Director: Nick Cassavetes
Written by: John Cassavetes
Cinematographer: Thierry Arbogast
Sean Penn - Eddie Quinn
Robin Wright Penn - Maureen Murphy Quinn
John Travolta- Joey |
She's So Lovely? I guess some people are attracted by binge drinking, chain smoking women who are passionate about bad, mad men.
"She's So Lovely" comes to the screen with impressive credentials. John Cassavetes, noted for his gritty parables of lost love, wrote the story in the late 1970s as a vehicle for himself and his wife Gina Rowlands. Just before his death in 1989 he re-wrote the script for Sean Penn, the quintessential bad boy of current film. Penn stars in the film with his real life wife Robin Wright Penn. The director is Nick Cassavetes son of John. It's called keeping it in the family!
Eddie Quinn (Penn) is a hard drinking no-hoper, given to wild bouts of violence. His wife Maureen is as unstable as he. Their life is a roller coaster of emotion moving between passionate love-making to wild drinking binges in dingy bars. When high on alcohol Eddie is liable to start shooting. When he discovers that his wife has been bashed and raped by their neighbour, out comes the gun and Eddie shoots his way into a mental institution.
Instead of the promised three months, ten years pass. Maureen has married up in the world and is living in comfort with fast talking developer, Joey (John Travolta) and her three children. Eddie is about to be released. Will their passion be rekindled? Who will win the babe?
Well this viewer simply didn't care. Penn certainly gives a strong performance as a passionate man teetering dangerously on the brink of madness, but Wright Penn's character is weak and uncertain, hardly a credible object of strong passion.
This is a story of destructive obsession rather than of love. An obsession that destroys everyone it touches, and "she" is anything but lovely.
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