Word: sheparded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through...
Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous...
...Shepard is a terrific Eddie, all slurred words and crooked teeth. He has a cocky, lanky body language, like a scarecrow loosed on a three-day drunk. Basinger is better, fiesty and dignified and lovely to watch. The scene in which she washes herself is unspeakably beautiful. Quaid is fine as the boyfriend, with a charm as harmless and crooked as his bowtie. And Harry Dean Stanton gives another superlative performance. He ranks with Robert Duvall as our finest character actor...
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, whose classic Nashville had an equally jarring conclusion, seems right at home in Shepard's irresolute world. It is his prerogative to leave things open-ended, and ours to question the repercussions of his choice. Altman's version of Shepard's play is certainly more than filmed theatre. The world he gives us is tangible and authentic, and no film in recent memory has as meticulous a look. Eddie's truck is a masterpiece of mud and birdcrap, like a Jackson Pollack custom-designed Chevy. May's motel room is a working model for entropy, strewn with dirty underwear...