and much so after the year 2000. Donal Logue takes us inside the schlub, forming with his equally marginalized friends a coalition against the good-looking, successful men of the world, embodied in the film by Jeremy, another suitor of Syd. Dex’s philosophical edge allows for a strikingly interesting, yet not preachy, dialogue on the meaning of God and life to emerge within the film. “Everyone who talks to God is expressing gratitude, or groveling…God must be the loneliest person in the universe.”

The casting of Mr. Logue, an extremely charismatic Harvard graduate, in the leading role and the film’s use of various philosophies are by far the most compelling reasons to view the film. As a time machine, the film places the viewer back in a time uninterrupted by constant cell phone usage and lacks the distractions of a far more viral driven society, such as ours. It gains extra interest, as a time capsule, when viewed within the context of a time where Judd Apatow and the R-rated comedy boom that followed “Wedding Crashers” cast a shadow on many mainstream comedy releases. Where those movies combine raunch and sweetness in an organic, non-separate way, “The Tao of Steve” is each of those, only at different times: Lecherous, sweet, then lecherous and sweet again.

Ultimately, “The Tao of Steve” succeeds because its multiple components are each given just enough time on screen: the central love story, the ongoing theme of philosophy, the “Tao” behind seduction. With the lead character in play for each of these, no one element feels over or under explored. That coupled with appealing, on-location scenery, which makes the viewer feel like a Santa Fe resident, makes this film worth watching, and slightly compelling even.