Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dennis Haysbert, Sydney Pollack, Richard Jenkins, Paul Guilfoyle
Director: Sydney Pollack
Producers: Sydney Pollack, Marykay Powell
Screenplay: Kurt Luedtke, based on Darryl Ponicsan's adaptation of Warren Adler's novel
Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot
Music: Dave Grusin
U.S. Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Random Hearts is the latest big-budget disappointment to come out of Hollywood - a meditation on grief and loss that is sabotaged by shallow writing and the desire to inject romance where it is clearly out of place. The director is Sydney Pollack, who was once a card-carrying member of Tinseltown's A-list. His pinnacle of glory came on a March night in 1986, when he captured the Best Director Oscar and his cinematic child, Out of Africa, won Best Picture. Since then, it has been all downhill. Pollack hasn't accomplished much in the last 13 years, and the little he has done has not overwhelmed. The rust of disuse shows, and even the presence of box office heavyweight Harrison Ford can't resurrect his flagging career.
It's easy for me to become angry with a movie like Random Hearts for wasting so much potential. The idea behind the movie is fascinating, and, approached with more thought and care, this could have been a wrenching and memorable experience. But the filmmakers, afraid of isolating or offending viewers, took the expedient route of cheap theatrics and silly melodrama. There's not enough genuine sentiment in this film to fill a thimble. And, on nearly every opportunity when it has a chance to redeem itself and head in a challenging direction, Random Hearts lets its audience down. Even the ending is a cop-out.
Dutch Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford) is a tough Washington D.C. internal affairs cop who thinks he's involved in a happy marriage. Kay Chandler (Kristen Scott Thomas) is a one-term Congresswoman from New Hampshire who is facing a stiff challenge in her bid to be re-elected. Like Dutch, Kay thinks her domestic life is perfect. These shiny preconceptions are shattered when a plane carrying their respective spouses crashes, and they learn that Dutch's wife was having an affair with Kay's husband. The revelation jolts both of them, but, the more they investigate the situation, the closer they become, until they must address their growing passion for one another.
A match between them is far-from-perfect. Dutch, who genuinely loved his wife, is having a harder time coping with her infidelity than with her death. Other than Kay, he can't trust anyone, and his obsession to answer the unanswerable "why?" is driving him to increasingly irrational acts. For her part, Kay is initially cold to Dutch, but, as she warms up, she realizes that if the press learns of their liaison, it might mean the end of her hopes for a second term. And she has a daughter whom she must cushion against learning too many unsavory facts about her philandering father.
Random Hearts is riddled with problems, most of which are rooted in the script. Not having read Warren Adler's novel, I can't say whether these flaws lie in the source material or in Kurt Luedtke's screenplay, but they effectively sink the movie. Random Hearts' examination of grief is perfunctory and unsatisfactory. It's a cinematic contrivance engaged in by a pair of half-realized characters. Only on rare occasions do their reactions seem to have been conceived in an atmosphere of real mourning. And the romance is a huge miscalculation. While it's conceivable that two people placed in this situation would turn to each other for comfort, Pollack's mistake is in attempting to create an aura of eroticism in circumstances that demand something more raw and uncomfortable. The love story is not only intrusive and difficult to swallow, but it's a trifle distasteful. Plus, it's leavened by cheesy dialogue.
Despite the billions of dollars his movies have racked up at the box office, Harrison Ford has rarely been seen as a great actor. He plays Dutch with a reticence that borders on wooden. It's easy to see that he's trying to show a man who bottles up his pain inside, but a look into Ford's cool eyes dispels the illusion. In terms of roles and performance, this is his biggest misjudgment since 1991's Regarding Henry. And, although Kristen Scott Thomas is considerably better, there are moments when her portrayal fails to convince. The heat that is supposed to exist between the loads simply isn't there. Supporting players like Charles Dutton and Bonnie Hunt don't have enough to do to pick up the slack.
While watching Random Hearts, I was reminded of two similar, but infinitely superior, motion pictures. The first is Peter Weir's Fearless, which tells of the ways in which survivors of a plane crash deal with the unreality of life after the ordeal. Even though neither Dutch nor Kay is a victim of the accident, they are survivors of the trauma, if not the experience. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't have the courage to follow them into the dark passageways that claim Weir's characters. The second, closer match is Kieslowski's Blue, about a woman who loses her husband and daughter in an automobile crash. In the aftermath of the accident, she learns that her husband was having an affair, and, in an effort to obtain closure, she seeks out the mistress, who is pregnant. There is more truth in one frame of Blue than in the whole of Random Hearts. The sorrow and emotional agony of the 1993 film are unbearably real and palpable; here, they are feeble echoes and pale shadows.
Even though it runs 130 minutes, Random Hearts is probably the right length for the subject. However, too much wrong material has been included. Time-eating subplots about Dutch's latest case and Kay's re-election bid should have been excised, since neither adds much. (The election material starts out promising, then fizzles.) Meanwhile, Pollack appears to have taken lessons from Martin Brest about how to irritate and bore viewers with endless pauses in conversations. Not since Meet Joe Black have people engaged in verbal exchanges where they take so long to say so little. And, even when they do speak, the words sound rehearsed, like the text from an out-of-date novel. Cut all of this waste, and there would have been at least an hour for a more complete exploration of the relationships between Dutch and his wife, Kay and her husband, and the two mixed couples. That movie might have been worth watching. This one is marginal at best.
© 1999 James Berardinelli