The Travolta/Cage Project #73 A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
It feels like a weird, preposterous dream at this point but seventeen years ago I would fly from Chicago to Los Angeles every weekend to tape Movie Club with John Ridley, an AMC movie review panel show hosted by the future Academy-Award winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave.
I’m not sure I was ever supposed to be on television. I’m more of a print guy, to put it mildly. Accordingly, in a backwards kind of way, failing miserably as a television personality led directly to succeeding as an author, a gig that suits my temperament and idiosyncrasies better than cheesing it up on the boob tube.
I wrote a manuscript about my experiences making Movie Club with John Ridley that was rejected by every major publisher in the business but eventually spawned The Big Rewind and all of the books that followed, most notably the “Weird Al” Yankovic trilogy: Weird Al: The Book, The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al.
Movie Club with John Ridley was only on the air for fifteen episodes but that entailed watching an awful lot of movies that I will forever associate with my long ago and foggily remembered stint as a TV star minus the stardom.
These movies include biggies like War of the Worlds, which I climatically flew to New York for a press screening I was turned away from (which, full disclosure, was not a pleasant experience) but also weird little nothings like 2004’s A Love Song for Bobby Long.
What can you really say about a movie like A Love Song for Bobby Long except that it fucking sucks, is a waste of everybody’s time and no one should see it?
Alas, it is my job to write about movies for a living so I am obligated to go a little bit deeper and a little bit further than merely stating, as strongly and unequivocally as possible., that A Love Song for Bobby Long is a flaming garbage fire of a motion picture.
A Love Song for Bobby Long takes place in the same New Orleans as lesser Nicolas Cage vehicles like Seeking Justice, Stolen, The Runner, Zandalee and Sonny.
In these movies New Orleans isn’t just a character: it’s an abysmal main character: hokey, over-the-top, incredibly cheesy and colorful to an overbearing and obnoxious degree.
These movies offer a theme park version of N’Awlins, a tourist’s-eye take on the city that’s all gumbo-thick accents, debauchery and seedy eccentricity.
In my head-canon, these movies and A Love Song for Bobby Long are all part of a shared NCU, or N’Awlins’ Cinematic Universe since the New Orleans of A Love Song for Bobby Long is every bit as tacky and cliched as it is in every movie Cage has made in New Orleans that isn’t Wild at Heart or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
It’s not easy to make a Nicolas Cage movie in New Orleans that isn’t terrible. You pretty much have to be an insane genius like Werner Herzog or David Lynch to accomplish that formidable feat.
New Orleans plays itself, poorly, in A Love Song for Bobby Long. A love song to the city, its inhabitants and books that made me want to never visit that wonderful city again, and burn all my books (even the ones I have written), A Love Song for Bobby Long casts Travolta as the title character, a former academic superstar who long ago gave up on life and now devotes his worthless existence to the mindless pursuit of pleasure.
Bobby Long is a wannabe Bukowski who has the drunken pontificating and bleary self-destruction part down but not the part about writing compulsively and prolifically.
Instead of doing any actual writing, Bobby serves as the muse and inspiration for protege Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht). Lawson and Bobby are essentially minor variations on the same awful person; they’re both alcoholics committed to doing as little as possible but being a younger and less damaged man, Lawson is slightly less fucked than his mentor.
These deeply dysfunctional drunks end up sharing a house, and more with Purslane Will (Scarlett Johansson), a high school dropout who was abandoned by her mother and father.
When Purslane’s hard-luck, hedonistic mother dies, she relocates from Florida to New Orleans, where she butts heads with Bobby and develops a flirtatious relationship with Lawson.
Movie stars don’t get much more charismatic, charming or likable than Travolta. Bobby Long is supposed to have more than his share of seedy, degenerate charm. We’re supposed to be amused and impressed by him as well as put off and repulsed.
Not even Travolta can render Bobby Long anything other than absolutely insufferable, however. Whether he’s holding court at a bar, plucking a guitar for the entertainment of his many admirers or dispensing non-stop highbrow literary quotations he seems to think are an acceptable substitution for a personality I never stopped wanting to punch stupid Bobby Long right in his stupid face.
And I love John Travolta! I mean, I really love Travolta. I would not commit to a five year long project where I watch and write about all of his films if I didn’t love the guy on an unhealthy level.
Yet my deep love of John Travolta did not keep me from hating the character he plays here with a ferocity and intensity that, honestly, frightens me a little.
Purslane is thoroughly and appropriately non-charmed by Bobby, his stories and his well-worn self-mythology until the plot calls for her to inexplicably and inappropriately impressed by him.
This is Purslane’s coming of age story, ultimately, but Travolta’s performance is so hammy and overbearing that it sucks up all the oxygen, leaving nothing for his co-stars.
Poor Johansson has exactly one nice moment here, when she talks about the fantasies she had about her mother as an abandoned child. As someone who was similarly abandoned by his mother and similarly nursed poignantly pathetic fantasies of connection and transcendence, this moment rang true.
Unfortunately it’s the only moment that rang true in the film’s nearly two hour runtime. A Love Song for Bobby Long is aptly titled, as it’s easily a half hour too long.
Thanks to the ace cinematography of the great Eliot Davis (The Outsiders, Out of Sight, Shakes the Clown), A Love Song for Bobby Long looks fantastic but feels utterly fake and false.
I never thought I would write this, but John Travolta has made a lot of bad movies and questionable life choices. I knew that going into this project but suffering through the likes of A Love Song for Bobby Long really underlines just how many bad movies he’s made and just how terrible his many misfires can be and frequently are.
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