HEART LIKE A WHEEL
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
HEART LIKE A WHEEL isn't a great piece of B movie making, because it's striving for A status, but it's a terrific little flick nevertheless. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan, from a script by Ken Friedman, it tells a true story about three-time Top Fuel hot rod racing champion Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney and sticks to it in the old fashion way. (Though not rotting like Tony Curtis' JOHNNY DARK and not in any way as phony fashionable as John Frankenheimer's Sominex epic GRAND PRIX.) This is assured moviemaking, confident of winning you over. By the end, I almost cheered -- a reaction I'm told was common for evening showings. In rooting for underdog Muldowney, this picture is somewhat like MELVIN AND HOWARD -- with an ending you wish Melvin could have had. The best news of all is that HEART isn't just about racing or the women's lib propaganda inherent in it, it's also about the relationships between men striving to make it and the women they love who become better at what their men are striving for. Muldowney, at least in the picture, is one women in a man's world who men can admire -- even while using her. The theme isn't heavy duty provocative or sexist, but there are some potently provocative and sexist moments that pop up -- the realism of the moments startling and cogent.
As Muldowney, Bonnie Bedelia's face isn't as strong as it might be; she's missing flesh in her cheeks and with a tiny mouth, she has an elongated, pinched chin that tends to make us think we're looking at a mannequin, particularly when she wears her helmet. She often looks like one of the harpies from the soaps -- Robin Strasser's Dorian on "One Life to Live." (Sometimes she resembles Peggy Ann Fleming.) But she doesn't act as if she's in a soap -- there's no fishwifery. She gives a fine reading, using her incomplete face and her eyes and voice as though she's constantly opining, especially when she confronts some competition for Beau Bridges' affections in a motel restaurant, or when she's on the phone talking to her ex-husband, or when, again on the phone, she's giving a radio sportscaster an interview. (It is during these phone scenes that her faces merges with her character.) To some there may be hints of the Streep method, but Bedelia, at times as calculated, doesn't produce any cold fronts.
Beau Bridges as the famous hot rodder-womanizer Connie Kalitta does what Warren Beatty and Jack Nickolson haven't been able to -- realistically womanize his way into our suspicious hearts; the lies this character tells endears him to us. Flabbed out, unshaven, fingernails greased to the max, revelling in his puppy dog act, Bridges gives the most honest portrayal of a womanizer that's come out of Hollywood in years: every woman knows a man like this and many of them have loved him, and every man has had a buddy like him, if not wanting to be like him. What makes this performance so beautiful -- and ongoing even when he's not on the screen -- is that Bridges makes us understand why he does things without ever having to explain. We know why he attempts to beat Bedelia after she publicly disowns him (it's the only real act of feminist revenge in the picture and we understand that too). Bridges plays scenes that spring from our own lives; I couldn't detect a single false note throughout. Leo Rossi, as Shirley's ex, and a muscular version of Kevin Kline, is another slice of life: a man who doesn't want his wife to succeed all that much. When he calls her for money some years after their separation, it's a scene that might be ego-humiliating but it works -- there's heart and some valid level of pride in it. (Now that I think about it, this movie has more phone scenes than an average episode in a soap.)
HEART LIKE A WHEEL works so well because there isn't any feminist-inspired humiliation in it -- an additive that would have been easy to mix in. You like everyone in this movie; and you like the movie immediately. Kaplan and Friedman don't waste time in establishing Muldowney's compulsion: at the beginning we see her as a child sitting on her drunken father's lap, behind the wheel of the car, zooming through the air. The thrill has been set. A few scenes later, now married, when Muldowney's husband agrees to a night time drag race, we watch as she stands in the middle of the highway mimicking her husband's shifting of gears. It's in her blood but not his and he loses. In the next race, she takes over and wins. The crowd cheers and she waves to acknowledge them. But it's really a wave of goodbye -- she's lost her heart to the wheel. It's when I lost mine, too.
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