PLAYING BY HEART (Miramax) Starring: Gillian Anderson, Ellen Burstyn, Sean Connery, Anthony Edwards, Angelina Jolie, Jay Mohr, Ryan Phillippe, Dennis Quaid, Gena Rowlands, Jon Stewart, Madeline Stowe. Screenplay: Willard Carrol. Producers: Meg Liberman, Willard Carrol and Tom Wilhite. Director: Willard Carrol. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 118 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
PLAYING BY HEART inspires the question, "how many stories do you need to tell in one film in order to cover the entire spectrum of human relationship dynamics?" Is three sufficient? Five? Ten? The answer, of course, is that it's actually a trick question; you can't possibly cover the subject of love in toto over the course of one two-hour feature. The best you can do is make the stories you _do_ choose to tell compelling enough and insightful enough that they feel somehow more universal.
Writer/director Willard Carrol, apparently unhip to the tricky nature of the aforementioned question, has answered it "six." And that's at _least_ two too many. Carrol's line-up of romantically lost souls, centered primarily in Los Angeles, includes: elderly married couple Paul (Sean Connery) and Hannah (Gena Rowlands), struggling with the shadow of a long-ago infidelity; emotionally defensive Meredith (Gillian Anderson), struggling with whether to pursue a relationship with Trent (Jon Stewart); party girl Joan (Angelina Jolie), struggling to dent the armor of surly party boy Keenan (Ryan Phillippe); unhappily married Gracie (Madeline Stowe), struggling to keep her affair with a married man (Anthony Edwards) meaningless; and Hugh (Dennis Quaid), struggling to come up with a new sob story every night to win the sympathy of women in bars. Added for good measure is the reconciliation of a mother (Ellen Burstyn) with her terminally ill son (Jay Mohr), each struggling to understand the other.
There's an inherent danger in films that include several intertwining stories, namely that some will be much more interesting than others, and that the interesting stories will be less effective because we keep dashing away from them. At least one of the stories is extremely effective -- Anderson and Stewart's tentative sparring -- thanks largely to the charismatic intelligence of the two actors. Two others are consistently diverting -- Jolie and Phillippe, and Connery and Rowlands -- again thanks largely to the performers, which is a particular surprise in the former case. But with three other stories vying for time, including the utterly tedious trysts between Stowe and Edwards, there's never enough time for the good ones to build any momentum. Carrol and usually reliable editor Pietro Scalia (an Oscar-winner for JFK) chop PLAYING BY HEART into bite-sized three minute chunklets, giving the film all the emotional resonance of a wittier-than-usual episode of "The Love Boat."
That wittiness is what Carrol is counting on to carry us through PLAYING BY HEART, a film with more than its share of effective verbal sparring and clever quips. The dialogue makes the episodes diverting a fair amount of the time; it also disguises a script that has virtually nothing interesting or new to say about relationships. It often feels like Carrol is engaged in a decade-late scramble for a "modern" take on love and sex -- incorporating HIV into not one but two of the storylines -- but essentially every one of the stories is about people trying to understand and be understood. It's not a particularly revelatory take on why love is complicated, which makes it even more unclear why Carrol had to tell so many stories to say one thing.
Perhaps it's the sense that Carrol is trying _so_ hard that makes PLAYING BY HEART frustrating in spite of its occasional sparks of life. John Barry's score drapes a curtain of strings heavily over too many scenes, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography paints an unbelievably romanticized L. A. nightscape, and the conversations sometimes turn into exchanges that in real life would end with someone getting smacked across the face. Yet for all its flaws, PLAYING BY HEART probably would have worked if it had given us the time to build a familiarity with only one or two couples, allowing us to understand their hopes and fears about love in more depth than a quick character capsule could provide. The moments just don't add up in this epic of the heart that proves the law of diminishing returns.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 heart lites: 5.
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