The Travolta/Cage Project #49 She's So Lovely (1997)

I am fascinated by the unexpected directions John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s careers went after Pulp Fiction and Leaving Las Vegas respectively made Travolta a superstar again and Cage an Academy Award winner. Nicolas Cage, method actor and hardcore thespian, decided to reinvent himself as an action superstar with delirious exercises in big-budget pulp like The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. 

Travolta of course made some mostly forgotten smash hits for dads and moms in Phenomenon and Michael but then he took a turn towards the arty and ambitious with movies written by John Cassavetes and Terence Malick in the form of 1997’s She’s So Lovely and 1998’s The Thin Red Line. 

By the time She’s So Lovely was released in 1997 John Cassavetes was unavailable to direct, having died in 1989 at the age of 59. So his son Nick Cassavetes took over as director in addition to re-writing the script. The appeal of She’s So Lovely is that it was a ostensibly a new project from the mind of the creative revolutionary and cinematic pioneer who changed American film forever with his pioneering work in seminal films like Shadows, Faces, Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence. 

John Cassavetes was an auteur’s auteur but film is a collaborative medium. So She’s So Lovely partially reflects the sensibility and voice of one of American film’s true icons and legends and partially reflects the sensibility and the voice of his son, the director of such films as The Notebook, John Q. and Alpha Dog. 

Then again, Nick Cassavetes was hardly the first filmmaker to make a movie in the style of John Cassavetes. With 1975’s Mikey & Nicky, Elaine May wrote and directed a John Cassavetes movie that could very well be better than any of Cassavetes’ own films, in no small part due to Cassavetes’ central presence as one of the film’s leads alongside close friend and collaborator Peter Falk. When Woody Allen decided to transform the messiness of his real life break-up with Mia Farrow into the live-wire psychodrama of Husbands & Wives, he was channeling Cassavetes. From a biological standpoint, Nick Cassavetes has more of a right to make a John Cassavetes movie than anyone else. It’s literally in his blood even if his later work suggests that his own aesthetic is decidedly different than his father’s. 

But in She’s So Lovely, Nick does his very best impersonation of his father. He set out to make a John Cassavetes movie without his father in the director’s chair or onscreen in a way sometimes succeeds surprisingly well and sometimes feels like a weird case of filmmaker karaoke or the cinematic equivalent of a tribute band. It’s almost the real thing but not quite. 

Sean Penn stars as Eddie Quinn, a quintessential John Cassavetes anti-hero. He’s a con man and alcoholic whose emotions are perpetually cranked up to 10. Eddie only has three modes: intense, more intense and so unbelievably intense that his body vibrates with emotions so overwhelming that they threaten to tear him apart from the inside. 

Penn is essentially a real-life John Cassavetes character: a sad-eyed madman with the ragged soul of a poet who FEELS THINGS DEEPLY, lives hard, drinks hard and loves hard. Eddie is a goddamned degenerate out of a Tom Waits song or a Charles Bukowski short story, a lowlife whose mental illness and inability to function in the world, at all, are seen as badges of authenticity and purity, that he’s too good for our corrupt and degraded world. 

Penn delivers a performance of tremendous quantity and variable quality so vast and needy and all-consuming that it sometimes threatens to swallow the movie whole. Penn doesn’t just act here. He ACTS in a way that’s simultaneously impressive and obnoxious, raw and ridiculous, powerful and perpetually bordering on deranged self-parody. Penn won Best Actor at Cannes for his role here, and, as is almost invariably the case, he won for the MOST acting as much, if not more, than the BEST acting. 

Penn is so wildly, floridly excessive in She's So Lovely that it makes you grateful for the rare moments when he’s not onscreen.

She’s So Lovely begins in a deceptively non-Sean Penn-centric way. We open with Eddie’s pregnant, troubled wife and soulmate Maureen Murphy Quinn (Robin Wright-Penn, nearly matching her then-real-life husband’s punishing intensity, albeit in a less showy, attention-hungry fashion) in a bad way. 

She’s looking for her no-good husband without success and when scumbag neighbor Kiefer (James Gandolfini) invites her into his scuzzy apartment for whiskey she reluctantly acquiesces, despite being pregnant. 

In a riveting early performance, Gandolfini is terrifying and mesmerizing. Our first glimpse of him is out of focus behind Wright-Penn, with a wolfish smile and a greedy gleam in his eyes that betray distinctly bad intentions. Kiefer is a heartless predator out to exploit this broken woman’s desperation so he gets her drunk and physically and sexually assaults her. 

Everything about Penn’s performance screams, “Look at me!” whereas Gandolfini simply inhabits his role with his whole heart and soul. Maureen is terrified of what her erratic husband will do if he knows that she’s been assaulted so she refrains from telling him. Eddie and the actor playing him are both such narcissists that they’re incapable of seeing the world beyond their own selfish needs and desires. 

The child-like Eddie makes everything about himself and his rages. When he learns that his wife has been assaulted he attacks Kiefer and when mental hospital attendants come for him, he shoots one of them in the stomach, earning himself a ten year stint in the loony bin in the process. 

Ten years later Maureen has left her grimy, gritty, ugly old life behind and become a mother and suburban housewife married to Joey Giamonti (John Travolta), a solid, decent family man who is understandably concerned when a wife he rescued from the gutter tells him that not only does she still love Eddie, but she loves her unhinged ex-husband more than she loves the one she’s married to.  

So when Eddie gets out of jail and sets about winning back his ex-wife from her new husband Joey is terrified of losing everything he’s built to a man with nothing to lose. 

Travolta, who also Executive Produced along with Penn and, of all people, Gerard Depardieu, doesn’t even appear in She’s So Lovely until it’s half over. His blissfully non-method performance signals a fascinating shift from punishingly intense romantic psychodrama about love and obsession among grungy outsiders living on the fringes of society to a weird domestic dark comedy about two very different men battling for the heart and mind of a very intense, very confused woman. 

Maureen has reinvented herself as a figure of cozy suburban conformity, a traditional housewife whose life revolves around her family. But when Eddie lurches back into her life she almost instantly devolves into the mess she was when her second husband found her. It’s a little like how adults will devolve into children emotionally immediately upon returning their childhood homes for the holidays. 

Joey similarly reverts emotionally when Eddie pops into his life. The father and husband becomes an anxious man-child, swearing up a storm, offering Eddie’s nine year old daughter a beer and generally behaving in nearly as irresponsible and immature a fashion as his romantic rival, who seems zonked out of his mind on tranquilizers yet still feels everything in the universe intensely, all at once. 

In the much less flashy role, Travolta is goddamn delight, a responsible grown up, dad, husband and citizen who becomes an insecure kid again when faced with the awful possibility of losing his wife to someone whose appeal he can’t begin to understand. 

Then again, Travolta gets to talk like a human being here whereas Penn is blessed and cursed to communicate overwhelmingly in purple poetry, delivering beatnik micro-poems like, “You can’t understand my obscurity unless you have infrared vision”, “Love is so difficult. It’s like horse racing. It’s like perfume” and accusing his wife of telling “Chinese stories, fables to cover foibles” as if he’s performing at the Def Poetry Slam. 

She’s So Lovely largely exists for the sake of Sean Penn’s performance. Yet his relentless scenery-chewing is nevertheless its biggest weakness. In that respect, She’s So Lovely often succeeds in spite of itself. It lives and dies on the strength of its performances, which are uniformly stellar with the glaring exception of Penn’s turn, which is good and bad and everything in between. 

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