Forever Mine

I saw this film at the Telluride Film Festival. People were walking out, but I stuck it out. Wish I hadn't. Shlocky story, contrived and boring characters. The only thing mildly interesting was to see the revenge plot play out and that was a disapointment as well. Pass on this one.

We all know that Paul Schrader is a sober son of the Dutch

Reformation Church. Still, I'd love to have a taste of the

crack he was smoking when he wrote this flaming lulu, a

painfully sincere and heartfelt tribute to undying love that

suggests Stanley Kubrick singing "Love Theme from Mahogany" a cappella.

Apparently an attempt to capture the spirit of Scott Spencer's novel "Endless Love" (so famously lost by Franco Zeffirelli), FOREVER MINE posits Joseph Fiennes

(he of the smoldering, gotta-have-you eyebrows) as a Miami cabana boy who messes with the wrong guy's wife--Gretchen Mol as the secretarial cutie who married

gnarly Mr. Big (Ray Liotta). Before you can say AGAINST

ALL ODDS, Mr. Big is coming down hard on Cabana Boy--only, in Schrader's world, this means more mutilations, burials alive, disguises, funny accents, and

villainous moustache-twirlings than in the entirety of

Shakespeare's CYMBELINE.

Schrader claimed he wanted to go back to the nineteenth

century. And indeed, the over-the-top melodrama suggests

a desperate attempt to flee fin-de-siecle irony. But it's

always a train wreck when cerebral directors try to let go of

their book-learning and Open Themselves to Feeling. FOREVER MINE suggests a cable-movie version of Robert Bresson's two wackadoody salutes to cute young boys, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER and THE DEVIL PROBABLY; Fiennes greets Mol in a seedy motel room on which he has spray painted the words, "GIVE ALL TO LOVE." (That was the tagline of the movie's abortive theatrical run.) Like Kubrick in EYES WIDE SHUT, Schrader

tries to peel off his layers of coldness and ratiocination--but

any movie that opens with a quote from Walter Pater suggests that the filmmaker is more suited to analyzing

melodrama than expressing it.

For all the tropical gloss put on it by the great cinematographer John Bailey, FOREVER MINE has a giggle-inducing quality that's unique even to bad Schrader

movies. (In one scene, Fiennes leaves an ambivalent Mol

in her hotel room. As he walks away, he bumps his head

into a palm frond, stops, and seems to look back at the

palm frond. Fade to black. Does Schrader equate Douglas

Sirk with Ed Wood?) Now that he's expressed his inner lovesick sap, maybe Schrader can go back to who he really

is--a cold, alienated, God-haunted, overeducated freak

from Michigan who's also the greatest living writer of

movies.

"Forever Mine" is not a good film. The script is highly formulaic and dull, the characters are one-dimensional, there are several holes in the plot, and the ending manages to be both cliched and unsatisfying. It is worth watching only for two nude scenes from the wonderful and lovely Gretchen Mol, who hasn't done much of that at all. If you're a fan of hers, you won't be disappointed here.

Watching this cheese, I was reminded of "Strange Days", where Joseph Fiennes' brother Ralph was locked inside a picture almost as bad as this one. The Fiennes brothers certainly can act, and Joseph does his best here to keep the wooden lines fresh. Gretchen Mol lights up the screen no matter what she's in, but one can only wonder why these very good actors are stuck in such a bad movie. Weren't there any more intelligent scripts around to do than this one? Ray Liotta is strictly on auto-pilot for this film.

The story here is simple - jealousy, adultery, revenge, etc. Movies like this put some basic elements together, and then count on the magnetism of the stars to enlist the audience's attention. But if the characters have nothing but stupid lines to say, how can we care about them? 4/10, and only Mol's scenes make me go that high.

I watched this film at the Torun camerimage festival in Poland.The whole audience was in stitches, which would have been fine except this was supposed to be a romance. How a renowned scriptwriter like Paul Schrader managed to come up with such bunkum is unfathomable! Watching it reminded me of the scene in Singing in the Rain, where the audience is in uproar at the unsynchronised sound. The whole experience was surreal! I promise you, you won't see a bigger turkey than this all year - Ed Wood would have been proud of it!

Forever Mine is not a good movie. Many other reviewers on this site have pointed out why.

But let's give credit where credit is due.

Cinematographer John Bailey did a magnificent, Oscar-worthy job on this film! It looks great. The first half takes place in Miami in 1973. I lived in Miami in the early 70's, and this film caught the feel of it so beautifully that I could smell the Cafe Cubano, hear the Jai-Alai cheers, and feel the sea breezes. The pastels, the faded glory of the hotels, the neon lights, the whole palette.

John Bailey can't be blamed for Forever Mine's script, or its legal problems, but the result of those problems must have been depressing for him because nobody ever saw Bailey's work projected on the big screen after the film festivals. That's really a shame. This film was meant to be projected in a 2.35 aspect ratio, and that simply can't be appreciated anywhere except a big screen. Of course, Bailey didn't know it would go straight-to-cable-and-DVD when he filmed it in that super widescreen ratio.

By the way, this work was no isolated fluke for Mr. Bailey, as you might guess. He has never won an Oscar, or even a nomination, but he's shot some very fine films in his career. He probably should have been nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Big Chill, and he has shot some terrific offbeat stuff, like Cat People and Groundhog Day.

So, a strong "well done" for Mr Bailey, for work that few people will ever see.