Fool for Love (Robert Altman, 1985) wr. and play Sam Shepard; Sam Shepard, Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid
For once, I didn't mind a film that is a bit stagey - by which I means it still looks somewhat like the play from which it is derived. It's the closest I'll ever get to seeing a Sam Shepard play - and this even has Sam in it for the greatest authenticity! Kim Basinger is a bit theatrical, granted, but she is very good. And it's odd, in terms of 'realism' that the Old Man is always hanging around (he's on side of the stage in the play) but, hey, it's Harry Dean Stanton, and he's usually worth watching. (So is Randy Quaid, always.)
What I didn't like is the episodic structure of the narrative: the way Eddie keeps leaving and then coming back again, getting his horses out of the trailer, and then putting them back in again. But I suppose we can see that as something in the nature of the character, and his relationship with his lover, who is ... like a sister.
Wikipedia:
Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote, "With Fool for Love, [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." Gene Siskel also gave the film three out of four stars, writing that Altman "has served the play well." A negative review[er] in Variety wrote that the film made the material "look like specious stuff filled with dramatic ideas left over from the 1950s. Some highbrow critics here and abroad likely will proclaim this a masterpiece, but general audiences will react as they did to the last Shepard-scripted pic, Paris, Texas—with a yawn." Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film "has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as The Old Man." His main criticism was finding Altman's close-ups and cross-cutting too frequent: "You don't have to know and admire Mr Shepard's text to want to shout out to the director to pull the camera back and sit still." Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times [wrote], "As played by Shepard himself and a ferociously wonderful Kim Basinger, it's a raw, explosively funny, elemental tragicomedy about the pure willfulness of love." Lawrence O'Toole of Maclean's wrote that "the performances of Shepard and Basinger are often mannered and too emotionally confined for all the noisy fighting that takes place. Despite those flaws, Fool for Love is sizzlingly effective. What emerges is a portrait of two lives that are painfully, inexorably, even tragically united."
Roger Ebert:
... What's astonishing is that Fool for Love is essentially a male drama, told from a male point of view, and yet Basinger is able to suggest so much with her performance that she steals the center of the stage right away from the man who wrote her lines and is playing opposite her.
Part of her impact probably is because the director is Altman. Few other major directors are more interested in women. In his films such as Thieves Like Us, 3 Women and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, he has shown women in settings very similar to this one: unfulfilled women, conscious of the waste of their lives, living in backwaters where their primary pastime is to await the decisions of men.
...
Altman is also up to some of the same visual tricks he used in Jimmy Dean, including the use of windows and mirrors to give us two planes of action at the same time. And he has a wonderfully subtle way of showing us the Harry Dean Stanton character in both the past and the present.
This is Altman's fourth movie in a row based on a play. It comes after Jimmy Dean, Streamers and the extraordinary Secret Honor ... After a career as one of the most free-swinging of all modern movie directors (MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville), it is interesting to see him embracing the discipline of a play script. Having made movies that were all over the map, he now inhabits interiors - of rooms, and of people's minds. With Fool for Love, he 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.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 17 January, 2022 | Now: 23 August, 2022