Last year, in "Six Days, Seven Nights," Harrison Ford's character survived a plane crash. Now, in "Random Hearts," Ford plays Dutch Van Den Broeck, who suffers a far more harrowing catastrophe - he must deal with his wife's demise after her plane goes down. Unfortunately, sitting through this movie makes her fate seem like a welcome alternative.
How exactly does "Random Hearts" become such an ordeal? Because it bites off much more than it knows how to chew. Screenwriters Kurt Luedtke and Darryl Ponicsan have taken Warren Adler's already convoluted novel and turned it into something much worse: a hollow piece of Hollywood junk.
Dutch isn't the only one whose spouse dies in the crash; Republican Congresswoman Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas) loses her husband as well. But wait, there's more: The two late spouses were sitting together on the plane, and, as Dutch soon discovers, they were having an affair.
And even this complication is not enough: Kay is running for reelection, and any scandal, including her husband's infidelity, will destroy her chances. See how heavy things have become already? We haven't even made it past the first reel yet.
This could have been a fantastic movie if it had focused on Dutch's and Kay's losses and discoveries of their spouses' betrayals. Scenes in which Dutch pieces together his wife's deception (allowing Ford to display such emotions as stoicism, extreme stoicism and eventually sublime stoicism) have great potential, but they cannot scratch beneath the surface of the staid "man scorned" notion that Dutch comes to represent.
In fact, only one sequence truly is jarring - when Dutch and Kay meet in Miami, where their wife and husband had previously frolicked together. As they watch couples writhing rhythmically on the dance floor at a tango club, they realize the overwhelming scale of their spouses' deceit. But "Random Hearts" ignores the idea of how one copes with such a discovery.
Instead, halfway through this overlong journey into despair, the protagonists decide to fall in love. How come? Because the script tells them to do so - not because they share any great chemistry, not because their growing passion can't remain repressed any longer and certainly not because it makes any sense.
The shame is, Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack ("Out of Africa") should have known better. Much better. His "Tootsie" is one of the great romantic comedies of our time and proves that he knows how to capture on-screen chemistry. This time around, though, it feels as though he was just going through the motions. For instance, how was he incapable of noticing just how irritating Dave Grusin's jazz score is?
Blurring the film's focus even further is a distracting subplot involving Dutch, a sergeant in the Internal Affairs division of the D.C. Police Department, tracking down a police officer whom he suspects murdered a witness. The intent of this loosely intertwined story is clear: Dutch, whose career was based on his ability to decipher truth from lies, cannot fathom how his wife was able to pull the wool over his eyes.
But Pollack and the writers leave out any understanding of Dutch's marriage. Until Ford finally begins to emote in the film's last half-hour, it's hard to grasp his loss because the audience knows nothing about the two of them together.
Scott Thomas has the more interesting role, partially because of her supporting cast (including Pollack as her media consultant and the wonderful Bonnie Hunt as her socialite friend). And anyone able to look past her here-it-comes-there-it-goes-again American accent will recognize the subtlety of her performance. Scott Thomas shows what a mess Kay is beneath her stable veneer.
But in adapting the film from the novel (in which Kay was a lawyer's wife), the writers strip Kay's tragedy of its dramatic weight. "Random Hearts" gets so caught up in the idea of moving on after tragedy that it neglects to dramatize how people cope with it. Additionally, the idea of reducing the death of Kay's husband to a mere complication in her political campaign is borderline offensive. It paints death as something more burdensome than poignant.
Hearts are not random in this movie; they are empty and unfeeling. And in this case, that's a fate worse than death.
Grade: D+
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