Fool for Love

Sam Shepard's story of obsessive love in a lonely Texas trailer park may have been a fine stage drama, but transferring the play intact from the imaginary backdrop of a theater to an out-of-doors location only makes the stage dialogue sound pretentious and artificial. Good theater doesn't guarantee a good movie, and Robert Altman's attempts to open up the play using flashbacks and fluid camera work do little more than draw attention to its stage origins, with the director's trademark slow zooming and cross-cutting giving an entirely false impression of movement and meaning (dramatic moments, including a childhood secret revealed, are subsequently lost within all the visual calisthenics). The end result is an attractive but empty experience.

The 80's were not very kind to Altman. After the disappointment of Popeye, both artistically and at the box office, he was banished from Hollywood. Altman burnt too many bridges on the Popeye shoot and so ended up at the University of Michigan teaching his films and staging plays, among other things. His filmography during this time tended towards smaller stories, often derived from stage plays. He had limited artistic success and almost no commercial success during this time. Fool for Love is among his most successful works from this time period, both critical and commercially but it is one of the Altman's most inaccessible films.

This film is a bizarre marriage of ponderous melodrama and the light detached bemused tone that is iconic Altman. Shepard's script, from his play, tells a battle of the sexes doomed romance story with a dash of family squabble that reminds me of a striped down version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? As written the story is a series of preposterous reveals and twists that upon final analysis add up to very little. It is all smoke and mirrors. The story is engaging because it is utterly weird. It has a roughness to it that shows promise, but Shepard does not know what to do with these characters in the end.

Fortunately, Altman leans into the script's limited setting. The motel on the edge of society coupled with the Western motifs present really allows Altman to bring out the absurdity present in the script. The film is dryly funny; it really undermines the Western image of masculinity. But the direction doesn't seem to link up to the script which also makes the film not add up too much. (And the photography is quite lovely to look at)

A must for Altman fans but others would be advised to check out other Altman films first.

Interesting, laid back version of the Shepherd play. On stage, with Ed Harris in the lead, it was all frenetic energy and danger. Here the piece is more moody and dreamlike. At times that works tremendously well, and it is visually beautiful. The play has been opened up in a way that feels natural and not forced. And the use of narration is very interesting and productively unsettling, since the memories we see do not quite match the words we hear.

On the other hand, the slower pace makes the writing feel more melodramatic and almost old- fashioned in its twists. And Shepherd is nowhere near as interesting as Harris was on stage. We never feel that he is really dangerous. He comes off more as a love-struck kid than obsessed man. And it ends with a whimper, not a kick. Still, there are plenty of less interesting theater to film adaptations out there.

"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-

I came to Fool for Love, and am looking at what I just saw, from a position that won't be like some of you trading this: a few years ago, I saw an off-off Broadway production of Shepard's firestorm of sexual comedy and anguish, and I had no exposure to what it was before. I was awestruck by how much Shepard's play packed in one room, which is in the motel (the father "spirit" appears as a figure by the stairs), even featuring at one point some explicit nudity (a monologue that May delivers to herself, which one can barely hear in the film version as Shepard is outside looking in, is stark naked and it makes for an extremely vulnerable position to be in), and is a work that is darkly funny, intense, but the overall feeling is heartache and loss. It feels so suited for the stage, all of those monologues about a past gone included.

Altman and Shepard as screenwriter open up the production, but it doesn't add to what was already there on the stage. On the contrary, this is a case where Altman shows what characters are describing from their pasts. At first, this works. Kind of. When we realize this seeming derelict at this motel played by Harry Dean Stanton is meant to be May's father (and, gasp, Eddie's, which comes after we had a whole opejing act where they, you know, appear to be ready to rip each others throats), he tells her about a memory of pulling off a road to be surrounded by cows. He describes it in narration, and we see it, and how this is edited and weaved together with Basinger and Stanton largely works dramatically.

Where it doesnt is in all of those scenes after, where our two half sibling/estranged lovers tell confused Randy Quaid about their pasts, it's all too much. The images are not filmed or acted well in these flashbacks (except for a shotgun blast that is, um, a great goddamn shotgun beat), and this approach doesn't make these decidedly theatrical monologues any more... Cinematic. The writing of what the actors is saying isnt bad, but the combination just falls flat.

Why watch it then? Harry Dean Stanton, Shepard and to an extent Basinger bring it to these characters. Stanton especially couldn't give a bad performance if he tried, but in this case he was already on the hot streak of his career (look up what he did in 1984, how many actors had that great a year in modern American film?) He has a man here who is a Ghost of Non-holiday Past, and one who sees his children a certain way. Will they live up to what he expects? Will he disappoint them even as this theatrical apparition? He is also playing haggard and a bit drunk and aimless, and Goddamn is he a treasure every second on screen. If this is a less successful Altman film, it's not because of him, or for lack of Shepard trying with a role he wrote (though originally not for himself, and I lament that Jessica Lange couldn't play May, ironically because she was pregnant with Shepard's child).

Overall, I wouldn't say don't check out Fool for Love, but you can wait if you're just getting into Altman, and it's certainly not the stronger of the two Stanton/Shepard films of the 1980s (Paris, Texas wins by many miles). The main issue comes down to this: this is a filmmaker, via this writer, sort of... Going on auto-pilot. It doesn't feel special outside of what the actors more or less bring.