SPEECHLESS
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1995 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *
SPEECHLESS is a story of the love/hate romance between rival speechwriters in a New Mexico senatorial campaign. They are a month away from the election, and Geena Davis and Michael Keaton are competing with each other to get their candidate elected while having a romance at the same time. The story has superficial similarities to the real life romance between Bush's speechwriter, Mary Matalin, and Clinton's speechwriter, James Carville.
The two speechwriters alternate between playing tricks on each other and helping out each other in getting their candidates elected. They have a romance full of sight gags like the cliched love making scene in a much too small car (MG I think). Throughout the movie, their bosses never realize who the other speechwriter is. Right.
The movie starts slow but has two or three good laughs. After that it is downhill all the way. Keaton and Davis are both uneven actors. Keaton is better at his best that Davis, but they both have had many brilliant and many embarrassing roles in their repertoire. Here thanks to some awful direction by Ron Underwood and a miserable script (SPEECHLESS is a perfect title given the quality of the script) by writer Robert King, Keaton and Davis play unbelievable and worse, boring characters. It was like they were on Prozac in some of the scenes.
Screenwriting 101 teaches that romantic comedies should either be romantic or funny and preferably both. This movie was neither.
The worse part of the movie was the ending. Which senator would win you were wondering? Having given up on romance or comedy, at least you could hope for a little mystery. The ending was totally out of left field. It was as if one candidate had to drop out because he admitted to having adopted a space alien.
Finally, being a political junkie, I figured I would at least like the show for the political aspects. Well, there was no Contract with America to argue over here. These candidates had no apparent belief in anything and, moreover, did not even claim to believe in anything. Success was getting the lead on the local stations with any story including inviting TV crews into your home to watch you make dinner and to show how cute your dog is. Zzzzzzz.
For my 2 or 3 laughs, I generously award SPEECHLESS a single *. Please avoid this show and don't rent it. It is rated PG-13 for reasons that escape me. One time they literally whispered a single bad word. Everybody kept all of their clothes on, and no one even raised a hand in anger. All that having been said, they could rate it NC-95 for all I care. The movie runs a tediously long 1:39. Good time for catching up on your sleep.
**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.
REVIEWED WRITTEN ON: December 16, 1994
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews