SHE'S SO LOVELY (71)

Directed by: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta

The Pitch: A girl's mentally unstable boyfriend crosses the line into insanity ; ten years later, when he comes out of the institution, she's married with kids but still loves him passionately.

Theo Sez: A cross-eyed mutt you'll either want to kick in the teeth or protect from the harshness of the world ; a crazy trip down a road seldom travelled - and with good reason. Its narrative is far too perverse and wilfully irrational for the mainstream Hollywood audience but it doesn't think much of traditionally "gritty" indie trimmings either, starting off in time-honoured Bukowski / Hubert Selby territory - wasted-looking people in cheap, shabby bars - but ending up at the opposite end of the spectrum, the disarming laugh-out-loud absurdity of the final confrontation (favourite moment : Harry Dean Stanton's reasonable, just-a-natural-misunderstanding tone as he tells Travolta to put away his gun : "It's not that kind of an evening."). It goes beyond both blandness and intensity - when tempers finally boil over into a fist-fight it undercuts the violence with a burst of soundtrack Muzak, making it look silly ; the point is to put Love (the film's abiding theme) beyond both cutesiness and mere passion - it's a grand cosmic thing, a Meeting of Souls. It sounds preposterously self-indulgent, and indeed it is - the whole film is like your extrovert, childlike, big-hearted friend who likes to sing in restaurants and thinks nothing of pouring out intimate details of his life in crowded public places ; he's often embarrassing, just as much of the movie (the whole of Penn's performance, and especially his incoherent babble when he's supposed to be insane) is so embarrassing you want to hide under your seat, but the embarrassment is part of what makes it special. In a world of corporate strategy and marketing mavens (you can just imagine Harvey Weinstein's face when he first saw it), it's at least genuinely reckless ; it's often ridiculous, but it's not afraid to be ; it makes bold choices, and many of them pay off in unexpected ways.