Release Date: October 8, 1999
Starring: Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dennis Haysbert, Sydney Pollack, Richard Jenkins, Paul Guilfoyle, Peter Coyote
Directed by: Sydney Pollack
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R (brief violence, sexuality, language)
Imagine standing on thin ice, watching as the cracks slowly begin to spider-web away from you. Any minute now, the tensile strength of the ice will give way and you'll fall through; but if you try to run off the ice, you'll end up in the same predicament. It's a lose-lose situation, much like the star power set up for failure under the direction of The Firm and Out of Africa director Sydney Pollack in Random Hearts. The typically reliable charm of middle-aged leads Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas can't make longish romantic melodrama any more exciting than it was intended to be, explicitly iterating that old-fashioned romance is out and diet cola-esque love comedies are in.
Kristin Scott Thomas, star of 1998's The Horse Whisperer, ends up involved in the same onerous antics of love affairs, this time in the metropolitan setting of our nation's capitol. As New Hampshire Congresswoman Kay Chandler, she essays the part of a headstrong woman with a newly shaken confidence in life when she learns that her lawyer husband has died in a plane crash.
This information is brought to her attention by DC Police Internal Affairs Sgt. Dutch Van Den Broeck (Ford), who sleuths his way to the discovery that his wife and Chandler's husband were having an affair. Both spouses made claims of having business in Miami as an alibi for their romantic getaway, but the plane crash produces holes in the story that Dutch begins to investigate. He's paid to notice things, and when his late wife's employers at Saks Fifth Avenue have no record of her business trip, it's a clue he can't ignore.
Struggling through the mental anguish in a rather boring performance, Ford's Van Den Broeck confronts Representative Chandler with this information. But she doesn't want to hear it, quite the opposite of Dutch's inquisitive attitude. "You want to know why when there is no why," she insists to him at one point, illustrating the differences in their thinking. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the tragedy, the two grief-stricken victims begin their own love affair, searching for closure that may never come.
During this long-winded attempt at returning to the good old days of boy-meets-girl romance, director Pollack shows an eye for the parallel structure of his narrative. Quite often he intermixes scenes of Chandler and Van Den Broeck in the same actions, as when they kiss their spouses good-bye for the last time or bury them after the plane crash. He also emphasizes the dual nature of the film through the character of Dutch: on one side Van Den Broeck is working on a sticky internal affairs case; on the other he's investigating the how's and why's of his late wife's infidelity.
But audiences will find that this is a lot of rich footage strung together with little excuse. The central love story plot is anything but -- it takes nearly two-thirds of the film's running time to get Kay and Dutch together, and by then the novelty of Pollack's eye for nuance has simply become wearisome. Like Kristin Scott Thomas' last film, The Horse Whisperer, this is a movie in which much is spoken and little is said.
Inasmuch as that is true, it's a certainty that Random Hearts could've been shortened by a half-hour to forty-five minutes without losing a shred of its solidity. The only problem is that it's difficult to decide which segment to cut out, because everything is laboriously poignant. A case could be made that the brevity of audience attention spans rather than the length of Pollack's film is the downfall of the product. Nevertheless, it's hard to appreciate high cinema in so tedious an incarnation.
It's doubtful that the rambling Random Hearts will find a place as a viewer favorite, for even though it has the strength of solid performances from Ford and Scott Thomas, it bears the distinction of an unexciting execution. At times director Pollack seems to realize this, taking advantage of Dutch's occupation to include bits and pieces of police work to energize things. But, in the end, this movie would not have suffered from a shot or two of caffeine and a good, long stay in the editing room.
all contents © 1999 Craig Roush