by Hadley Hury
ena Rowlands, the fine
actor, and widow of the late writer-director John Cassavetes, has
a small cameo scene in her son Nick Cassavetes' She's So
Lovely. It's always a pleasure to see Rowlands -- one of our
most likeable screen presences and notoriously underutilized --
but in this contrived and queasy mix of melodrama, black comedy,
and art-house pretensions, the classy sexagenarian's brief
appearance will only have the unintended and very unfortunate
effect of reminding many viewers of better days or prompting them
to wonder what might have been. The young Cassavetes fashioned
She's So Lovely from a short story written by his father some
20 years ago, and it would be a moot, not to mention unfair,
point to consider how the late director himself would have
brought his material to the screen -- except for the fact that
this project wears its homage on its sleeve. Audiences familiar
with John Cassavetes' groundbreaking independent films of the
late 1950s through the mid-'70s -- some of the best of which,
such as A Woman Under the Influence, featured Rowlands --
will be hard-pressed not to draw unfavorable parallels.
The lead performances are not to blame. Sean Penn plays Eddie, lost boy and loose cannon whose only foot up on even the lowest rung of socialization and functional adulthood is his love for a similarly simple and volatile waif-of-the-streets, Maureen, played by Sean's wife, Robin Wright Penn. Halfway through the 95-minute movie, Eddie makes the step (it's even shorter than we'd been led to think, and handled -- as are many of the film's plot twists -- with a thumping lack of credibility) to a complete psychotic breakdown, and is institutionalized for 10 years. Here Penn goes to the end of the road he entered so memorably with his fine portrayal of the condemned killer in Dead Man Walking; his Eddie is an apotheosis of the maladjusted, uneducated misfit whose woundedness explodes in rage and violence. It's a showy performance and all the more impressive for only occasionally giving in to self-conscious grandstanding. Robin Penn, also an actor of some power -- whose strong-boned blondness distinctly recalls the younger Rowlands and whose career to date seems similarly, frustratingly meager -- does what she can to build a sympathetic, or at least believable, character of the underscripted Maureen. But when the movie jumps ahead a decade and Eddie is released, and we discover Maureen, now cleaned-up, better adjusted, and living in suburbia, married to a building contractor named Joey (John Travolta), and the mother of three young daughters, the actor is left stranded with a trumped-up film finish that may have seemed very high in concept but provides a very low character-development arc or anything approaching dramatic credibility.
Will Eddie and Maureen destroy what seems to be a normal, if somewhat tenuous, family by running off together? Since all that the film has shown us is the pair's dangerous irresponsibility and tawdry self-indulgence, we can guess. Will the viewer care? Probably not much, since we pretty much feel by this point that no one should have to put up with these two except each other. Cassavetes' careless use of Eddie's clinical emotional illness as an almost glancing plot device is indicative of She's So Lovely's misbegotten ambition to frame a noirish tale of unappealing outcasts with hip-cool comedy. But it is the incidental treatment of the children that is the true nadir of the project. That the children are indeed incidental to Maureen and Eddie, though deplorable, is not unexpected since they are so apparently self-absorbed. But it is the film itself that seems to forget the three young girls are there. There's a bit of unsatisfying and dramatically strained attention given to their plight, but, by and large, the impact of the story's final scenes seems to have been completely lost on young Cassavetes. As the children look on uncomprehendingly -- and most of the audience looks on with more than a little disgust at these painful, almost macabre scenes -- She's So Lovely comes to a characteristically dissonant ending in which whimsical soundtrack music and wry character reactions try to signal that these proceedings are to be taken all in good fun. But just as the lack of fleshed-out emotional conflict robs the film of its aspirations toward kitchen-sink pathos, so the lack of directorial viewpoint and tone make a sour, disingenuous mess of its would-be dark comedy.
It may have taken two awards at the Cannes Film Festival (where pretension reigns even more securely than it does at the Oscars), but She's So Lovely is art-house grittiness sans true grit.
ABOUT THE ONLY intriguing aspect of the Australian import Paperback Romance is why it didn't go straight to video. Made three years ago, it seems a mystery why it should be released now -- even as marginally as it is. It's a tepid romantic comedy that occasionally strains for seriousness, the sort of movie which you have utterly forgotten by the time you reach the parking lot. (Several viewers at a recent showing didn't wait long enough to forget it; they got up and left early, probably in search of some redeeming "better half" of some other movie down the multiplex hall.)
Anthony LaPaglia, an interesting actor, is fairly well wasted in his lead role as a jewel dealer who falls for a bodice-ripper romance writer, played by Gia Carides. The audaciously banal plot involves the fact that Carides' character wears a leg brace and doesn't want that to ruin her one chance for happiness. A freak accident allows her to hide her real affliction in a leg cast under the guise of a skiing accident. (It says everything you need to know about the level of endeavor here to realize that this was done better several years back -- by Kristy McNichol, no less.)