Gritty Drama, Sitcom All Rolled Into ‘Lovely’

The script for Nick Cassavetes’ “She’s So Lovely,” a strange and uneven comedy of mad love starring Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn and John Travolta, is an inheritance from his father, the writer, director and chronicler of floundering romantic souls, John Cassavetes.

The senior Cassavetes wrote the original screenplay in the late ‘70s, intending to cast himself and his wife, Gena Rowlands, as married pub-crawlers Eddie and Maureen, and one of his pals--Ben Gazzara, maybe Peter Falk--as Joey, the man Maureen marries after Eddie is put away in a mental hospital.

The script languished for a decade before Penn got interested in playing Eddie, and Cassavetes rewrote it for him. But Cassavetes died before anything could come of that alliance. Later, Penn optioned the script, planning to both star and direct, and nothing came of that, either.

Finally, while directing his first picture, “Unhook the Stars,” Nick Cassavetes showed his father’s unproduced screenplay to one of that film’s producers, and “She’s So Lovely’s” 20-year journey from script to screen ended at this May’s Cannes Film Festival, where Penn’s performance earned him the jury’s best actor prize.

That’s the good news. Penn’s instincts were correct. Eddie is a terrific John Cassavetes character, a man under the influence, and for the first half of the movie, as Eddie and Maureen blindly answer to both their passions and their demons, Penn does some of the best acting of his career. So does Wright Penn, and Travolta shows up at the half-way mark to do an irresistible turn in a rare supporting role.

But there are two distinct halves to “She’s So Lovely,” and they are so wildly different you might wonder whether 15 or 20 pages of crucial transition hadn’t fallen out of the script somewhere along the line.

The first half is chip-off-the-old-block Cassavetes, with the characters and Thierry Arbogast’s cameras prowling the streets, bars and tenements, creating that same quirky, nervously honest, often darkly funny mood that made John Cassavetes one of the defining filmmakers of the turbulent ‘70s. The second half, picking up 10 years after Eddie was institutionalized, is pure screwball comedy. It’s as if Cassavetes had written the first half for himself to direct, and the second for Carl Reiner.

When we rejoin them, Eddie is leaving the hospital, appearing more sedated than cured, to visit Maureen, who’s now living in an upscale suburban neighborhood with the devoted, good-hearted and possibly mob-connected Joey. They have three children, including the daughter Maureen was carrying when Eddie short-circuited and shot a paramedic.

Eddie and Maureen are different people now. Not just sobered-up different, different. But they both know, without having spoken and seen each other for a decade, that they’re still madly in love. The only question for Maureen is, what to do about Joey? She’s been honest with him about his runner-up position in her heart, but with the dreaded reunion at hand, Joey’s not sure whether to throw her out or beg her to stay, whether to kill his rival or befriend him.

Travolta is at a great advantage appearing in only one of the two halves of the picture. He doesn’t have to come out of the dark, dingy, urine- and blood-stained shadows of the first half and into the bright, sitcom suburbia of the second half. People bleed in the first, they bounce in the second. And the ever-charming Travolta bounces very well these days.

It’s hard to judge the second-half work of Penn and Wright Penn, or of Harry Dean Stanton and Debi Mazar, who play depressing barflies in the first half, and Fred and Ethyl Mertz in the second. Continuity was an issue for no one.

The abrupt shift in style and tone may be intended to show that love, like bacteria, can survive the extremes. But the principle doesn’t apply to movies.

* MPAA rating: R for strong language and some violence. Times guidelines: The violence is realistic in the first half, cartoonish in the second.

‘She’s So Lovely’

Sean Penn: Eddie

Robin Wright Penn: Maureen

John Travolta: Joey

Harry Dean Stanton: Shorty

Debi Mazar: Georgie

A Hachette Premiere production, released by Miramax Films. Director Nick Cassavetes. Producer Rene Cleitman. Script John Cassavetes. Cinematography Thierry Arbogast. Editor Petra Von Oelffen. Music Joseph Vitarelli. Production design David Wasco. Costumes Beatrix Aruna Pasztor. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

* In limited release.