A Boeing 737 bound for Miami, takes off from Washington and promptly crashes into Chesapeake Bay killing all on board. Kay Chandler, a republican congresswoman finds out her husband was on the plane. Sgt. Van Den Broeck, a policeman who's name is so foreign his colleagues call him 'Dutch', discovers his wife Peyton died sitting next to Mr. Chandler, travelling as his wife. The grief of losing his beautiful, loving wife is combined with the dent to his ego from being made a cuckold, posthumously.
Obsessed with finding out what drove his wife to infidelity, he tracks down the congresswoman, and seduces her. But their affair is disturbed by the jealous memory of the dead lovers, of the lie that all four had been living before the crash. The byline reads: "In a perfect world they never would have met." In a perfect world filmmakers would think twice before embarking on adaptations of bad 80s novels, especially when they lack irony. This adaptation has the emotional realism and grittiness common to the NY film scene, but it is weighed down by too much plot, too many chapters and too much character development. In other words, too many pages of turgid copy churned out by some bestselling hack, which has to be condensed into 131 minutes. The result is an acceleration of narrative events that makes the relationship between Dutch and Kay improbably intense and unstable.
The ground covered by the film means its 131 minutes felt like three hours to the audience, who began laughing at all the wrong things, even groaning in disbelief as the chapters rolled on. But many of them were there because they'd been given free passes, and were seeking entertainment, not an extended exploration of a grief-stricken relationship. The film has some interesting elements, such as the class conflict between Kay, who got elected to Congress because her dad was famous, and Dutch, the paranoid internal affairs policeman who can't believe his wife got bored and fell for a toff who paid for regular first class trips to their Miami lovenest. There is an unusually raw, honest quality to the script, which has some tense exchanges full of wit and wounding unsophistication, but which is also padded out with inane smalltalk. The film relies too heavily on words to entertain its audience, and the only available subplot is Dutch's run-in with a corrupt cop, which proves so distractingly stupid and violent it cripples the entire movie, combining the high concept of the cop drama and airplane disaster, with the interior drama of two confused lovers. There was a palpable draining of interest from the cinema after Dutch and Kay's repressed sexuality erupts in a violent grope-session in the airport carpark. It seems letting a middle-aged couple engage in teenage sex is taking cinema one base too far for Australia's multiplex audiences. From then on, the audience's primary interest seemed to be "What time is it?"
Random Hearts suffers for its complex 'adult' concept - it fails to generate the appropriate audience expectations. It strives for a truthfulness that endangers its place on the romantic comedy shelf, and it attempts an intrusive action-based subplot that confuses the audience by stripping the film of any romance it had. Whilst it makes some bold political and moral statements, overall the film is a weak adaptation that lacks emotional integrity and popular characters. Pollack has honourable intentions, but the best he can do is go down swinging. His movie will translate better on the smallscreen when viewers can walk away from the parts they don't like to make some coffee, relieve themselves, even engage in some nooky themselves, before coming back to catch up with the plot. It's a mixed-up movie about a mixed-up world that should have been serialised and syndicated for the entertainment of bored housewives; not developed into a serious screenplay with multiplexes in mind.
eugene chew
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