Review of The Thing Called Love (1993) by Darrin N — 13 Jan 2008

I'd forgotten what a charmingly written and performed movie this is, and a curiously progressive one in a number of ways. Also, it offers an overwhelming number of great country songs, both originals and classics.

Phoenix, who was deep into his heroin addiction and in his last year of life, gives a weird, squirrelly performance as the dark half of Mathis' competing love interests, but it's also a strangely compelling one â?? sort of James Dean meets Kurt Cobain. Mulroney (who I always thought would have made a better Johnny Cash than River's kid brother) is the more classic love interest, the real heartbreak kid, and he's an absolute star. One scene in particular, in which he visits Mathis in a diner to arrange a recording session with her, is a romantic performance of such deftness it just seems wrong that he isn't enjoying Clooney-like stature these days. And Bullock would never be this good again. Her aimlessly ambitious Linda Lue Linden (from Briar Hill, Alabama) is a perfect alchemy of sharp comic timing and naturally garnered pathos. It's rare to see a character who's not too bright, but for whom you desperately want things to go well anyway, and she pulls that off brilliantly.

As the story was being laid out to lead to a number of possible ends, at least one of which would have been terribly clichéd and another of which would have been horribly infuriating, Carol Heikkinenâ??s script then struck just the right series of notes in its final few minutes, making for an unlikely marriage between Nashville sentiment and feminist sensibility. A really really good film.