RANDOM HEARTS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Columbia Pictures Director: Sydney Pollack Writer: Kurt Luedtke, Novel by Warren Adler, adapted by Darryl Ponicsan Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles S. Dutton, Paul Guilfoyle, Dennis Haysbert, Bonnie Hunt, Richard Jenkins
Trivia quiz. Two strangers, both married, meet at a train station and find themselves drawn into a short but poignant romance. Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto pumps up the amour. You're on the money if you named David Lean's 1945 "Brief Encounter," a picture that deserved four stars then but would hardly rate the same good fortune in 1999. The time is over for this time of languorous movie. Adultery then was delicious. Today it's shrugged off so much that a sitting president actually furthered his popularity by engaging in hanky panky outside his marriage. Trying to capitalize on the film and literary conventions of a bygone age may occasionally work, but in "Random Hearts," with its all-star troupe of lead performers and a superior bunch of supporting people, it does not.
I was ready to attack Todd McCarthy for what I considered his pigeonholing of movie audiences, but now I'm not so sure. McCarthy said of this film in "Variety" that it is "an ideal rainy day matinee attraction for well-to-do ladies of a certain age...pic's sobriety and deliberate pace, combined with an utter lack of allure for anyone under about 40, spells a short theatrical visit." In fact now I'd as soon amend Variety's opinion. An online critic whose 81-year-old grandmother recently saw "American Beauty" called it the best movie she'd seen this decade, making me wonder whether even the old- timers want to return to the stodgy, torpid, sentimental fantasies of yesteryear.
Director Sydney Pollack--a fine actor who justifiably injects himself into the action as a political campaign adviser--does give the picture a particular spin by throwing together people of wholly different classes as William Friedkin did in 1971 by contrasting a down-to-earth cop played by Gene Hackman with a sophisticated, classy criminal played by Fernando Rey. Harrison Ford inhabits the role of an obsessive cop, Internal Affairs Sgt. Dutch Van Den Broeck, who is as consumed by the search for truth about his wife as he is about tracking down corrupt policemen. You could never imagine that sparks would fly between him and the patrician congresswoman, Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas), because Chandler not only is a Republican accustomed to hanging out in upper-middle-class circles but seems only vaguely preoccupied with learning the truth about her straying husband.
What brings the two distinct personalities together is a plane crash that claimed the lives of Dutch's wife Peyton (Susanna Thompson) and Kay's roving husband, Cullen (an almost unrecognizable Peter Coyote). Both Kay and Dutch were unaware that their spouses were traveling together to continue their fling in Miami, but the discovery that they occupied seats 3A and 3B on a plane that neither was supposed to be taking causes diverse reactions by their surviving partners. While Dutch is determined to find out every detail of the tryst, Kay is concerned that the news would hurt her campaign for the next session of Congress.
As in virtually all romantic dramas, parties are kept apart as long as possible. In this case, the obstacle that keeps Kay and Dutch strangers is Kay's unwillingness to get close to the police officer for fear that the public will gossip and because she is in denial about her husband's affair. When they finally lunge at each other animalistically in a car, the thrust is far from believable, nor do the two exhibit much chemistry for the remainder of this overly long, albeit soberly designed and produced movie. While Pollack is interested in comparing the two careers--Kay's campaign and the kitschy ways her advisers tell her to speak to the public on TV vs. Dutch's blow-by-blow activities as a cop--the scenes involving Dutch's trailing of a guy he suspects of murder seem out of keeping in a film of this nature.
Harrison Ford does convince us of his determination to get at the truth while Kristin Scott Thomas's is best at showing her change from uptight, contained patrician to a much softer, more compassionate human being. We learn at least one additional detail that we hope we never have to experience: that when the immediate family are summoned to the airport to identify their loved ones after a crash, they do not see the actual bodies but rather a transmission of the head on a TV screen.
Rated R. Running Time: 133 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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