Word: fooled
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...Fool For Love isn't a great film, it's certainly a wonderful one. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese's unsung After Hours, no finer American film was released in the course of the 1985 year...
...FOOL FOR LOVE falters only in its pacing, which is perhaps too slow in starting, too quick in its resolution. The first half hour of the film has a staggered, disjointed rhythm to it, and the climax is perhaps too abrupt and suddenly tragic. Though Shepard's plays are notorious for their refusal to resolve themselves, what distinguishes him as our most audacious playwright translates less gracefully on the screen...
Altman does an equally amazing job of translating Shepard's fascination with the role of myth. In Fool For Love, and other Shepard dramas, characters provide conflicting versions of the past, leaving the audience to sift through an ash-heap of half-truths and seeming contradictions. Altman, ingeniously, lets the camera paint the past, while the characters consciously or unconsciously falsify it. In one scene, May describes her mother holding her hand so hard she fears her bones might crack. The camera shows mother and daughter walking at a distance. Eddie describes the night he and his father stroll silently...
...Fool For Love is an important film for a number of reasons. It establishes Shepard as one of our finest screen-writers, and confirms the staying power of Altman, who has always been one of our most solid directors. Shepard's collaboration with Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas, and now his work with Altman, hints at a possible Shepard film canon. Coppola doing Buried Child? Kurosawa's A Lie of the Mind? Kubrick's Curse of the Starving Class? A Lucasfilm version of The Tooth of Crime? The mind reels...
...while prospects look bright for a Shepard-filled future treat yourself in the interim to Altman's Fool For Love. It's better than tequila, or Barbara Mandrell, or Tex-Mex chili, or a pocketful of quarters and a virgin Magic Fingers. And despite Harvard Square Theatre's highway-robbery $5 ticket price, you'd be an ever-lovin' fool for missing...