Fool for Love

After reading Fool For Love in a Drama class of mine, I was looking forward to seeing how Sam Shepard's wonderful play would be translated to the screen. Much to my dismay, it was nowhere near as entertaining as the play. The film seemed to drag, the music was inappropriate for the tone of the movie, and all the raw energy of the play seemed to have been sucked out of this film version. It's a shame to see this come out this way even with Shepard's involvement, playing the role of Eddie. Do yourselves a favor...see the play next time it's being performed in your area or simply read the book instead.

May (Kim Basinger) is waiting for her boyfriend (Sam Shepard) in a run-down American motel, when an old flame turns up and threatens to undermine her efforts and drag her back into the life that she was running away from. The situation soon turns complicated.

When a film is an expansion on a play, such as this is, you have to be true to the source while also going beyond. Altman succeeds, casting Harry Dean Stanton as a one-man Greek chorus and bringing a fuller vision to the story than could be shown within one room.

Roger Ebert said that Altman "has succeeded on two levels that seem opposed to each other. He has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility." These are kin words and not without merit.

"Fool for Love" is one of the several now forgotten films Robert Altman directed throughout the 1980s. This one, a screen adaptation of a Sam Shepard play that features Shepard in the lead role, just simply isn't very good. Altman made many not-very-good films over the course of his fascinating career, and many times the fault was his. But here I think the fault lies with Shepard for writing such a flimsy play. Altman's direction is assured, the performances are o.k. given what the actors have to work with, but this inconsequential screenplay goes nowhere, and takes its time getting there.

Shepard is Eddie, a stuntman who has a love/hate relationship with May (Kim Basinger). The two fight endlessly over the course of an evening spent in some dusty motel in the middle of nowhere, while a mysterious man (Harry Dean Stanton) who may be either a figurative or literal father to both Eddie and May quietly observes. Randy Quaid rounds out the four-person cast as a gentleman caller.

The only dramatic hook in the entire plot is the suggestion that Eddie's and May's relationship is incestuous. However, this hook feels more like a gimmick than anything. The screenplay doesn't explore their relationship in any detail, and it doesn't use their relationship to explore any more universal themes. Shepard and Basigner create eccentric, mannered characters who grow irritating within the first five minutes; Stanton and Quaid have little to do but provide reaction shots.

The last half hour or so of the film is especially bad, when Eddie's and May's back stories begin to play out in flashback over monotone, somnolent voice over.

Chalk this up to another of Altman's experiments gone awry.

Grade: C-

Fool for Love (1985) was directed by Robert Altman. It's based on a Sam Shepard play. Sam Shepard did the screenplay. Sam Shepard also stars as Eddie, a rodeo rider who drives up to an end-of-nowhere motel, and starts causing trouble within the first 60 seconds.

I'm amazed that this movie is so bad. Shepard is a good actor, and so are the other leads: Kim Basinger as May, and Harry Dean Stanton as "Old Man." Randy Quaid has the unenviable supporting role as a "normal" guy who arrives at the motel to take May out on a date, and ends up enmeshed in the bizarre triangle.

It's hard to believe that a brilliant director, working with such skilled actors, could end up with a movie this bad. Nothing works, except that Eddie is a menacing presence throughout. It's obvious from the first minutes of the movie that bad things are going to happen, and they do throughout the film.

It's also obvious that Altman needed to open up the play so that he could turn it into a movie, and he did. He didn't do it all that well, but he did it.

It's clear that people didn't like the film. At the time I'm writing this review, the IMDb rating is a horrific 5.9. (I actually helped improve the rating when I gave the film a 6. That must be a first.)

The movie will work well enough on DVD, which is how I saw it. It would probably work better on the large screen, because you'd get even more of a sense of the total isolation of the motel location. However, my advice is to pick another movie. Fool for Love just isn't worth the time spent watching it.

Robert Altman directed this adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay and stars as a drifter who drives his pickup truck, complete with horse and trailer, to a small hotel in New Mexico. It seems he has a tempestuous romantic history with the hotel's proprietor (Kim Basinger), and the audience fills in the blanks as the film progresses, taking a distinctly sharp turn in the last third. Also with Randy Quaid and Harry Dean Stanton. The first half of the film nearly lost me for good, with not a lot happening and the performances pitched to the back row. But things get better during the home stretch, even if bits do strain credulity. From the Cannon Group, stepping outside of their usual budget action flicks.