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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 01/23/1997, B: Steve Vineberg,

A separate World

Dan Ireland mixes romance and madness

by Steve Vineberg

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Directed by Dan Ireland. Screenplay by Scott Michael Myers. With Vincent D'Onofrio, Renee Zellweger, Ann Wedgeworth, and Harve Presnell. A Sony Classics release.

ALT="[Whole Wide World]" width=225 height=153 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5> As Bob Howard, the pulp writer who romances a small-town schoolteacher in 1930s west Texas in The Whole Wide World, Vincent D'Onofrio gives the best performance I've seen by an actor in the past year. D'Onofrio has thick, squarish pugilist's looks; a walrus moustache he tries out, or an outsize Mexican hat, sits on his face with unexpected ease, absurd appendages you suddenly realize complete him. He gives Howard a physicality that's both lumbering and exploratory: tracking through the cornfields or down a country road, he always seems to be stretching toward something, a world only he can see. That's the heart of Robert E. Howard, the man who created Conan the Barbarian: he lives such a fervent life in his head, rehearsing his stories in the fields or chanting them like fearful verse, bent over his typewriter, that he disappears into it. When his ailing mother (Ann Wedgeworth) interrupts him to call him to the phone, she has to shout to be heard above the din of his imagination.

For this bold, possessed man, who brawls against the world every time he marks out a new tale, and whose braggadocio and nonconformity mask deep-flowing misanthropy and despair, D'Onofrio seems to invent his own style -- a kind of homegrown pulp-theatrical machismo. It's as if he'd crossed the stylized all-American forthrightness of a John Wayne with the romantic sweep and tormented soul credited to 19th-century actors like Edmund Kean and Edwin Booth.

The Whole Wide World is the work of two men whose names were unfamiliar to me, the director Dan Ireland and the screenwriter Michael Scott Myers, and it's enchanting. Modest but resolutely offbeat and lovingly crafted (the soft-edged cinematography is by Claudio Rocha), it's one of the few truly original pieces of filmmaking to be released in the past year, and it deserves to be the kind of small picture that audiences fall in love with. Even the usually programmatic composer Hans Zimmer seems to have been caught up in the movie's spell: he's written an evocative and often witty score that suggests, in its small way, the kind of experimentation Copland went for in his soundtracks.

Renee Zellweger plays Novalyne Price, the young teacher and hopeful short-story writer who becomes enamored of Bob and tries to draw him out of his isolation. Their courtship has a comic intensity brought on by her determination and his tendency to back off unexpectedly and then, just as suddenly, come charging back at her like an offended bull. The gifted Zellweger (she's also the ingenue in Jerry Maguire) has a mixture of curiosity and feistiness that at first reminds you of Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here, but her fiery Texas style -- she never backs away from a fight -- has a soft, silky underlayer. These two are remarkable together. Ann Wedgeworth, as the protective, dying mother who claims Bob's first loyalty, adds a third superb performance. Wedgeworth's Mrs. Howard is the kind of fading Southern woman Tennessee Williams might have conceived: the sensuous aroma of gardenia drifts off her, mixed in with the odors of decay.

Ireland and Myers sustain their unconventional period romance; the film is a triumph of sensibility and generosity of imagination. The title derives from the phrase a mutual friend uses to describe Bob when he introduces the two main characters: "the best pulp writer in the whole wide world." But as the film goes on, you realize that it mostly refers to the world of Bob's fiction, which encompasses him, and the world that Novalyne is on the brink of entering -- the world that graduation from college, a teaching career, and graduate school in Louisiana, as well as her love for Bob, present to her. Myers adapted his script from One Who Walks Alone, the memoir Novalyne wrote, as Novalyne Price Ellis, at the age of 76; the title is more touching when you consider that she waited her whole life to write down this story, as if she had to approach the end of her world before she could understand what happened to her in her youth, and what it meant to her. This movie has the magical effect of stretching itself around you as you watch. For two hours, the complicated love affair of an adventure-story writer and a schoolmarm becomes, for us, the whole wide world.