SHE'S SO LOVELY (Miramax) Starring: Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta, Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, Kelsey Mulrooney. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Producer: Rene Cleitman. Director: Nick Cassavetes. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 95 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Promotional posters for SHE'S SO LOVELY describe it as "a film by Nick Cassavetes from a fable by John Cassavetes," a tag-line which prompted a visit to my American Heritage Dictionary:
"fable [fa' b(e)l] n. 1) a concise narrative making an edifying or cautionary point, often employing as characters animals which speak and act like human beings."
I suppose you could say that SHE'S SO LOVELY fits that definition, in the sense that it makes a cautionary point. Unfortunately, the point is made at Nick Cassavetes' expense: don't go messing around with a legend just because you happen to be related. When Nick tries to remain true to his father's spirit in the film's first half, the result is strained and dated. When he tries to forge his own path in the film's second half, the result is an incomprehensible mess.
As for animals acting like people, you won't find any in SHE'S SO LOVELY. People acting like animals...well, that's another story. Eddie Quinn (Sean Penn) is a short-tempered, vaguely unstable sort with an indeterminate employment history; his pregnant wife Maureen (Robin Wright Penn) sits around chain-smoking and drinking herself stupid while waiting for Eddie to return from one of his regular multi-day disappearing acts. One such bender puts Maureen in a dangerous position with a burly neighbor (James Gandolfini), who slaps her around when she refuses his advances. Maureen doesn't tell Eddie the real cause of her injuries, afraid that anger will push Eddie over the edge. Instead, Eddie's conviction that Maureen is lying to him pushes him over the edge, landing him in a mental institution for a decade.
There is at least a convincingly seamy aura to the portion of SHE'S SO LOVELY devoted to Eddie and Maureen's kinetic romance. Vintage Cassavetes ambiance drips from the depressingly silent flop houses and dive bars, and from the characters wandering around in a directionless, drunken daze. Yet even in its best moments, SHE'S SO LOVELY feels not quite right. It's like the steak transported through the telepods in David Cronenberg's version of THE FLY, a story from another era which has been rendered synthetic in its transport to 1997. Despite the strong performances and affectingly crazy exploits of Penn and Penn, there's the feel of an homage to the first half of SHE'S SO LOVELY. It has no unique identity.
To show you how far looking for a unique identity gets you, witness the second half of SHE'S SO LOVELY. It's set ten years after the first half, with Eddie just about to be released from the institution and Maureen remarried to construction company boss Joey Giamanni (John Travolta). Maureen is still in love with Eddie, though, which understandably irritates the man to whom she's presently married and with whom she has had two other daughters.
There is a vein of tension which could have yielded dramatic gold in the scenes between ex-husband and ex-wife, between father and the daughter he's never seen, and between one husband and the first husband who claims his wife's deepest affections. But young Cassavetes treats the whole episode as the wacky premise for a profane situation comedy, as though Papa had banged out a very special episode of "My Two Dads" twenty years ago. The whimsical score by Joseph Vitarelli consistently undermines the seriousness of the matters at hand; situations like Eddie's appointment with an effeminate hairdresser are treated as atmospheric goofiness. Meanwhile John Cassavetes' prose, removed from the barfly milieu which gives his dialogue a sad poetry, ends up in the mouth of Travolta's blustering middle-class husband and becomes purple enough to warrant a place in the Incredible Hulk's wardrobe ("You're a glorified piece of blue sky," he snorts at his step-daughter). Instead of wondering whom Maureen will end up with, your mind wanders to why Nick didn't go all the way and use a laugh track.
Ultimately, it's hard to figure out what Nick Cassavetes was thinking when he decided to resurrect SHE'S SO LOVELY. For that matter, it's not clear what John was thinking when he wrote it, with its half-realized characters, awkwardly constructed narrative and weightless romantic triangle. There's a lesson to be learned here, something like "it's best to let sleeping scripts lie."
Here endeth the fable.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fable manners: 4.
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