She's So Lovely

Let's go back in the past;1975:"a woman under the influence",John Cassavetes.Gena Rowlands plays a misfit,we follow her through two phases of her life:before and after the confinement in a mental hospital.The "treatment" she underwent had disastrous results because she tried to commit suicide soon after her release.

Now 1997 "she's so lovely":Gena Rowlands plays -fleetingly- either a shrink or a social worker,I cannot make up my mind.Sean Penn plays a misfit,we follow him through two phases of his life;before and after..well you get the picture.Her,against all odds,the treatment made wonders for Penn's mental health;if we consider the end of the movie.

Alas,Nick Cassavetes is not his father,and we do not find here the overlong,sometimes infuriating scenes ,devoid of any dramatization,close to improvisation ,John Cassavetes' trademark. All what remains is ,save for the bizarre and far-fetched ending , simply mundane.John Travolta is miscast.

The main reason to see this movie :Sean Penn.One of the best actors of his generation,he runs the whole gamut of emotions,and definitely demonstrates how an actor can single-handedly save a movie from mediocrity.He makes us believe in his unbelievable character.

I wish Penn could have his dream come true:Portraying the late Phil Ochs!

The beginning credits were difficult for me to read, thus I was not cognizant of the writer or director. Sometime into the film, I pondered the striking resemblance of numerous scenes to the work of John Cassavetes. Later, I impressed myself with the discovery of his name on the video package. Cassavetes wrote and directed some excellent cinema, but this film is more akin to his dismal "Big Trouble". The script is fragmentary and lacked character motivation. The story introduces Penn and Wright as urban lovers, then suddenly switches pace when Penn has a mental episode and is institutionalized. Resuming ten years later, Penn is released only to find Wright married to another loser. As her husband, Travolta reminded me of his "Pulp Fiction" character constantly cursing and chain smoking. Unfortunately, the scenes between Penn and him are flat. I don't understand Travolta's emotional reactions to his unrealistic predicament, while Penn remains mentally incapacitated like De Niro in "The Awakenings". Wright is fine, but her role is ill-defined. It was good to see Harry Stanton with a sizable part, and Debi Mazar is alluring with her Betty Page looks. I would recommend skipping this film and seeing "Husbands", "Faces", or "A Woman under the Influence". 2 out of 4 stars.

I suppose that the point of this movie is that love, and people in love, are not necessarily very "proper" and jasmine-smelling. Fine, I agree, but by the time the movie ended I was not sure it was love this movie was about. Quinn and Mrs. Quinn amply deserve each other that there was hardly any point in making a long movie to demonstrate that. The pity is, that the movie was well done, well directed, with some nice touches; the actors were also good, but the script, or rather, the characters are a mess. In any case you might even tolerate the failures of script and characters but it is impossible to get past the inanity of the protagonist Mrs. Quinn: she just doesn't make sense. In the second part of the movie Mrs. Quinn is as messed-up as in the first part, only ten years, a new marriage, three children and a change in her social standing are supposed to have happened in between; nevertheless, only her clothes and her makeup have changed. How can that be? I am not the same as ten years ago, and not so many things have happened to me. Also, she's supposed to be the pivot of the whole conflict, but she's not solid enough to justify that.

Maureen is a bit strung out and pregnant from her low-life husband Eddie. Their lives are an unpredictable mix of actions that mostly involve drinking and scamming round on the fringe of society. When Eddie is "away" for a few days, Marueen falls in drinking with neighbour Kiefer, who tries to rape her but then just beats her. She explains this away to Eddie so as to keep him from going crazy at her or anyone else but when he does start to flip she calls the paramedics to take him into care for his own safety. However when he shoots one of them, Eddie is sentenced to a mental institution. When he comes out he finds that Maureen has divorced him and has moved onto a much more stable and reliable man in the form of Joey, with whom she has had more children.

Almost halfway in it becomes evident that this film isn't going to work out that well because, before the "10 years later" jump, the love between the two leads hasn't been established to a convincing degree. Given that the narrative is using this mutual attraction (despite all the negatives) as its lynchpin this is a bit of a problem. Other than establishing that both are unstable and using each other for meaning, the film doesn't do that much for all the time it takes up. The second half isn't that much better as Eddie comes out as a sort of watered down Rainman and disrupts Maureen's new relationship with Joey. The script then asks us to swallow that she still loves Eddie to the point where the mere news that he is released sees her flush the last ten years down the toilet.

I can sort of understand what the script was trying to do but it didn't manage to produce anything interest in the aggressive relationships that it paints in the gutter. The characters are where the main failing is. Maureen's character is poorly defined and Wright-Penn doesn't appear to understand what motivates her character and thus turns in a really mixed performance that pushes emotional buttons in each scene but is never consistent. Eddie is OK in the first half of the film as he just seems like a drunk unstable loser but in the second half he is unconvincingly soft. Likewise Penn is strong in the first half but he is unconvincing in the second. Their performances aren't helped by a weird mix of tones – at times a dark love story, at other times a cringingly awful "comedy" complete with "jaunty" music being played over a fight on the front lawn or that horrible scene at Joey's bar. Travolta is a bit better and Stanton is a reasonably nice addition in a small role.

Overall this is a shocking mess of a film that spirals downhill from the mid-point onwards. The first half shows potential but doesn't manage to pull off the formative stages of the central relationship and thus fails to set up the second half. However the second half isn't helped by poor development and a terrible mishmash of "comic" moments that simply feel crass and out of place – I suspect even if the first half had been a stormer, this second half would have been poor enough to drag it all under. Even the acting talent seems all at sea and unsure of where they stand or who they are. A load of rubbish with little or no value.

Nick follows in the footsteps of his old man, John Cassavetes, who supplied the screenplay and you can tell because the down and out characters walk about with cigarette in one hand and a glass of booze in the other. This is a very simple tale of manic love told with care.