We all know that Paul Schrader is a sober son of the Dutch
Reformation Church. Still, I'd love to have a taste of the
crack he was smoking when he wrote this flaming lulu, a
painfully sincere and heartfelt tribute to undying love that
suggests Stanley Kubrick singing "Love Theme from Mahogany" a cappella.
Apparently an attempt to capture the spirit of Scott Spencer's novel "Endless Love" (so famously lost by Franco Zeffirelli), FOREVER MINE posits Joseph Fiennes
(he of the smoldering, gotta-have-you eyebrows) as a Miami cabana boy who messes with the wrong guy's wife--Gretchen Mol as the secretarial cutie who married
gnarly Mr. Big (Ray Liotta). Before you can say AGAINST
ALL ODDS, Mr. Big is coming down hard on Cabana Boy--only, in Schrader's world, this means more mutilations, burials alive, disguises, funny accents, and
villainous moustache-twirlings than in the entirety of
Shakespeare's CYMBELINE.
Schrader claimed he wanted to go back to the nineteenth
century. And indeed, the over-the-top melodrama suggests
a desperate attempt to flee fin-de-siecle irony. But it's
always a train wreck when cerebral directors try to let go of
their book-learning and Open Themselves to Feeling. FOREVER MINE suggests a cable-movie version of Robert Bresson's two wackadoody salutes to cute young boys, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER and THE DEVIL PROBABLY; Fiennes greets Mol in a seedy motel room on which he has spray painted the words, "GIVE ALL TO LOVE." (That was the tagline of the movie's abortive theatrical run.) Like Kubrick in EYES WIDE SHUT, Schrader
tries to peel off his layers of coldness and ratiocination--but
any movie that opens with a quote from Walter Pater suggests that the filmmaker is more suited to analyzing
melodrama than expressing it.
For all the tropical gloss put on it by the great cinematographer John Bailey, FOREVER MINE has a giggle-inducing quality that's unique even to bad Schrader
movies. (In one scene, Fiennes leaves an ambivalent Mol
in her hotel room. As he walks away, he bumps his head
into a palm frond, stops, and seems to look back at the
palm frond. Fade to black. Does Schrader equate Douglas
Sirk with Ed Wood?) Now that he's expressed his inner lovesick sap, maybe Schrader can go back to who he really
is--a cold, alienated, God-haunted, overeducated freak
from Michigan who's also the greatest living writer of
movies.
