MOVIE REVIEW : EDDIE & MAY: FOOLS FOR ‘LOVE’

May and Eddie. Eddie and May. Fools for each other for 15 years. Connected. Disconnected. Unconnected. But always aware of the other’s whereabouts. Moving to the same music, which only they can hear.

Among other things, “Fool for Love” (at the Fine Arts) is Sam Shepard’s vision of the hot blast that rages between these two: the rootless rodeo cowboy, crisscrossing the country in his horse trailer piebald with mud, and his fine-boned, hair-trigger-tempered sometimes lady. As played by Shepard himself and a ferociously wonderful Kim Basinger, it’s a raw, explosively funny, elemental tragicomedy about the pure willfulness of love. It comes to a rolling boil during one night at the seedy El Royale Motel at the purple edge of the Mojave Desert. Or maybe--as the final scene hints--just at the edge of hell.

Shepard’s view of love is unabashedly mythic, more lust than love, more animal than anything else, and he throws in a prickly family secret for good measure. Not for the timid or the tidy, this play. In transferring it to the screen, director Robert Altman has rolled up his sleeves and, for starters, has let the two lovers breathe. Out of the one room that served to remind us only too well of a cage, their bone-jarring, wall-rattling assaults on each other now range all over this crummy neon-pueblo trailer court.

Altman’s most inspired stroke is to people this trailer court with a mixture of real and memory figures, to have time flow as effortlessly as his camera. Harry Dean Stanton, like an agreeable coyote, is staked out in a rusting silver trailer at the back of the court. With a more important and less shadowy role than his character had in the play, Stanton is also the film’s omnipotent chorus and The Cause of It All, and he is marvelous. If you watch carefully in the procession of cars that glide in and out of El Royale, you’ll also notice Stanton as an earnest young husband and father, and a little girl of about 3 who looks like a baby Basinger, with her mother.

Freed from its existential single box, Shepard’s story flows, burns, scalds and confounds, as the camera of Canadian cinematographer Pierre Mignot glides in and out, from high to low, peering in these little lighted cabins, watching the sexual dramas that take place silently within. (Mignot also worked for Altman in ‘Streamers” and “Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean.” It would not be out of order to refer to him as the great Mignot, since that seems to be the case. The editing of Luce Grunenwaldt and Steve Dunn is an integral part of this sinuousness, as is Stephen Altman’s wonderful set: these toylike, glowing cabins which in this purply-brown night light seem to pull us to their mysteries.)

Eddie and May have had other romances during their tumultuous time in each other’s lives, but Eddie is unquestionably ahead on the score card--by a few dozen. One of his most recent discards is a leggy, jet-setting Countess, an affair that May takes particularly hard. (The Countess’ presence looms very large all through the film.) For her part, May has a movie date planned tonight with Martin, a perfectly decent dullard who does yard work (he’s Randy Quaid, in a performance pitched precisely right).

You get your feet all braced for the confrontation between these two men, and you are abundantly rewarded. If Eddie and May are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, poor sufferin’ souls, Eddie and Martin are polar opposites. They’re woman’s eternal choice: adoration and terminal boredom on one hand; raw, unpredictable danger on the other.

Of course you stack the deck a little further when you cast Shepard as Eddie, but it’s still no contest whatsoever. What’s so nice about Shepard’s performance is the antic side that’s allowed to emerge. Like the silly gaffer’s tape on one cowboy boot that tweaks the mythic image, Shepard’s whimsicality offsets his distracting good looks, makes them a little more bearable.

Basinger is the movie’s revelation. She makes May a jumpy, juicy, full-tilt, sensuous creature. Scrubbing in exasperation at the tendrils of hair that cloud her face, clamping herself to Eddie’s leg like a blond barnacle, she has her own funny side too, but what you remember most is May’s longing, so deep it’s torn her up inside.

What Altman has pulled out of this pair is perfection, and when you include Stanton and Quaid, you have a dream cast. Their actions are set off by a series of songs by Sandy Rogers, who is Shepard’s sister. Low-down and naaaasty, they’re a straight-faced running comment on the action, and they bore into your mind just like the desperation of Eddie and May.

‘FOOL FOR LOVE’ A Cannon Group release. Producers Manahem Golan, Yoram Globus. Director Robert Altman. Screenplay Sam Shepard. Camera Pierre Mignot. Editor Luce Grunenwaldt, Steve Dunn. Production design Stephen Altman. Music George Burt. Associate Producers Scott Bushnell, Mati Raz. Executive in charge of production Jeffrey Silver. Sound Catherine D’Hoir. With Sam Shepard, Kim Basinger, Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Martha Crawford, Louise Egolf, Sura Cox, Jonathan Skinner, April Russell, Deborah McNaughton, Lon Hill.

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

Times-rated: R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.)