Fool for Love

Two (or three?) intertwined stories superimposed on eachother. Intrguing challenge to sort them out. Extremely well portrayed anguish by Shepard and Basinger. A fun mystery to try to solve.

Fool for Love got its start as a play written by American Sam Shepard as part of his Family Trilogy, which is really five plays. The others are Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West and A Lie of the Mind. Originally, Kathy Bates and Ed Harris were the May and Eddie, who are played in this film by Shepherd and Kim Basinger. This is yet another bid for artistic importance for Cannon, who not only got a screenplay and lead role out of Shepard, but Robert Altman as director. Set in Shepard's beloved American Southwest and expanding the play's smaller cast and setting with more characters and an entire motel complex - the crew used the other rooms for production - we discover May, who is hiding out in said hotel when her old flame Eddie shows up. They've been through make-up and break-up more times than we can probably count and she refuses him at every turn, claiming to have moved on with Martin (Randy Quaid). Meanwhile, the Old Man (Harry Dean Stanton) acts as the story's Greek chorus, telling each of the main characters the information they desire. It turns out that he had two families in one town, which led to our leads being siblings without knowing it. After becoming lovers, Eddie's mother shot herself. Eddie has started to become his father, sleeping around without considering the emotions that are destroyed in his wake, such as The Countess (Deborah McNaughton), a revolving carrying love who keeps coming back to enact her revenge. Cannon somehow released this film the same year as Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, Rappin' and American Ninja, which speaks to the sheer volume - and all over the place insanity - of what the studio released. Not many other studios released movies meant for Cannes as it also unleashed films born for the drive-in.

The film seems to beg for a less literally interpreted comment than those posted here (Where I looked hoping to find someone who could explain the darn thing). Usually when people methodically destroy a motel, or start SHOOTING GUNS, the manager comes out and asks them to stop. For some reason that never happens in this movie. Hmm. It seemed to me that The Old Man and the Old Trailer in the Old Junkyard are the only real things in the story, and The Old Motel with its' crackling neon lights, complete lack of window coverings, and grotesquely stained mattresses a symbolic tableau for his daily reliving of past events in his life and possible present day scenarios. Ghosts from the past appear and wander hazily around the courtyard, even interacting with each other while the old man looks on and listens with varying degrees of emotion, amusement and curiosity, interrupted periodically by his desire for alcohol which plays a large part in the imagined world he inhabits - a world where he is "married to Barbara Mandrel". The characters suddenly depart as the whole scene bursts into allegorical flames, and the Old Man retreats defeated again to his Old Trailer amid the conflagration. Presumably the nightmare will be repeated on the morrow, like so many Twilight Zone episodes which this movie so closely resembles except with better dialog. CB

I came to Fool for Love, and am looking at what I just saw, from a position that won't be like some of you trading this: a few years ago, I saw an off-off Broadway production of Shepard's firestorm of sexual comedy and anguish, and I had no exposure to what it was before. I was awestruck by how much Shepard's play packed in one room, which is in the motel (the father "spirit" appears as a figure by the stairs), even featuring at one point some explicit nudity (a monologue that May delivers to herself, which one can barely hear in the film version as Shepard is outside looking in, is stark naked and it makes for an extremely vulnerable position to be in), and is a work that is darkly funny, intense, but the overall feeling is heartache and loss. It feels so suited for the stage, all of those monologues about a past gone included. Altman and Shepard as screenwriter open up the production, but it doesn't add to what was already there on the stage. On the contrary, this is a case where Altman shows what characters are describing from their pasts. At first, this works. Kind of. When we realize this seeming derelict at this motel played by Harry Dean Stanton is meant to be May's father (and, gasp, Eddie's, which comes after we had a whole opejing act where they, you know, appear to be ready to rip each others throats), he tells her about a memory of pulling off a road to be surrounded by cows. He describes it in narration, and we see it, and how this is edited and weaved together with Basinger and Stanton largely works dramatically. Where it doesnt is in all of those scenes after, where our two half sibling/estranged lovers tell confused Randy Quaid about their pasts, it's all too much. The images are not filmed or acted well in these flashbacks (except for a shotgun blast that is, um, a great goddamn shotgun beat), and this approach doesn't make these decidedly theatrical monologues any more... Cinematic. The writing of what the actors is saying isnt bad, but the combination just falls flat. Why watch it then? Harry Dean Stanton, Shepard and to an extent Basinger bring it to these characters. Stanton especially couldn't give a bad performance if he tried, but in this case he was already on the hot streak of his career (look up what he did in 1984, how many actors had that great a year in modern American film?) He has a man here who is a Ghost of Non-holiday Past, and one who sees his children a certain way. Will they live up to what he expects? Will he disappoint them even as this theatrical apparition? He is also playing haggard and a bit drunk and aimless, and Goddamn is he a treasure every second on screen. If this is a less successful Altman film, it's not because of him, or for lack of Shepard trying with a role he wrote (though originally not for himself, and I lament that Jessica Lange couldn't play May, ironically because she was pregnant with Shepard's child). Overall, I wouldn't say don't check out Fool for Love, but you can wait if you're just getting into Altman, and it's certainly not the stronger of the two Stanton/Shepard films of the 1980s (Paris, Texas wins by many miles). The main issue comes down to this: this is a filmmaker, via this writer, sort of... Going on auto-pilot. It doesn't feel special outside of what the actors more or less bring.

Sam Shepard's story of obsessive love in a lonely Texas trailer park may have been a fine stage drama, but transferring the play intact from the imaginary backdrop of a theater to an out-of-doors location only makes the stage dialogue sound pretentious and artificial. Good theater doesn't guarantee a good movie, and Robert Altman's attempts to open up the play using flashbacks and fluid camera work do little more than draw attention to its stage origins, with the director's trademark slow zooming and cross-cutting giving an entirely false impression of movement and meaning (dramatic moments, including a childhood secret revealed, are subsequently lost within all the visual calisthenics). The end result is an attractive but empty experience.

May (Kim Basinger) is waiting for her boyfriend (Sam Shepard) in a run-down American motel, when an old flame turns up and threatens to undermine her efforts and drag her back into the life that she was running away from. The situation soon turns complicated. When a film is an expansion on a play, such as this is, you have to be true to the source while also going beyond. Altman succeeds, casting Harry Dean Stanton as a one-man Greek chorus and bringing a fuller vision to the story than could be shown within one room. Roger Ebert said that 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." These are kin words and not without merit.

(WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER) A movie almost designed to make you pause and check your recollection of it - it's confined to an almost empty motel where the huge courtyard resembles a circus ring and the rooms seem like temporary withdrawal points rather than refuges; as the characters become increasingly preoccupied by the past, the present increasingly falls away, until the ultimate incendiary appearance of the Countess in the black Mercedes marks the fusion of reality and fantasy. Whether or not their stories are true, and whether Stanton is truly the father or just a crazy old man stepping into their stories, seems impossible to determine. The theme seems to be how love of an extreme and unconsidered nature messes with stability to the point where reality itself breaks down; where exotic, misplaced fantasy becomes dangerously tangible. The image of the burning motel - a symbol of dislocation beset by destruction - is an appropriately weird ending for this strange but effective, startlingly imaginative, movie.

After reading Fool For Love in a Drama class of mine, I was looking forward to seeing how Sam Shepard's wonderful play would be translated to the screen. Much to my dismay, it was nowhere near as entertaining as the play. The film seemed to drag, the music was inappropriate for the tone of the movie, and all the raw energy of the play seemed to have been sucked out of this film version. It's a shame to see this come out this way even with Shepard's involvement, playing the role of Eddie. Do yourselves a favor...see the play next time it's being performed in your area or simply read the book instead.

source: Fool for Love

Fool for Love