RANDOM HEARTS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Columbia Pictures
Director: Sydney Pollack
Writer: Kurt Luedtke, Novel by Warren Adler, adapted by
Darryl Ponicsan
Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles S.
Dutton, Paul Guilfoyle, Dennis Haysbert, Bonnie Hunt,
Richard Jenkins
Trivia quiz. Two strangers, both married, meet at a train
station and find themselves drawn into a short but poignant
romance. Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto pumps up
the amour. You're on the money if you named David Lean's
1945 "Brief Encounter," a picture that deserved four stars
then but would hardly rate the same good fortune in 1999.
The time is over for this time of languorous movie. Adultery
then was delicious. Today it's shrugged off so much that a
sitting president actually furthered his popularity by engaging
in hanky panky outside his marriage. Trying to capitalize on
the film and literary conventions of a bygone age may
occasionally work, but in "Random Hearts," with its all-star
troupe of lead performers and a superior bunch of supporting
people, it does not.
I was ready to attack Todd McCarthy for what I considered
his pigeonholing of movie audiences, but now I'm not so sure.
McCarthy said of this film in "Variety" that it is "an ideal rainy
day matinee attraction for well-to-do ladies of a certain
age...pic's sobriety and deliberate pace, combined with an
utter lack of allure for anyone under about 40, spells a short
theatrical visit." In fact now I'd as soon amend Variety's
opinion. An online critic whose 81-year-old grandmother
recently saw "American Beauty" called it the best movie she'd
seen this decade, making me wonder whether even the old-
timers want to return to the stodgy, torpid, sentimental
fantasies of yesteryear.
Director Sydney Pollack--a fine actor who justifiably injects
himself into the action as a political campaign adviser--does
give the picture a particular spin by throwing together people
of wholly different classes as William Friedkin did in 1971 by
contrasting a down-to-earth cop played by Gene Hackman
with a sophisticated, classy criminal played by Fernando Rey.
Harrison Ford inhabits the role of an obsessive cop, Internal
Affairs Sgt. Dutch Van Den Broeck, who is as consumed by
the search for truth about his wife as he is about tracking
down corrupt policemen. You could never imagine that
sparks would fly between him and the patrician
congresswoman, Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas),
because Chandler not only is a Republican accustomed to
hanging out in upper-middle-class circles but seems only
vaguely preoccupied with learning the truth about her straying
husband.
What brings the two distinct personalities together is a
plane crash that claimed the lives of Dutch's wife Peyton
(Susanna Thompson) and Kay's roving husband, Cullen (an
almost unrecognizable Peter Coyote). Both Kay and Dutch
were unaware that their spouses were traveling together to
continue their fling in Miami, but the discovery that they
occupied seats 3A and 3B on a plane that neither was
supposed to be taking causes diverse reactions by their
surviving partners. While Dutch is determined to find out
every detail of the tryst, Kay is concerned that the news
would hurt her campaign for the next session of Congress.
As in virtually all romantic dramas, parties are kept apart as
long as possible. In this case, the obstacle that keeps Kay
and Dutch strangers is Kay's unwillingness to get close to the
police officer for fear that the public will gossip and because
she is in denial about her husband's affair. When they finally
lunge at each other animalistically in a car, the thrust is far
from believable, nor do the two exhibit much chemistry for the
remainder of this overly long, albeit soberly designed and
produced movie. While Pollack is interested in comparing the
two careers--Kay's campaign and the kitschy ways her
advisers tell her to speak to the public on TV vs. Dutch's
blow-by-blow activities as a cop--the scenes involving Dutch's
trailing of a guy he suspects of murder seem out of keeping
in a film of this nature.
Harrison Ford does convince us of his determination to get
at the truth while Kristin Scott Thomas's is best at showing
her change from uptight, contained patrician to a much softer,
more compassionate human being. We learn at least one
additional detail that we hope we never have to experience:
that when the immediate family are summoned to the airport
to identify their loved ones after a crash, they do not see the
actual bodies but rather a transmission of the head on a TV
screen.
Rated R. Running Time: 133 minutes. (C) 1999
Harvey Karten
Have I seen this movie: No
Will I see It: probably on video
