I LOVE TROUBLE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Julia Roberts, Nick Nolte, Saul Rubinek, James Rebhorn. Screenplay: Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer. Director: Charles Shyer.
If you're making a list of movie terms you don't hear all that often, "caper" has to be right up there. It puts me in mind of light-hearted mystery with a generous helping of romance, beautiful people in danger but not hard-core danger; NORTH BY NORTHWEST comes to mind, or the THIN MAN series. I LOVE TROUBLE is an attempt to resurrect the caper, and you've got to hand it to Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer for trying. They've put two appealing stars with great chemistry in a fast-paced film. They just forgot to give them anything to do. As much as I found myself wanting to enjoy I LOVE TROUBLE, it barely managed to divert me.
Nick Nolte stars as Peter Brackett, a columnist for a Chicago newspaper loved both by readers and by the ladies. Due to a staffing shortage, Brackett is sent out to cover a train derailment. There he meets Sabrina Peterson (Julia Roberts), a young reporter for a rival paper who resists his advances. When Peterson scoops Brackett on a lead, his competitive juices start flowing, and the train story turns into a good-natured game of one-upmanship. However, it soon begins to appear that the train wreck was no accident, and when bullets begin to fly Brackett and Peterson form a reluctant and competitive partnership. Along the way, antagonism naturally turns to attraction.
Shortly after I LOVE TROUBLE started, something began to become clear: there were no characters. Meyers and Shyer had thrown two reporters of opposite genders into a movie without giving them personalities. At least there was an attempt to do something with Brackett; he is shown as a self-plagiarizing narcissist who has forgotten what real reporting is. The problem is that that characterization vanishes after the first fifteen minutes (easily the film's best fifteen minutes). Peterson is written as a good- looking prop, a sparring partner who seems to have been born a minute before the movie started. Nolte and Roberts struggle admirably to generate some kind of life for their characters, but all they can do is flash their thousand watt smiles and hope for the best. And they go farther than they have any right to, purely on the strength of their charm. When they smiled, I frequently smiled right along with them.
It sort of makes you wonder what they could have done with a remotely interesting story. The big conspiracy at I LOVE TROUBLE's center is...unique, to say the least, but it's fairly tedious stuff. The identity of the villain is apparent from minute one, and I LOVE TROUBLE takes far too long to get into its main plot. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the plot never gets going, nor is it designed to. It's just a device to take Nolte and Roberts from situation to situation quickly, allow their romance to blossom, and give them a chance to exchange witty banter.
Only there isn't any witty banter. All told, I have to wonder exactly what it is that Meyers and Shyer did to earn their screenwriting paychecks. Their dialogue earns chuckles at best, their sense of pacing is extremely suspect, and their characterizations are wooden. Like their BABY BOOM and FATHER OF THE BRIDE, I LOVE TROUBLE seems designed only to move along affably, without spark or inventiveness of any kind. The fact is, there is nothing truly off-putting about I LOVE TROUBLE. Nolte and Roberts make an appealing tandem, and Roberts' performance in particular is extremely energetic, perhaps her best work to date. But since a movie like I LOVE TROUBLE is inevitable in its outcome--the two reporters *will* end up together--getting there has to be more interesting. Without any excitement in the suspense storyline, and with two bland characters contributing to a singularly vanilla romance, I was left watching two beautiful people be beautiful. It just wasn't enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 scoops of vanilla: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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