Fool for Love (1985, Robert Altman)
Added 2025-11-29 20:55:48 +0000 UTC50/100
One of the long-forgotten indie films I “reviewed” (in 100-word capsules) for Entertainment Weekly back in the late ’90s bore the cringeworthy title I Love You, Don’t Touch Me! And that’s more or less the dynamic here, exemplified by the way that May is introduced hiding from Eddie in the bathroom, terrified, but also primping herself for him in the mirror. She castigates him one moment and throws her arms around his legs like a frightened child seconds later; she instigates a tender kiss and follows up with a knee to the balls. Seems maybe a bit less programmatic after the twist-of-sorts emerges—all that push-pull is rooted in something genuinely fraught—but I’ve never much cottoned to Shepherd as a playwright, as he tends to favor raw emotional volatility for its own sake. Indeed, I’d likely hate Fool for Love on the stage, and was enormously grateful for Altman’s cinematic navigation of quintessentially theatrical space (after giving us an opening bird’s-eye view of the entire rinky-dink set). During one stretch, shots of Shepherd and Basinger engaged in verbal combat (she gives by far the stronger performance, ironically, though Shepherd reportedly didn’t want to play Eddie; easy to imagine young Ed Harris in the role) parry with amused reaction shots of Harry Dean Stanton as the first overly symbolic then bluntly literal Old Man and indifferent non-reaction shots of the first overly symbolic then bluntly literal Little Girl on the swingset, and it’s so expertly composed and fluidly edited (by Steve Dunn and Luce Grunenwaldt—neither of whom has much of an editorial résumé otherwise, curiously) that the rote recriminations start to feel almost poetic. Certainly this works better as a movie than would, say, The Tooth of Crime or Suicide in B♭, probably about as well as True West might. It fundamentally belongs to another medium, though, and Altman can do only so much to disguise that.
