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Show Shaky Fakey Hearts | Random Hearts’ Hollywood Romance Can’t Pass : the Audience Laugh Test audience starts howling. You could argue that they were responding to the awk- or a romantic drama, Random Hearts sure doesn’t begin the way you would expect.The film eases us into the lives of its two principal characters: _ Washington D.C. internal affairs cop ‘wardness of the moment, but I’m not sure | buy it. In a matter of seconds, it was obvious that people weren't buying the relationship. In a matter of seconds, Random Hearts had plummeted to earth William “Dutch” Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford) and New Hampshire Congresswoman Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas). Their lives run parallel for nearly an hour of screen time, with Dutch investigating a pair of corrupt cops while Kay prepares for a tough re-election cam- paign. Drifting through the background is the event that will bring them together, an airline crash that claims the lives of Dutch’s wife Peyton (Susanna Thompson) and Kay's husband Cullen (Peter Coyote). With a languid silkiness, director Sydney - Pollack lets the characters develop inde-. pendently before Dutch’s suspicion that Peyton and Cullen were having an affair sets them on a collision course. Then, something horrible happens: Dutch and Kay actually get together. To understand what’s so dreadful about the romantic story in Random Hearts, you have to understand the laughter. After a day together in Miami exploring the possible scene of their spouses’ infidelity, Dutch and Kay return to D.C., exchanging portentous glances on the plane until they | finally reach Kay’s car. In the car, they surrender to an angry, clumsy clinch—and the faster than the downed jet that brought Dutch and Kay together. Doomed liaisons between wounded, grieving souls are nothing new in dramat| ic cinema—case in point: Last Tango in Paris—but generally they’ve had the sense to focus on the essential emptiness at the center of such relationships. Random Hearts has too old-time Hollywood a sensibility to delve into that kind of psychological pain. Scenes between Dutch and Kay keep suggesting there’s the potential Sharing a drink and a secret in Random Hearts" look for corruption, feels like a fool when he discovers infidelity he never suspected for a moment. The transference of his anger at Cullen to an affair with Kay works thematically; Kay is another matter entirely. She’s almost unsurprised to learn of for genuine affection between them, Cullen’s philandering, the absence of shock something besides the mutual despair and betrayal that connected them in the diminishing the revenge motivation. Scott first place. Ag.a result, Random Hearts feels consistently and resolutely false as Thomas tries to wring some plausibility from Kay’s actions, but it’s hard to accept them as anything but plot machinations. soon as they start to go at it in the front When Harrison Ford—looking a bit silly in - seat of Kay’s car. Pollack and company keep trying to transplant the heart of a 1940s weeper into the body of a European art film. It doesn’t help that the story can't even make a convincing case for the emotions that link them in the first place. It makes perfect sense that Dutch, a cop trained to his stud earring—says to her, “I was thinking about your mouth,” you have to believe ~ she would have laughed in his face. Of course, people in Hollywood love stories are always saying ridiculously purple things to one another, and audiences roll with it all the time. It can only work, however, if the story is built on one of those which sodic have to it, sweeping archetypal premises in soul mates are inspired to rhappoetry. Random Hearts shouldn't had the faintest whiff of soul mates not when the hook is the visceral _ response of two people to an affair between their spouses. Pollack is too polished and professional a filmmaker to make an unwatchable film; he’s also too polished and professional a filmmaker to dig into those dark places. For nearly an hour, he has it all working, using the character development to build a case for incompatibility. By the time the smiling, optimistic denouement rolls around, you know the audience was right when their gut response to this relationship was to laugh out loud. a Heavenly Father, sometimes | feel so powerless to help my fellow man see cian (ele eo See F4| 6661 ‘vl YIdOLD0| vz the wisdom of your way. How can | inspire them to walk in righteousness? TIONS MOUNTAIN aas rain : ree aa Shee i lountain times - ~ SUMMIT. COUNTY: & “SELECT SLC LOCATIONS | |