SHE'S SO LOVELY
RATING: ** (out of ****)
Miramax / 1:28 / 1997 / R (language, violence) Cast: Robin Wright Penn; Sean Penn; John Travolta; Harry Dean Stanton; Debi Mazar; Gena Rowlands; James Gandolfini; Chloe Webb Director: Nick Cassavetes Screenplay: John Cassavetes
"She's So Lovely," a "romantic fable" scripted by the late John Cassavetes and directed by his son Nick, opens to the tune of Bjork's wild "It's Oh So Quiet." In retrospect, it's a great selection, because the movie, much like the song, is about how passion can drive you crazy. But as "She's So Lovely" hacks away at getting its point across, it also commits several deadly errors that render it from being the hip, offbeat fairy tale it so aspires to be. Chief among them is the drawback that its strange cast of characters fails to ever make much sense.
Case in point: Eddie (Sean Penn) and Maureen (Robin Wright Penn) are one of the most bizarre husband-and-wife pairings that filmdom has likely ever seen. He disappears for several days at a time while she carts her pregnant self around town, scanning the local bars for her spouse and taking time to enjoy herself with a few drinks while she's at it. Maureen gets a little too free-spirited during a particular one of Eddie's absences, and spends the afternoon sharing whiskey with a creepy neighbor (James Gandolfini) who then beats her up after she rejects his advances. When Eddie finally resurfaces and catches a glimpse of Maureen's bruised face, he eventually wigs out and hits the streets with a loaded gun.
No fair telling what havoc ensues immediately thereafter, but the movie then flashes forward 10 years. Eddie, now released from the mental institution where he's spent the last decade, gets a dye job and a new look and begins searching for Maureen. She, meanwhile, has gone from happy hour to homemaker, married a wealthy hothead named Joey (John Travolta), raised a trio of adorable little girls and established living quarters in quaint suburban decadence. Inevitably, Eddie crashes Maureen's pleasant but unfulfilling lifestyle, and inevitably, there's a mental (and physical) tug-of-war between Eddie and Joey as to who she'll profess her undying devotion to.
This is love? The movie says it is, but that's its main undoing -- Eddie and Maureen repeatedly tell us and each other that they're in love, but "She's So Lovely" does little in the way of showing off their inner workings. Both are unstable, fragile creatures, and the film seems to think that bizarre personal similarities constitute an explanation as to how their relationship works. It doesn't. We're also never given any reason as to why the new-and-improved Maureen -- if she is in fact so preoccupied with her past life with Eddie -- would so willingly project her affection on Joey. This love triangle, as "different" as it sounds, fails to click in most cases because it doesn't break its character surfaces or lets its cast portray people with little more dimension than cartoons.
Speaking of the cast, "She's So Lovely" has a nice one, with the two Penns (real-life man and wife, in case you hadn't already figured that out) and the lone Travolta performing successfully enough to overlap some of the movie's gaping flaws. They also compensate for a very shaky shift in tone; the Eddie-Maureen first half is too serious to be dramatic and too silly to be serious, but act two, featuring Eddie's release and the events there on, makes the proceedings insanely quirky (Joey to nine-year-old daughter: "Shut up and drink your beer!"). Travolta steals most of his scenes in a smaller-than-you-might-suspect supporting role, male Penn is nicely subtle and female Penn does an almost-fascinating combination of Betty Boop, Olive Oyle and Mira Sorvino's "Mighty Aphrodite" lead.
The title's a little off too, because I came away thinking that Penn's Maureen is anything but lovely. I also blinked at how quick the film delivers its resolution, which is extremely abrupt but also too fast to be boring. "She's So Lovely" isn't a terrible movie by any means, but it is one with a lot of ill-used talent. It's an interesting (I hesitate to use the word "refreshing") change-of-pace to see a summer movie that at least attempts to tackle an unusual topic, albeit one where John Travolta doesn't trade faces with anybody and the biggest special effect is Sean Penn's spunky bleached-blonde hairdo.
© 1997 Jamie Peck E-mail: jpeck1@gl.umbc.edu Visit the Reel Deal Online: http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~jpeck1/
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