User reviews

"Forever Mine" is a somewhat flawed telling of an interesting and unpredictable love triangle story which is built around a solid core cast of under-rated actors (Fiennes, Mol, and Liotta). The film, which takes place over 17 years during which a Florida cabana boy struggles with an evil politician for possession of his wife, begins as a romantic melodrama and turns into a darkly obsessive war of wills. "Forever Mine" suffers from low budget appurtenances (music, sets, props, etc); an uneven flow which runs in the beginning and crawls through the middle; and an unnecessary murder which serves little purpose; etc. Those who can overlook the ragged edges of the film will be rewarded by some excellent performances and an evocative and compelling drama while, as the extremes of IMDB.com's users' perspectives indicate, the more analytical viewers will react quite the opposite. An earnest and interesting love it or hate it sleeper.

"Forever Mine" is not a good film. The script is highly formulaic and dull, the characters are one-dimensional, there are several holes in the plot, and the ending manages to be both cliched and unsatisfying. It is worth watching only for two nude scenes from the wonderful and lovely Gretchen Mol, who hasn't done much of that at all. If you're a fan of hers, you won't be disappointed here.

Watching this cheese, I was reminded of "Strange Days", where Joseph Fiennes' brother Ralph was locked inside a picture almost as bad as this one. The Fiennes brothers certainly can act, and Joseph does his best here to keep the wooden lines fresh. Gretchen Mol lights up the screen no matter what she's in, but one can only wonder why these very good actors are stuck in such a bad movie. Weren't there any more intelligent scripts around to do than this one? Ray Liotta is strictly on auto-pilot for this film.

The story here is simple - jealousy, adultery, revenge, etc. Movies like this put some basic elements together, and then count on the magnetism of the stars to enlist the audience's attention. But if the characters have nothing but stupid lines to say, how can we care about them? 4/10, and only Mol's scenes make me go that high.

I saw this film at the Telluride Film Festival. People were walking out, but I stuck it out. Wish I hadn't. Shlocky story, contrived and boring characters. The only thing mildly interesting was to see the revenge plot play out and that was a disapointment as well. Pass on this one.

There is a mystery at the heart of Forever Mine, the most recent downturn in writer-director Paul Schrader's roller coaster of a career. The mystery involves a man in the first class section of an airplane to New York, circa 1987. The man looks a little bit like Joseph Fiennes, but he is wearing a goofy make-up job to imply scarring and he is speaking with a goofy accent to add intrigue. And thus the mystery can be summed up with a series of questions: Who? Who is this man? What? What is he going to New York to do, dressed as a drug dealer? And Why? Why would anybody cast Joseph Fiennes for a part that required acting? Sure, Fiennes is perfectly skilled at looking soulful, but anything beyond that -- accent, characterization, etc -- is out of his range.

We cut quickly from the plane to "14 years earlier" where we see Fiennes again, now much younger. We know he's younger because he isn't scarred and he doesn't have a goatee. He also isn't speaking with a thick Cuban accent anymore. He has a strange accent that waffles between British, "American," and "Latino." Fiennes is Alan, a cabana boy at a Miami resort. His friend Javier is trying to convince him that he should enter the drug game to make some real money. But Alan has clearly seen DePalma's Scarface, Blow, and a number of other drug movies and he has more legitimate dreams, starting, apparently, with bedding the wife (Gretchen Mol) of a New York businessman (Ray Liotta). Alan and the wife, Ella, begin perhaps the most public affair in cinema history. They make out down the beach from her husband, they get all kissy at local bars, and then have emotional conversations outside her hotel room. And the husband doesn't find out. But then it's time for the couple leave, but soulful Fiennes cannot let Ella go. We're not really sure why, though. As a character, she's a total cypher. Schrader gives her one or two expositional confessional moments, but that's about it.

So of course the relationship is at least temporarily doomed. But in Schrader's universe we knew that before Alan and Ella even kissed, because we know that she's Catholic and that guilt and morality will quickly come into play. As with several other Schrader works, religious fervor is the central plot device, which leads to Alan's deformity, Ella's regret, and the film's film act.

Beyond the Catholicism, though, there's not much at stake in Forever Mine. The two leads have minimal chemistry and the film is plagued by constant continuity errors and cliched plotting. I was troubled by the fact that the 14 years between the flashback and the framing device had done nothing to age any of characters. And I was perplexed by the fact that even though Alan's friend Javier starts out as the the man with the connections, he ends up as a glorified servant. I didn't understand why Schrader couldn't be bothered to develop either Ella's character or that of her husband. And I was just annoyed by Fiennes's inconsistantcy as an actor.

Schrader seems to be having fun with his own background and the backgrounds of his actors. There appear to be obvious references to Goodfellas and Taxi Driver, while Fiennes's 1987 persona has a strange similarity to Robert DeNiro. And all of the elements seemed to have been in place for a fine film. This was Schrader's follow-up to the minor masterpiece Affliction and Fiennes's follow-up to Shakespeare in Love. It was also Mol's first starring role after Vanity Fair jumped the gun and made her an "It" Girl shortly before the release of several small parts. But really nothing comes together. Schrader plots an affair without any twists or originality beside the Catholic guilt that have always fueled his violent Graham Greene-esque visions. The political context that justifies the period setting is hardly worth the effort. The drug subplot goes nowhere. And when Ella sits reading Madame Bovary to a group of senior citizens, the symbolism is just infantile.

Forever Mine never was released in theaters because the company producing it went under. It premiered on Starz! and moved to video. It's hard to imagine it having any real box office potential under any circumstances. This film is a 3/10 at best.

Great movie -albeit, not too original. Good acting -let's say I was pretty well content with the actors and they're portrayals of the characters. An old story with an different twist -or maybe twists that seriously remind of a bunch of different movies. But you figure, 'Hey, it's going to have a unique and blow-your-mind kind of an ending,' right? WRONG! In fact, I'm still waiting for the ending to happen. It's been hours and the DVD is still in the thing, just playin'. I waited through ALL the credits, hoping that some kind of 'sneaky' ending would come, and NADA! It's like they just ran out of film or something. But, hell, I'd forgo any or all of the credits just to see how this frickin' story ends. PLEASE! thank you -7 out of 10- if anybody cares. I doubt my opinion matters, but this COULD have been 10 out of 10 with SOME (just a modicum) of closure. Maybe even 'the end'. At the end.

the end

I won't attempt to summarize the plot, such as it is. Suffice it to say that every single character in this film manages to behave in the least straightforward and believable manner in every situation. The heavy hand of a poor screenwriter is evident throughout, as all the characters seem more manipulated than motivated. The writer/director, Paul Schrader, was an unfamiliar directorial name to me until I watched this mess, and his resume makes it clear why. He's had a few successes as a writer, but pretty much all of them were directed by Martin Scorsese, who is very definitely not on hand to salvage this disaster.

Fiennes and Mol are game for the most part, and do what they can with the laughable dialogue. Ray Liotta, however, is at his over-the-top worst. He can be effective with the right part and some directorial restraint (see *Blow*, for instance) but neither is present here.

Avoid this and find something better to do.

How could such an accomplished screenwriter, a man who wrote such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, etc. be so singularly responsible for such an aggravatingly awful movie?

I don't think anyone will know. Perhaps the joke is on all of us and Paul Schrader is laughing at our reactions. Maybe he set out to make the worst movie he possibly could and in that it is a triumph.

This movie is offensively bad. It will make you mad. A waste of talent, money, time, effort and thought on everyone's part.

Everything in this movie is unbearably implausible, false, phony. How comes a woman doesn't recognize the man she loves, just 14 years after he's disappeared, and when it happens that much more than half his face looks exactly the same it was? What the hell did the main character do to become so rich and respected? After all, how many cabin boys have become that rich in real life? And, most of all, how comes a young woman like that stays 14 years with the man that has beaten her and, to her knowledge, killed the man of her life? Ridiculous. The screenwriter of Taxi Driver has made a film that is a very good candidate to the title of The Worst Movie Ever Made.

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.

The intrigue of this movie is"no one will ever love you like this". Fair enough. It's a romance in the classic tradition of love once and forever.

But the romantic rendezvous quickly takes a quirky and complex twist. A twist of fate that is not fully realized or retorted in any satisfying solution. The 14 year development and "downward up-fall" of the two main male characters is woefully thin and without clarity.

There is enough sordid side play and noirish edge to maintain viewer interest but ultimately an unsatisfying and ugly ending lets us down in an odd denouement of devilish melodrama.

The some of the parts do not add up to anything substantial enough to sustain what could have been an exceptional picture puzzle. But the pieces do not fit snuggly together and we are left with a rough, uneven surface to what might have been the Writer/Director's exceptional ode to an era of movie magic he loves. But he unfortunately can not, without compromise, return, and so he is stuck in his own postmodern paradox.

Forever Mine is not a good movie. Many other reviewers on this site have pointed out why.

But let's give credit where credit is due.

Cinematographer John Bailey did a magnificent, Oscar-worthy job on this film! It looks great. The first half takes place in Miami in 1973. I lived in Miami in the early 70's, and this film caught the feel of it so beautifully that I could smell the Cafe Cubano, hear the Jai-Alai cheers, and feel the sea breezes. The pastels, the faded glory of the hotels, the neon lights, the whole palette.

John Bailey can't be blamed for Forever Mine's script, or its legal problems, but the result of those problems must have been depressing for him because nobody ever saw Bailey's work projected on the big screen after the film festivals. That's really a shame. This film was meant to be projected in a 2.35 aspect ratio, and that simply can't be appreciated anywhere except a big screen. Of course, Bailey didn't know it would go straight-to-cable-and-DVD when he filmed it in that super widescreen ratio.

By the way, this work was no isolated fluke for Mr. Bailey, as you might guess. He has never won an Oscar, or even a nomination, but he's shot some very fine films in his career. He probably should have been nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Big Chill, and he has shot some terrific offbeat stuff, like Cat People and Groundhog Day.

So, a strong "well done" for Mr Bailey, for work that few people will ever see.

Brazilian Globo TV showed yesterday in it's "gala" time this film. Maybe the complete belief in the 'universal' (rather coprophagous) appetite of the masses for a bit of cheap entertainment between reality show "Big Brother" and the soporifics Late Hour News...

On the other hand, a proof that prestige of American film in general, and of names like Schrader, Liotta, Fiennes are untouched

If I write here right now that we took it as a bona fide self-parody, or maybe an attempt to emulate Ed Wood in producing the worst film possible - Yes, things like that are already been said before on this board, as I read above...

The best point, to place it, after all, above the 'awfull' grade: It's funny, thanks for some sincere giggles and roar of laughters while the whole evolves - in short, a classic in the "worst of" category... (In this mood, don't' miss it!)

some might laugh.... but i guess there is a big philosophy in the movie....

the husband had no fault... neither the lady.. nor the cabana boy.

they all fell in love in from different angles. and every ones view was just perfect.

Gretchen Mol .... as Ella Brice was a perfect choice.... wow what a lady....

if you have not seen the movie... you must

Here we have another Hollywood projection of what romantic love is and should be. Only problem is....you would have to be an idiot child to not realize how unrealistic Hollywood's fantasy love is. In this movie, we have full grown adults falling in lust....I mean falling "in love" at first sight - as when the voluptuous blonde emerges from the ocean nearly naked and catches the adoring eye of her male admirer. Only problem is....she's married. But really...who cares about that small detail when we have an ocean side waiter who just can't wait to get his hands on her. Within a matter of a few days, we have an extramarital, true love that's been fully consummated and practically sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Not to be deterred, the admiring towel boy, convinced that he has found a "love" that was meant to be, decides it's best to follow his married woman back to her home, far removed from the vacation paradise where the two had met. OK....this just gets messier and more unreal as the plot progresses. What's sad is the message that so many young people get from these types of Hollywood depictions. They think "love" is actually something that can happen overnight and then last forever. Nothing could be further from the truth. True, unconditional, unending love takes decades to develop and solidify. Most married folks never even get to that point. When you are young, it's all about hormones and lust - which has little to do with the deep emotional bond of real love. Those hormones do serve a purpose. They get young people hooking up, conceiving and producing the next generation. Movie had decent acting.....hence the 6 rating.

First off, gretchen mol is no raving beauty and certainly doesn't have a spectacular body to ogle and being married just makes this a score challenge for joseph finnes....his older brother ralph also fancy's himself as a charmer of females...the problem lies in getting by the violent husband who is also well connected...warnings by the wife to her suitor go unheeded...and in spite of her rebukes he is sure she wants him...c'mon, this schlock went out in the 60s...anything ray liotta is in usually spoils the watching for me since he always portrays sinister characters...the thought of him in bed with a naked alice eve made my skin crawl and still does