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Love
Field
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In Australia, Love Field sat on the shelf unsighted for almost two years. It isn't very long into watching it before that old, sinking feeling tells you why. Here is a film that went straight to hell on the road of good intentions. It tells the story of a dizzy, peroxide blonde housewife (Michelle Pfeiffer) devastated by the death of JFK, who leaves her husband and hooks up on the road with a handsome but enigmatic black gentleman (Dennis Haysbert) and his young daughter. The film has high and noble intentions: to show how seismic changes in American history and politics in the '60s played themselves out in the private, emotional lives of individuals. But it is a flat, pious drama, full of too-neat ironies, stiff attempts at humour, and an awfully clichéd musical score. Jonathan Kaplan (Over the Edge, 1979) is usually a fine director even with unpromising material, but he is thoroughly defeated by the liberal platitudes of this project – not to mention its horribly patronising view of 'ordinary' people. From a vantage point fifteen years on, it is striking to what extent this film prophesises the TV series American Dreams. MORE Kaplan: Brokedown Palace, Heart Like a Wheel, Immediate Family, Unlawful Entry, White Line Fever, Fallen Angels, Project X © Adrian Martin December 1993 |
