LOVE AFFAIR
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Garry Shandling, Katharine Hepburn, Pierce Brosnan, Kate Capshaw. Screenplay: Warren Beatty and Robert Towne. Director: Glenn Gordon Caron.
Making an old-fashioned romance isn't as easy as it might look. While films from this year like IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU and ONLY YOU attempted to re-create the magic of bygone love stories, they succeeded primarily in creating cloying pseudo-parodies of what those classic stories were all about: that perfect someone appearing at the most improbable--and inconvenient--time. LOVE AFFAIR does it right. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening have taken this third telling of a tear-jerking classic and made it a warm, sentimental and beautifully filmed experience, limited in its effectiveness only by Beatty's somewhat wooden lead performance.
Beatty stars as Mike Gambril, a former NFL quarterback and inveterate womanizer who is engaged to a popular talk show host (Kate Capshaw) as more of a business deal than a love match. On a flight to Australia, Mike meets Terry McKay (Bening), a struggling would-be singer herself engaged to a wealthy businessman (Pierce Brosnan). When their plane is forced to make an emergency landing, Mike and Terry end up together for three days on a ship bound for Tahiti and the flight which will take them home. In those three days they fall in love, and vow to meet again in three months if their lives are free of their previous entanglements. However, fate intervenes on the appointed day, and the course of true love does not run smooth.
If there is one unquestionable triumph to LOVE AFFAIR, it is the atmosphere. Director Glenn Gordon Caron (creator of TV's "Moonlighting") sets up the kind of shots one might expect from a film fifty years older: Bening descending a staircase into frame; Beatty appearing entirely in shadow during their airport fairwell; a slow, patient scene late in the film in Bening's apartment. There is a lyricism to his direction, without the force qualities of other recent romances. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall shoots in deep oranges and with lots of filters, and photographs Bening in the loving style which used to be reserved for Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman. Ennio Morricone's sweet, simple score also contributes to a mood which inspires you to hold your date's hand a bit more tightly.
This is not to say that LOVE AFFAIR gets by on style points alone. Beatty has rounded up a truckload of talent to bring the script (co-written by Beatty and Robert Towne) to life. At the top of the list is Bening, Beatty's real life better half, who shines as Terry. Few actresses in film can manage the kind of mature, intelligent appeal she brings to her roles, which makes it a shame that her appearances have been so infrequent of late. Here she is both savvy and vulnerable, more than a match for Beatty's aging playboy but still harboring basic insecurities. It's not a flashy role--LOVE AFFAIR is not a flashy movie--but it's a fine performance. Garry Shandling is a delight as Kip, Mike Gambril's agent, toning down his usual neurotic persona and giving a witty reading, and Harold Ramis has a funny cameo as an acerbic accountant. But the film is stolen by Katharine Hepburn, making her first big screen appearance in 13 years as Mike's Aunt Ginny. Her scene with Bening, in which she lays the groundwork for Mike and Terry's relationship, is wonderful, and proves that Hepburn can still act the heck out of a part (as well as that she is familiar with a certain four-letter word).
It's one of LOVE AFFAIR's most significant failings that that same scene does more to explain Beatty's character than Beatty himself manages to do. He sort of wanders through this part at times, never letting us know what Terry sees in him beyond his come-ons. This could have proved to be a fatal flaw, but there is just enough inherent romance in the situation that their pairing doesn't seem completely implausible. LOVE AFFAIR also lags significantly once the two lovers are separated, with nearly non-existent roles by Capshaw, Brosnan and Chloe Webb attempting to bridge the gap. But the cathartic final scene is effective enough to make up for the melancholy tone of the final half hour.
Sentimentality is frequently a tough sell. LOVE AFFAIR may be schmaltz, but it is artfully executed and well-acted schmaltz. And it renews my faith that somewhere, someone knows how to make a real love story.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 love affairs: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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