She's So Lovely

As could be seen in last week's Coolidge Corner retrospective, the films of the late John Cassavetes overflow with dialogue, characters, situations, and behavior that are out of control, a rampage of raw emotion and refined delusions that unreels with the sublime inevitability of a drunk falling down a flight of stairs. She's So Lovely, written by Cassavetes and directed by his son Nick, is much of the same, but in this case the actors are out of control too. The younger Cassavetes showed a sure hand and some talent in last year's Unhook the Stars; this time out he should have kept his stars hooked. Neither does he control the balance of tone between melodrama and farce that was a key to many of his father's successes.

Of the three leading actors, Robin Wright acquits herself best as Maureen "Mo" Murphy, a spike-haired, peroxided, pregnant spitfire who in the film's opening scenes is beside herself in her ratty apartment because of the three-day absence of husband Eddie (Sean Penn). "I hate to be alone," she confides to sleazy neighbor Kiefer (James Gandolfini), who seeks to comfort her by getting her drunk, raping her, and beating her up. The scene teeters from hilarity to grotesquerie as it edges to its foregone conclusion, and Wright maintains a core of dignity and intelligence beneath her surface of blowzy toughness and vulnerability.

Not so when Penn shows up. His Eddie is a buffoon, a back-alley drunken would-be philosopher poet who gives such grandiloquent lines as "What an interesting thing a woman is -- tits and ass and hair. What is hair?" exactly the wrong spin. His exchanges with Wright begin on a note of rampant hysteria and intensify upward, reducing any drama or suspense to caricature. Knowing that Eddie will kill Kiefer if he finds out what happens and unwilling to live alone (the film's attitude toward women is a little regressive) if he goes to jail, she tries to keep the truth from him. Yet out of sheer perversity she sets him up to be picked up by the authorities and then demands that he be a "tough guy" with Kiefer. Shots are fired, incoherent dialogue is screamed, tears are shed, and Eddie ends up in a mental institution for 10 years.

You'd think that with the advances in psychopharmacology over that period of time everyone would be a lot calmer. Instead Cassavetes's script ups the zaniness level a notch higher and the performers lose all self-control. The newly released Eddie confronts Maureen in her suburban home, where she lives with her new husband, Joey (John Travolta, making his Face/Off role look like subdued Method acting), and three daughters. Fine points of motivation and narrative logic are tossed aside for absurdist effect as the triangle collapses; the only actor who shows restraint is a haggard Harry Dean Stanton as Eddie's voice-of-reason barfly pal, Shorty. Stanton's performance, and the brief cameo by Gena Rowlands (Nick's mother and John's widow) as, fittingly, a mental-health counselor, serve as a rebuke to the rest of the cast and the director, who mistake excess and egotism for the freedom and truth of the elder Cassavetes's style. At the Nickelodeon, the Janus, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough