My World of Flops Phony Baloney Hearts Case File #198/The Travolta/Cage Project #77 Lonely Hearts (2006)
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
When I had the brilliant idea to devote five or six years to chronicling the complete filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage on the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Travolta/Cage Project I like to think I had a pretty sense of what I was in for.
Travolta is, after all, synonymous with bad movies and epic flops. Travolta is notorious for his terrible, terrible movies and inexplicable choices in terms of film roles and religions. He’s the King of Bad Movies, a dubious title to be sure.
But before I began this project I don’t think I had any idea just how bad Travolta’s movies would be, or how many terrible films he had made. The sheer awfulness of his films has become oppressive and dispiriting.
If movies like Saturday Night Fever, Blow Out, Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty reminded me of why I fell in love with movies in the first place, the dregs of Travolta’s resume make me wonder if I really like movies at all, or whether that was just a passing fancy that happened to last several decades.
Be Cool was particularly depressing because it made it impossible not to compare the two-time Oscar nominee’s long, steep, endless decline to his late 1970s and mid-1990s primes.
Midway through this alternately excellent and bogus adventure I find myself energized and excited by the Cage half of the project and exhausted by the side devoted to Travolta’s mid to late-period vehicles.
I’m talking about movies like 2006’s Lonely Hearts, which is handsomely mounted like a dead animal that has visited the taxidermist and roughly as lively.
Despite a cast that includes Travolta, Academy Award winner Jared Leto, Salma Hayek, Laura Dern, James Gandolfini, Alice Krige and Scott Caan, Lonely Hearts received the most perfunctory of theatrical releases, grossing just under two hundred thousand dollars after playing in a mere twenty-four theaters.
Lonely Hearts opens with the suicide of the wife of hero Elmer Robinson (John Travolta), the grandfather of Todd Robinson, the film’s writer-director. This filmmaker’s personal connection to the material and the story helps explain why a movie badly and unsuccessfully sold as the story of notorious real-life murderers Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez is actually about the director’s grandpa tries to get over the tragic death of the auteur’s grandma by cracking a big national case.
The opening suicide is referenced so frequently, and so artlessly and thoughtlessly that it becomes unexpectedly, inappropriately comic. Seemingly no one can let Elmer forget for a minute that his wife is dead by her own hand. If you were to do a drinking game where you took a shot every time someone mentions the suicide of Elmer’s wife you’d be as dead as she is halfway through from alcohol poisoning.
Beck was famously overweight and unattractive. That was part of the public’s fascination with her and Fernandez. She did not look like anyone’s conception of a femme fatale but this being the motion picture business she’s played by Salma Hayek, THE SEXIEST WOMAN IN HUMAN HISTORY.
Lonely Hearts doesn’t even bother trying to ugly Hayek up with unflattering clothes and make-up, like Monster did with Charlize Theron. Instead they decide to make a legendarily homely woman look every bit the movie star/sex bomb.
Needless to say, this changes the central dynamic ever so slightly. Instead of being a warped true story about a decidedly mismatched pair no one could quite figure out Lonely Hearts is about a pair of impossibly gorgeous beauties played by two of the sexiest people alive.
The resemblance is uncanny!
Lonely Hearts alternates between Beck and Fernandez’s reign of terror as they work their malevolent magic on some very sad, very lonely, very doomed women and Elmer and partner Charles Hilderbrandt's (Gandolfini) investigation into the murders.
Hayek spends the entirety of Lonely Hearts with an expression that unmistakably reads, “I’m going to literally murder anyone who seems romantically interested in the man I am pretending is my brother but that I am actually madly in love with.”
You’d think that would make conning lonely ladies difficult, if not impossible. You would similarly imagine that Hernandez acting like a sleazy cartoon of a disreputable, dishonest Casanova might raise some red flags among the lonely hearts he and his partner in crime swindled.
This gruesome twosome, pretty on the outside and ugly inside, nevertheless experience a fair amount of success in the con artistry and murder game until Elmer doggedly hunts them down as a way of redeeming himself for his wife committing murder three years earlier.
Elmer, a widower since his old lady offed herself, has been sleeping with a co-worker played by Laura Dern. Dern’s presence here raises all sorts of questions, questions like “What is a class act like Dern doing in a nothing supporting role in a stinker like this?”
Gandolfini is similarly wasted as a grim, unimaginative caricature of a grizzled New York cop who has seen it all and isn’t impressed by any of it. Gandolfini is also cursed with the thankless task of delivering the film’s narration.
(William Shatner voice) Caan!
Not even an actor of Gandolfini’s talent stature and talent can sell lines like “If any two maggots ever deserved to boil in their own shit it was Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck” and “He was the toughest badge I'd ever seen. Turned more collars than a Chinese dry cleaner.”
Gandolfini’s tough talk plays like a bad parody of hard-boiled, wised-up banter. It’s pulpy and crude and, like the film it ineptly tries to ground, egregiously phony.
Gandolfini went on quite the cinematic journey with his co-star here. Travolta and Gandolfini did some of the best work of their auspicious careers in 1995’s Get Shorty. 1997’s She’s So Lovely wasn’t as unqualified a triumph as Get Shorty but was still an adventurous, gutsy movie with fine work from both men.
By the time Lonely Hearts rolled around, however, Travolta was deep into a steep, seemingly irrevocable professional slide. Watching Be Cool for this project just made me wish I was watching Get Shorty instead.
I felt the same way watching Gandolfini and Travolta play partners here. It turns out they make much better adversaries in an infinitely superior crime movie that may not have been based on a true story but feels way more authentic than this overwrought nonsense all the same.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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