A Love Song for Bobby Long is the feature film debut from Shainee Gabel, who adapts the story from Ronald Everett Capps's novel Off Magazine Street. Like Company (which is being dropped the same day), this picture features both Scarlett Johansson and a 50-year-old guy in what is supposed to be an "awards worthy" performance. The guy here is John Travolta, and his role would be meaty Oscar stuff in the hands of a number of actors, but Travolta just ain't one of them. His turn is valiant, but ultimately transparent. But, that said, he does dance in it, and all of Travolta's legendary comebacks revolve around him having a big dance scene.
Johansson is Purceline Will, the epitome of Florida trailer trash who ditches her days of watching television and eating peanut butter and M&Ms with a spoon when she finds out her estranged mother has died in New Orleans. Because her stupid boyfriend didn't give her the message about mom 's funeral on time, Purcy shows up a day late and discovers she's inherited a portion of the family's dilapidated house, as well as its equally ramshackle inhabitants: Drunk, quote-spouting ex-professor Bobby Long (Travolta, Ladder 49) and his writing protégé, the far-from-sober Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht, The Recruit).
The drunks plan to make Purcy miserable enough to ditch them and the house so they can mix alcohol and pickle juice in private. But Purcy's infectious attitude - which, at some point, has made the giant leap from couch potato to aspiring x-ray technician - wins over as she gets the Ben Sanderson wannabes to give up the sauce and turn their lives around. Oh, and did I mention that Purcy never knew her dad, and that the curmudgeon we call Bobby never really knew his kids? Those two will be, literally, the only two people in the theatre who can't see the end of this film coming from a mile away.
On the plus side, Song is shot well and looks pretty (it's photographed by ex-Soderbergh lenser Elliot Davis), and it gives Johansson a chance to show a little bit of range. Not much, but way more than Company or The Perfect Score. I thought Macht was effective in a subtler, better way than Travolta. And I wished that Song had the touch of David Gordon Green, and that Gabel didn't change Purcy's mom from a morbidly obese mental patient to an attractive, moderately successful lounge singer.
By : Jon Popick
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 2
As lazy as a summer day along a brackish Louisiana backwater, Shainee Gabel's "A Love Story for Bobby Long" is a slow moving (the diplomatic among us might say "deliberately paced") affair, a film with no explosions, no gunfire, no police sirens, just the soulful creaking of a rocking chair on a front stoop or the ticking of a grandfather clock or the comforting rasp of a paper wasp, awash with the smell of cheap tobacco and cheaper whisky as a former English professor and his teaching assistant hole up in an unpainted shanty on the edge of town, a place where people come and go but nobody stays. Until Purslane Hominy that is. She stays. Momma has died and Purslane has come for her share of the spoils, the bacon, the fight to call this place her own. Scarlett Johansson plays Pursy with grace, gusto, and levelheaded-ness. John Travolta is Bobby Long, white-haired and secretive, a drunken disaster--it's another character-defining turn from Travolta. His. And Gabriel Macht ("The Recruit") is the blocked writer Lawson Pines, a match for no man's man, a more than casual imbiber too by all accounts, in love with the local barkeep ("Thirteen"'s Deborah Kara Unger) yet unwilling to keep his options closed. This New Orleans tributary, written by the director based on Reginald Everett Capps's lazy, slow-moving novel, delights as often as it dulls the senses. That is to say it's phonetically and systematically sound, finely and engagingly acted by Travolta, Johansson, and Macht and nicely attuned by Philadelphia-born Ms. Gabel, yet it seems to be missing a soul, an inner sanctum, in short a very raison d‚être.
By : David N. Butterworth (http://members.dca.net/dnb)
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