Loco amor

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.

Robert Altman directed this adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay and stars as a drifter who drives his pickup truck, complete with horse and trailer, to a small hotel in New Mexico. It seems he has a tempestuous romantic history with the hotel's proprietor (Kim Basinger), and the audience fills in the blanks as the film progresses, taking a distinctly sharp turn in the last third. Also with Randy Quaid and Harry Dean Stanton. The first half of the film nearly lost me for good, with not a lot happening and the performances pitched to the back row. But things get better during the home stretch, even if bits do strain credulity. From the Cannon Group, stepping outside of their usual budget action flicks.

The 80's were not very kind to Altman. After the disappointment of Popeye, both artistically and at the box office, he was banished from Hollywood. Altman burnt too many bridges on the Popeye shoot and so ended up at the University of Michigan teaching his films and staging plays, among other things. His filmography during this time tended towards smaller stories, often derived from stage plays. He had limited artistic success and almost no commercial success during this time. Fool for Love is among his most successful works from this time period, both critical and commercially but it is one of the Altman's most inaccessible films.

This film is a bizarre marriage of ponderous melodrama and the light detached bemused tone that is iconic Altman. Shepard's script, from his play, tells a battle of the sexes doomed romance story with a dash of family squabble that reminds me of a striped down version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? As written the story is a series of preposterous reveals and twists that upon final analysis add up to very little. It is all smoke and mirrors. The story is engaging because it is utterly weird. It has a roughness to it that shows promise, but Shepard does not know what to do with these characters in the end.

Fortunately, Altman leans into the script's limited setting. The motel on the edge of society coupled with the Western motifs present really allows Altman to bring out the absurdity present in the script. The film is dryly funny; it really undermines the Western image of masculinity. But the direction doesn't seem to link up to the script which also makes the film not add up too much. (And the photography is quite lovely to look at)

A must for Altman fans but others would be advised to check out other Altman films first.

Interesting, laid back version of the Shepherd play. On stage, with Ed Harris in the lead, it was all frenetic energy and danger. Here the piece is more moody and dreamlike. At times that works tremendously well, and it is visually beautiful. The play has been opened up in a way that feels natural and not forced. And the use of narration is very interesting and productively unsettling, since the memories we see do not quite match the words we hear.

On the other hand, the slower pace makes the writing feel more melodramatic and almost old- fashioned in its twists. And Shepherd is nowhere near as interesting as Harris was on stage. We never feel that he is really dangerous. He comes off more as a love-struck kid than obsessed man. And it ends with a whimper, not a kick. Still, there are plenty of less interesting theater to film adaptations out there.

Fool for Love (1985) was directed by Robert Altman. It's based on a Sam Shepard play. Sam Shepard did the screenplay. Sam Shepard also stars as Eddie, a rodeo rider who drives up to an end-of-nowhere motel, and starts causing trouble within the first 60 seconds.

I'm amazed that this movie is so bad. Shepard is a good actor, and so are the other leads: Kim Basinger as May, and Harry Dean Stanton as "Old Man." Randy Quaid has the unenviable supporting role as a "normal" guy who arrives at the motel to take May out on a date, and ends up enmeshed in the bizarre triangle.

It's hard to believe that a brilliant director, working with such skilled actors, could end up with a movie this bad. Nothing works, except that Eddie is a menacing presence throughout. It's obvious from the first minutes of the movie that bad things are going to happen, and they do throughout the film.

It's also obvious that Altman needed to open up the play so that he could turn it into a movie, and he did. He didn't do it all that well, but he did it.

It's clear that people didn't like the film. At the time I'm writing this review, the IMDb rating is a horrific 5.9. (I actually helped improve the rating when I gave the film a 6. That must be a first.)

The movie will work well enough on DVD, which is how I saw it. It would probably work better on the large screen, because you'd get even more of a sense of the total isolation of the motel location. However, my advice is to pick another movie. Fool for Love just isn't worth the time spent watching it.