Love Field

The actors are better than the story.

Set against the Kennedy assassination, the plot here deals with a rather simple-minded woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) from Dallas who is obsessed with the Kennedy family and especially Jackie. She's also unhappily married to a brutish guy (Brian Kerwin). She runs away from home and boards a bus to Washington to attend the Kennedy funeral.

Aboard the bus she chats with a black man (Dennis Haysbert) who is traveling with his small and oddly silent daughter. She never shuts up. He reluctantly responds to her endless chatter. The bus lumbers through racist America until there is an accident and the local cops start nosing around trying to get the details.

Right off they're suspicious of Haysbert and why he seems to be traveling with a white woman. To make natters worse, the ninny makes a phone calls when she discovers bruises on the child. That sets in motion a series of events with the travelers on the run from the cops.

While the man and woman learn things about themselves, their eyes are also opened to the realities of the American South in that pre-Civil Rights era.

The most annoying thing here, aside from the plot holes and implausibility of the story is the Pfeiffer character. If she has a Jackie obsession, why does she have platinum blonde hair a la Marilyn Monroe? She is a beautician after all. Seems like she'd had dyed her hair darker, not lighter.

Pfeiffer and Haysbert are good. Louise Latham is also good as the rural mother who takes them in while they are on the lam.