THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (64)

Directed by: Dan Ireland

Starring: Vincent D'Onofrio, Renee Zellweger,

The Pitch: The mid-30s friendship in a small Texas town between pulp writer Robert E. Howard (of "Conan the Barbarian" fame) and schoolteacher Novalyne Price.

Theo Sez: Somehow less than the sum of its parts, though entire stretches are just about flawless ; maybe there's one too many steps in the winding-down of the relationship, and the very last scene's unequivocally awful, leaving a bad taste in the mouth (it was on a 67 rating until literally the last few seconds). Keeping it small is its greatest asset, keeping the settings simple (mostly outdoors, except for the orange-lit interiors of Howard's oppressive home) and the supporting cast down to a minimum to create, almost by default, an authentic period atmosphere - a small, underpopulated Texas town, just a handful of people surrounded by the wide open spaces (the title is ironic, but not sarcastic). You get the feel of a quieter, simpler world, leaving room for D'Onofrio's larger-than-life performance - it often seems like he's overdoing the manchild, writer-as-barbarian routine (tactless, macho, unsocialised), but the world around him absorbs his excesses like cotton-wool, which is precisely his tragedy (he's like a man yelling on the edge of the Grand Canyon, his voice lost amid the vastness) : the emotional crux is our heroine's gradual realisation (Zellweger bringing her ethereal magic to a 'sensible' role) that he's a better man than she knows or even expects him to be, not just living in his own world but vying to transform the existing one, if others would only match his imagination. "I haven't seen any giant snakes or big-busted naked women frolicking through the West Texas hills lately," she notes acidly of his pulp-fiction "yarns". "Oh, but I have..." he replies quietly.