A challenging flood of feelings between two men and a woman. Eddie (Penn) and Maureen (Wright) are damaged goods, banged-up and buffeted by anger, abuse and rejection. After a psychotic episode ends in an impulsive shooting, Eddie is institutionalised in a mental asylum for ten years. Maureen is found and saved by Joey (Travolta) with whom she builds a normal family life. When Eddie is finally rehabilitated and released a crisis erupts around Joey's expectations of loyalty and a reciprocal, singular love. But such synopsis can only do injustice to a film which strives to express how to live with the fact that we are all essentially selfish and flawed. As Cassavetes Snr. showed us time and time again the only certainty is that such a terrifying state of being as love cannot be quantified or contained within rationale; normality. Damaged individuals need each other to find completeness, to maintain the stability and respect we label 'sanity', but the very seeking of this shelter is to compromise one's self, to become reliant on an unreliable relationship.
Any film which acknowledges this paradox is going to be an interesting glance beyond the sentimental dross of romantic cinema. And so She's So Lovely becomes an autumn fall of confidently flawed occurences, of relationships browned at the roots, rusted by time and hairdressers bleach. Like these metaphors the film collapses under its own weight, fragmenting with Penn's psychotic episodes and demented dialogue. But there is a sincerity and humanity in the insistent loyalty between friends and lovers, in faith which holds true through all the shit and shovel. The unshamed imperfection exhibited by the characters is what makes cinema-cassavetes so bleak and yet so uplifting. She's So Lovely mines a thin seam of personal truths and inspired madness at a time when our fables are becoming so anally 'realistic' they peel at the corners like bad wallpaper. It avoids the rubber nipple of substitute reality for an experience in which the doors of perception are left ajar, the piecemeal craziness left to sit and bleed together without explanation, without continuity, cleanliness or comfort. In a playful mood, the genre-splicing and unstable characterisation is liberatory - emphasising the lived moment - the cigarette being smoked, the Siberian Mist sitting in front of you, your friends arm around your shoulder, licking the bruised lip of your lover as you keep each other warm.
The shadow of Nick's famous father is always there. In the wanderings between bars and cars, the intensely tender and torturous domestic scenes, in the hustling of identity and relationships - the palpable embarassment of not knowing how to act yourself. Penn runs from responsibility to indulge in selfish wetdreams of masculinity that implode in an intoxicated string of pyrrhic victories. But what does it matter if it's not quite the film we feel Cassavetes Snr. would have made? Why criticise Junior for claiming his fathers signature? It is a stir-fry we still crave, whether with oyster sauce or blackbean. There are touching moments, moments without words, moments which tremble and shine exactly because they are not timeless but threatened by inexorable change and the giddy insane wish to imbibe life's cheap wine and exude it from every pore. These are the transcendental, honest moments which make us cry and laugh in the cinema. Because love is hard, life too confusing. Yes, it's madness, but oh so lovely.
eugene chew
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