L'amour poursuite

I was one of the (very) few people who saw this in a movie theatre back in 1990. It was a small audience but everybody enjoyed it and I thought this would be a big hit. For some reason though this faded quickly.

Detective Harry Dobbs (Tom Berenger) takes on a case for Miss Dolan (Anne Archer) to track her boyfriend. What Dobbs doesn't know is that he himself is being tracked by female detective Stella Wyntowski (Elizabeth Perkins). They end up meeting and set out to solve a mystery.

Sounds strange...and it is but it's lots of fun too. The movie is always switching tone from romance to comedy to drama yet it always manages to stay coherent and entertaining. There's director Rudolph's excellent use of color and music and a script which goes whipping every which way.

The cast is up to it. Berenger (purposefully?) adopts a gravelly voice and dresses like he just stepped out of a film noir. He perfectly plays the drama and comedy nicely. Perkins has a very difficult role but she grabs it and runs with it. Only Archer is a disappointment--REALLY overplaying her part. Kate Capshaw and Annette O'Toole shine in minor roles.

This is not a easy movie to categorize or explain--you've just got to watch it. It's sort of like a film noir with comedy, style and color...but it's also a romance with a mystery thrown in...OR a comedy with some dramatic moments. It goes all over the map. Beautifully done and well worth seeing.

This is a love story in the format of a comedy. Or, more appropriately, a love quest story. Like the Detective saga it parodies, the characters are on a search for absolution. But in Rudolph's screwball world where, for instance, every car is at least 20 years old and carries the model name "classic", all of this light madness works toward one, central theme: love is almost impossible to find, but, oh, so much fun to search for.

All the characters that are in long-term relationships are either breaking up, cheating on each other, or completely self-deluded. The other characters are in perpetual seek mode, from Miss Dolan who flirts and swoons wherever her whimsical heart takes her, to Stella, who studies "The Love Manual" and bitterly says things like, "the one who is in love always waits. It's the lover's signature."

Ultimately, this makes for light, entertaining fare. There aren't many bellylaughs, but there is a continual glow and a delightful, endearing glee about the film. Director Rudolph's cinematic sense is so keen that everything seems larger than it is, and more meaningful.

After reading the reviews, I expected "Love at Large" to be an almost surreal experiment in film noir, heavy on atmosphere and short on plot. It's true that the cars and some of the costumes don't seem to fit the early 1990s setting--Doris's green, full-skirted dress, complete with eight inches of yellow crinoline, is straight out of the 1950s, and the Blue Danube nightclub seems to belong to an even earlier era (pre-World War II). The vampy Miss Dolan exudes a 1940s glamour and mystery, the kind of woman who never existed outside of male fantasies. But much of the action (or conversation) takes place in realistic settings--upper-middle-class suburban houses, airplanes, airports, a ranch in what appears to be Wyoming or Montana.

More to the point, the subplot surrounding the bigamist Frederick King/James McGraw (Ted Levine) is not merely "thrown in," as some critics have suggested. Mistaken identity is a classic comedic device going back at least 2000 years to the New Comedy of Menander in ancient Greece, and it still works. It also adds suspense; both Harry (Tom Berenger) and Stella (Elizabeth Perkins) believe McGraw/King to be Miss Dolan's "charming but dangerous" lover, Rick, and are consequently oblivious to whatever danger the real Rick may present.

The Levine subplot also provides opportunities for variations on the love theme so blatantly emphasized by Stella's omnipresent "Love Manual." Compared with most movies of the 1980s and 90s, this one has relatively little sex but lots of kissing. (Ted Levine gets to kiss two women, unusual for him, but this film predates "Silence of the Lambs," in which his powerful performance as Jame Gumb stereotyped him as a murderer.) There are some genuinely tender moments and a lot of surprises, some of them comic and most of them in some way related either to love or mistaken identity.

The casting is excellent. Both Berenger (despite his gravelly voice) and Perkins are likeable and believable, and Levine is marvelous as a man with two lives and two personalities. (No, he's not schizophrenic; he just likes to go out on a limb because, as he tells Stella, "that's where the fruit is").

To say more would be to spoil the film. Find it and watch it. It will be well worth the trouble of hunting it down.

Alan Rudolph's soft-boiled, shaggy-dog detective parody stars Tom Berenger as a dim-witted private eye hired by torch singer Anne Archer to follow her boyfriend. He begins by tailing the wrong man, and soon finds himself pursued (again, by accident) by amateur gumshoe Elizabeth Perkins. The escalating complications lead nowhere in particular, but if quirkiness were a virtue Rudolph would be a saint, and his story takes some interesting detours on its way to a dead end conclusion. All the romantic whimsy and offbeat characters can't hide the brick wall Rudolph hits when trying to define the Meaning of Love, but on a strictly superficial level the film can be enjoyed as an elegant, empty caricature, with odd touches of retro-noir detail (Annette O'Toole, for example, dolled up as a Veronica Lake facsimile). Look for Gary Larson of The Far Side comic fame, playing guitar in the nightclub band.

I saw this film referred to as a comedy, but I hadn't remembered it as such when I first saw it some years ago. I suppose that it is, but it is funny in a wry sort of way, never a laugh out loud way. I don't know where Tom Berenger got that gravelly voice for this movie, but it seems to fit the part okay. Elizabeth Perkins was lovely and good as an angst-filled gal trying to be a private I. It was interesting to see Neil Young in a small acting role. He did OK. It makes me wonder how hard acting really is. Anne Archer was so totally gorgeous, I almost didn't realize how ridiculous her character was. This ended up being a pretty enjoyable film, if you don't go into it with unrealistic expectations. Grade: B