Love Field

The actors are better than the story.

Set against the Kennedy assassination, the plot here deals with a rather simple-minded woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) from Dallas who is obsessed with the Kennedy family and especially Jackie. She's also unhappily married to a brutish guy (Brian Kerwin). She runs away from home and boards a bus to Washington to attend the Kennedy funeral.

Aboard the bus she chats with a black man (Dennis Haysbert) who is traveling with his small and oddly silent daughter. She never shuts up. He reluctantly responds to her endless chatter. The bus lumbers through racist America until there is an accident and the local cops start nosing around trying to get the details.

Right off they're suspicious of Haysbert and why he seems to be traveling with a white woman. To make natters worse, the ninny makes a phone calls when she discovers bruises on the child. That sets in motion a series of events with the travelers on the run from the cops.

While the man and woman learn things about themselves, their eyes are also opened to the realities of the American South in that pre-Civil Rights era.

The most annoying thing here, aside from the plot holes and implausibility of the story is the Pfeiffer character. If she has a Jackie obsession, why does she have platinum blonde hair a la Marilyn Monroe? She is a beautician after all. Seems like she'd had dyed her hair darker, not lighter.

Pfeiffer and Haysbert are good. Louise Latham is also good as the rural mother who takes them in while they are on the lam.

I love this movie. Michelle is so great in it. I wish they could have elaborated more on the relationship between Lurene and Mr. Cater near the end of the movie. It kinda leaves you hanging. Otherwise, it was a great movie.

Michelle Pfeiffer's Oscar nominated performance anchors 1992's LOVE FIELD, a surprisingly moving marriage between character study and buddy movie that draws the viewer in with the draw of vividly human characters involved in a somewhat over the top story that manages to hold our attention due to the extreme likability of the two main characters. Pfeiffer plays a Dallas beautician named Lurene in 1963, who is so devastated by the assassination of JFK that she decides, against her husband's wishes, to travel to Washington DC to attend JFK's funeral and, en route, befriends a black man (Dennis Haysbert)traveling with his daughter, and the relationship that develops between the two when circumstances find the three of them on the run together. The story taken on an unexpected richness because these two people are part of the racially turbulent 1960's and because of the beautifully evocative performances from the stars. Pfeiifer, in particular, gives us a sad and slightly pathetic creature, wearing a platinum blonde Mariyln Monroe wig that seems to represent her desire to be someone else, her Lurlene is slightly ditzy, bored,lonely, but with a heart as big as all outdoors and the quiet dignity that Haysbert brings to his character in this tense situation is on target. Brian Kerwin also scores in the most significant role of his career as Lurene's abusive brute of a husband, but it is the performances and chemistry of the two stars that make this journey a memorable one.

I loved this movie! Pfieffer's child-like naiveté is beautifully balanced with the mature competence of Dennis Haysbert's character. This is the first time I'd ever seen Haysbert and I've been a fan ever since. Something about that man...the viewer understands why she falls for him. I ached for both characters. The movie stirs up some feelings about injustice, racism, oppressed women -- a memory of those times but not nostalgia for them. The ending soothes and satisfies all that was stirred up. Love Fields uses only a few people and not a lot of scenery to tell its story, but its quite enough. It is, essentially, a love story -- unexpected, but so right. The period (mid-60's)is well-established and well-maintained. See this movie!

An obsessed beautician heads for DC when JFK is assassinated. Along the way, she loses her husband, but finds something within herself she never knew was there; courage and fortitude.

Fraught with dangers only our parents remember, this film shows you what the US was like back in the late 50's, early 60's. It also teaches us that we haven't changed that much, as a nation, in the last 50 years.

Michelle Pfeiffer, Dennis Haysbert, and Stephanie McFadden endear with their honesty in this gripping drama by Jonathan Kaplan (Project X, the Firm, and Bad Girls). The performances are heartening and lends us hope that things genuinely CAN improve in the future. Not necessarily that they will, but that it is possible, should we apply our hearts to the problem.

This is a great film, though you have to be in the right mood for it.

It rates an 8.2/10 from...

the Fiend :.