08/29/97
MOVIE REVIEW: She's So Lovely
A crazy, mixed-up look at doomed love

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

** (out of five)
Starring Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta, Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, Gena Rowlands. A Miramax Films release written by John Cassavetes, directed by Nick Cassavetes. Rated R, contains violence, profanity, sexual situations. Running time: 96 minutes.

The misnamed She's So Lovely, which sounds like the title of some cute-as-a-button fluff, is a hard-edged in-the-gutter fantasy-romance that has more to do with the toughness of Leaving Las Vegas than it does with Doris Day.

The boozing, chain-smoking skid-row couple at the film's heart, played by real-life marrieds Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn, get broken up when Eddie shoots a man and is sent to a mental institution for 10 years.

A decade later Eddie's back on the streets looking for Maureen. She, thinking he'd never get out of the hospital, has divorced him and is now married to a successful contractor named Joey (John Travolta) and living with him and their three girls in a fancy suburban house. But -- surprise! surprise! -- Eddie and Maureen are still crazy nuts in love with each other.

This wacky story, written by the late John Cassavetes, finally has been brought to the screen as a homage by his son, Nick, who plays up its offbeat zaniness and its larger-than-life characters without ever once making them real or -- even deadlier to the story -- sympathetic. They are victims of their own devices.

Eddie and Maureen are colorful losers. Even after she has been whisked away, like Cinderella, to Joey's magical castle in the suburbs, when Eddie comes back into her life it's like the 10 years she spent with her new and loving husband never happened. And as far as what the audience can see, it didn't. A title card reads "10 years later" as the film leaps ahead.

For his part, Penn's mercurial Eddie, in one of the year's daffiest and most engrossing performances, believes for a long time that he has been incarcerated for a mere three months, because that's what he was told his treatments might take when he first entered the hospital. Only Eddie can't figure out why his hair has grown so long in three months.

Yet even Joey, the voice of reason in a movie that could be taking place in some other galaxy for all the reality one finds in it, is not a very likeable character -- a father who swears viciously in front of his little daughters and pulls out a gun when he's pushed to the limit.

Wright Penn matches Penn's Eddie in the gutsiness department -- smoking and drinking to excess when she knows she's pregnant with his child, getting raped and beaten up and falling down drunk in the gutter in the rain. But you wonder how this sad creature ever became the supreme object of desire of one man, let alone the script's two.

When we revisit her 10 years after she divorced Eddie, she's just as sullen and single-minded as before. Her tacky peroxided hairdo has been replaced by an even more unflattering mousey brown one. Joey wonders how she could have lived with him, loved with him, had two children by him over that time and still feels nothing -- and so do we. "I love you," Maureen tells Joey, "but I love him more.

Despite powerhouse performances and standout cameos by Harry Dean Stanton as a hard-drinking but soft-hearted boozer and Gena Rowlands (widow of John Cassavetes), it's the film's nagging questions that will probably turn off most people to She's So Lovely. There's something more than a little stale about the plot, especially Wright Penn's one-man woman "victim" character. The script was originally written by Cassavetes nearly 20 years ago and revamped by him for Penn more than a decade ago, although it took this long to get to the screen.

Certainly the first half of She's So Lovely, which is the set-up for what follows, will test audience good will. The characters keep doing maddeningly stupid things or things that don't make a lot of sense in the real world. We're supposed to love Eddie because, although he disappears on Maureen for long stretches and drinks to excess in barrooms where much of the film is set, deep down he loves her. Aww.

But he's also more than a little crazy and scary. Easy to rile, he has a hair-trigger temper and strikes out in anger without thinking about the consequences. That's why Maureen is so nervous about telling Eddie who raped her. She knows he'd kill the guy.

Penn does ballet spins around Eddie -- easygoing and sweet one second, ready for blood the next. No wonder Penn won the Cannes Film Festival jury's best actor award last May. This cocky smart aleck never has money but knows how to schmooze his way into getting what he wants, and Penn makes us see how Eddie charms his way through life. He flatters his way past the ticket seller at a dance hall. Later, he and Maureen turn up slightly loaded in the middle of the night to wake friends who own a restaurant and convince them to open up for an Italian feast. It's cute but incredible.

Unfortunately, despite their great love, it's Maureen who calls in the guys from the institution to take Eddie away. She fears the problems his temper may cause even though she says, in a Brooklyn accent that seems out of place in downtown Los Angeles where the film was mostly shot, that "I love the guy."

For his part, Eddie says to the puffy-lipped Maureen that "We were meant for each other. We're all banged up." These two have more love than brains.

Joey has brains but is driven to using brawn to try to rescue a lose-lose situation for him. Travolta's funny, foul-mouthed, desperate, exasperated performance in the film's final third is lively and punchy. Clearly he has logic on his side. But in a movie that's sheer fantasy, logic plays only a minor role.