She's So Lovely

The subject is l'amour fou, and the various ways in which it both heals and destroys, with emphasis on the latter. Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn play a young married couple, Eddie and Mo, whose lives are torn apart when Eddie winds up doing a ten-year stretch in an asylum; when he's released, Mo must choose between her former love and her current husband, Joey (John Travolta). So far, so good; trouble is, the story is so painfully contrived that it's impossible to care about her decision. For example, we're told that Mo loves Eddie with every fiber of her being...yet she never once visits him in the asylum after the day of his arrest, even before she meets Joey. Why not? Well, because there's no story otherwise; if she'd behaved in a manner consistent with her feelings for Eddie, she'd never have gotten involved with Joey in the first place. The movie is chockablock with puzzlers like that one, and Nick Cassavetes' slick, purely functional direction of his father's gutter-poetic script--John Cassavetes, you'll recall, having been the grandfather of the independent film movement in the U.S.--doesn't help matters one bit. Not recommended. (M. D'Angelo)