LOVE AFFAIR
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Onliners may recall that a few years ago when Warren Beatty and Annette Bening were hawking their bomb LOVE AFFAIR, they appeared on Oprah, who was wetting her panties with false enthusiasm. When she wasn't soliciting her in-studio audience for undeserving favorable reaction to the movie, she was kissing the stars' asses. Actually, their stoney asses, because Beatty and Bening were so guarded about themselves, so tight and controlled and cool, that they almost came off as snobs. And just this kind of aloof self-protectiveness about themselves is what they bring to their movie. Beatty and Bening brought this type of dung to BUGSY and won over some noodle-brained east coast critics, but to bring it to a four hankie tribute to AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER is suicide. What makes it all the more offensive is that no one had the guts to tell Mr. Hollywood and his Ice Princess to shove their acts where the moon don't shine.
Followers of Beatty know he's usually a smart producer, but somewhere along the line, in wanting to make his own version of the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr comedic weeper, he lost brain cells: he didn't ask the most obvious of all questions: is a remake necessary? Whatever your feelings about the Leo McCarey sudzer (which he also made earlier as LOVE AFFAIR with Dunne and Boyer), it's just about impossible to see how it needed an updating; this is the one of those movies that are best described as "guilty pleasures," for you know you're being had but what the hell? When you have two beautiful stars like Grant and Kerr, you go along for the cruise. And you can't help yourself: even when you fighting off the heart-clogging schmaltz, you're preparing for the water works when Grant opens Kerr's bedroom door. All that matters is that they belong together. But what is one to make of Annette Bening as the 90s Terry McKay? Who'd want her except a masochist?
As LOVE AFFAIR begins, and it's in trouble right from the start, what with that cloying Uncle Tom Bobby Short singing "Changes," Beatty's a retired quarterback about to be married to a television personality (Kate Capshaw) who got him a sports anchor position he isn't qualified for; like Grant, he's a gigolo. Bening's a sometimes singer who tricks as a decorator for her betrothed -- wheeler-dealer Pierce Brosnan; in other words, like Kerr, she's a gigolette. Beatty and Bening end up together in the first class section of plan headed for Sydney, but engine trouble forces the 747 down on a tiny atoll! (Don't even consider asking about the likelihood of survival.) They're rescued by a Russian cruise ship and while on it, they fall in love. One wonders what they find attractive about each other: in de-aging lighting effects, Beatty looks and acts and talks like he's suffering from the very earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's -- though sometimes he appears to be bumming from Steven Weber's Brian on "Wings" -- and Bening, with a runway model's thinness and haughty sarcasm, is this or any season's polar vortex; she'd have no trouble immobilizing Mr. Freeze. Lovable? She's not even tolerable. As the ship docks in civilization -- Tahiti! -- it just so happens that Beatty's aunt doesn't live far away and he asks Bening if she'd like to go along while he visits her. She's dubious of an auntie, but hey, she's got time to kill while in paradise. Old auntie is Katharine Hepburn of the Tremors, who promptly upgrades Cathleen Nesbitt with one line: "f..k like a duck."
Though based on the Leo-McCarey-Delmer Daves screenplays from the two previous versions, writers Beatty and Robert Towne slice away (or later edited away?) the relationships Mr. & Mrs. Supposedly Beautiful have with their intended. Beatty has only a few scenes with Capshaw, who's never allowed to be anything but a distance presence. (At least with Neva Patterson in AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, we had the chance to watch her die of public embarrassment over Grant's future in gooey artistic expression.) And Capshaw has been horribly attired and photographed: in a flat shag reminiscent of Fonda's in KLUTE, and wearing a god-awful beaded beret, she's more prostie than celeb. (TV newsers are whores, but not Kate.) Bening has only a bit more time with Brosnan, who doesn't steal the movie -- because he's not given the chance -- but he's the only one with any blood circulating. Unintended in its real meaning, he's given the only true line of dialogue to utter: to Bening, he says, "Boy, you're a tough nut to crack." The writers retain McCarey's worst part: the kids' stuff, including Bening "farmer in the dell"ing. It slumps further into abjectness when the kids turn Lennon and McCartney's "I Will" into REMEMBER's nauseous "Tomorrow Land" and "He Knows You Inside." All this "family value" warmth can't thaw Bening out of her chilled encasement.
Rumor has it that director Glenn Gordon Caron wasn't really in charge, and I think it's entirely possible to see that he wasn't as soon as the movie opens. This is another of Beatty's vanity productions, and his age insecurity is all over the place; while Caron acted as traffic manager, Beatty applied the soft focus to Conrad L. Hall's camera lens. Frankly, the movie doesn't feel directed; it feels staged for still motion -- every bit, every jerk, every blink and sip and kiss and everything else seems stilted. And because Beatty makes us exceedingly aware of his fears of aging, as he in did in DICK TRACY and BUGSY, he has made himself the target for the charge that he's too old -- 56 -- to play this part. Grant was too: 53 when he made REMEMBER. But Grant had intrinsic class, which he used as a cover; Beatty's too suspicious to discover if he's got any. The sharpie Beatty usually is as movie maker has dulled: he's opted for drabby glamour and the sobby cutes to get by, when, if he really believed in this project, he'd have put Brosnan in as star and put him opposite the kind of personality who could enliven the garbage, give it the spark and wit it needs for the 90s -- someone like Carrie Fisher. Hepburn's tremors most likely became Beatty's when he saw what he ended up with: an expensively stupid movie that has zilch reason to be.
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