She`s So Lovely Review

Eddie, Sean Penn, isn`t the most reliable of husbands; he disappears regularly on drunken binges; but he adores his wife, Maureen (Robin Wright). When Maureen is attacked while Eddie`s away, the incident tips him over the edge... Eddie`s sent to a mental home - he`ll be away three months, he thinks, but three months turn into ten years... The screenplay for this rather curious film was written many years ago by the late John Cassavetes, whose son, Nick, has now dusted it off and directed it. The trouble is that it`s a broken-backed sort of story. The first half is a drama about a hopeless drunk, a kind of Leaving Las Vegas. After Eddie`s prison sentence, a new character is introduced, played with considerable authority by John Travolta; but the events depicted in the second half are so improbable that the tone is more tv sitcom than Cassavetes drama. Sean Penn gives a typically intense performance as a man obsessively in love, while Wright is irritatingly enigmatic as his long-suffering wife. Travolta, somewhat surprisingly, walks away with the film - he`s totally assured and skilfully suggests the danger lurking beneath the surface of his suburban character. Nick Cassavetes` direction is very uneven and there seems no doubt that, if given the chance, his father would have made a very different, and, I suspect, much better film.