Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #182 Three of Hearts (1993)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
The good folks over at Gallup recently made headlines with a report indicating that more Americans are identifying as LGTBQ than ever before, particularly young people.
Folks terrified by change and the future, and by extension their own children, have decided that the reason more and more young people identify as something other than straight is because they are the suggestible victims of brainwashing by the “Woke” left.
These paranoid souls genuinely seem to believe that the increased visibility of the LGTBQ community is conditioning children to want to deny their heterosexuality so that they can benefit from the countless advantages of being non-straight.
I grew up in an era (the 1980s) where queer and trans lives were either invisible or portrayed in deeply hateful, hurtful, stereotypical ways that were, if anything, worse than invisibility.
I was conditioned to assume that everyone was straight. I wish I had grown up in a time with a more nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality, in a freer era where being bisexual or gay or trans could rightly be seen as no big deal and not something that defines you indelibly forever as an outsider.
I’m old enough to remember when black movies were rare enough that damn near every theatrically released black film was considered a referendum on the feasibility of movies about the black experience and every movie involving gay or bisexual lead characters became, by default, a weather balloon to determine the moviegoing public’s audience for these kinds of stories and these kinds of characters.
Three of Hearts, which found a gigolo played by William Baldwin romancing a bisexual beauty played by Sherilyn Fenn at the behest of her ex-girlfriend Kelly Lynch, was released in 1993 as part of a strange micro-wave of bisexual love triangles involving lesser members of the Baldwin clan, a tiny sub-genre that also includes 1994’s Threesome, which co-starred Stephen Baldwin in the pre-Jesus stage of his career.
The wisp of a romantic comedy-drama, which I am confusingly writing about for my Tawny Kitaen series despite the troubled hair metal sexpot having only a wordless, nameless cameo as a hot woman at a lesbian bar, can barely hold up to the scrutiny of being an actual movie, let alone a cultural bellwether as to whether or not a robust audience for mainstream crossover movies involving queer characters exists.
That’s not because Three of Hearts is bad, necessarily, but rather because there’s simply not a whole lot to the movie, positive or negative. It fails for pretty much the same reason romantic comedies usually do—it’s rooted in a painfully artificial premise involving subterfuge and deception that renders its characters unsympathetic as well as unbelievable—yet succeeds in spurts because it has a cast charming and attractive to almost pull off a borderline impossible conceit.
The borderline impossible conceit in Three of Hearts is that after getting dumped by bisexual academic Ellen (Sherilyn Fenn), lesbian nurse Connie (Kelly Lynch, whose real-life husband Mitch Glazer co-wrote the screenplay and apparently did some ghost-directing as well) hires delicate-featured gigolo Joe (Baldwin) to woo Ellen and then break up with her.
The idea is that Ellen will be so devastated that she’ll crawl back to her ex-girlfriend in broken-hearted desperation and swear off men for good. Then, in an eminently predictable development, the gigolo with the bedroom eyes, smoky voice and heart of gold ends up falling desperately in love with the woman he’s supposed to seduce and abandon.
Three of Hearts shamelessly exploits the romantic comedy/drama cliche of a heartbroken true romantic compulsively re-watching home movies documenting a love that has been lost, possibly for good. It’s a ubiquitous trope in movies like these that works spectacularly here even if the movie doesn’t need to explain why Ellen would be hopelessly hung up on her ex.
The whole world was in love with Sherilyn Fenn when Three of Hearts was made. Gay, straight, man, woman, animal, ghost, robot, zombie. It didn’t matter: everyone in the entire universe was hopelessly in love with Sherilyn Fenn and would do anything to be with her.
In an appropriately seductive performance, the sexiest of all Baldwins plays Joe as a man whose life and profession revolve around making every woman he’s with feel as if they are the center of the universe and he would perish in darkness without their light.
Three of Hearts keeps forcing Joe and Connie together. They meet cute when she hires him to pretend to be her boyfriend for a big family wedding. Gigolo Joe nails the gig, being very good at what he does, and when bad guys come looking for Joe he decides the safest place to hide out is in Connie’s apartment.
Joe pretends to be auditing a class Ellen is teaching to get closer to her and the two soon bond over their mutual attractiveness. What do you do when the feelings you must fake become real?
If you’re pretty much every protagonist in every romantic comedy you come clean about the nature of your deception despite knowing that a dose of honesty could very well prove to a deal-breaker.
Three of Hearts closes with a half-hearted shrug of indifference. Joe makes his play for Ellen, who is understandably turned off by Joe and Connie toying sadistically with her emotions for their own selfish ends.
Ellen does not seem interested and rather than acknowledge the pain and ugliness of Connie and Joe’s behavior we conclude with a glib switcheroo. Now Joe wants Connie to win back Ellen and dump her so that she will crawl back to him in sadness and confusion.
It’s one of those weirdly anti-climactic endings that doesn’t make anyone happy but I suppose I should just be grateful it does not end with Joe kissing Connie. The professional stud and the lesbian nurse are seemingly on the verge of an awkward kiss throughout much of Three of Hearts. Thank god that doesn’t happen and the movie, at the very least, acknowledges that there are human beings for whom life does not revolve around penises. You didn’t see many of those kinds of characters back in 1993 but I am happy to report we have made at least a little progress on that front in the ensuing 28 years.
I had a weirdly muted non-response to Three of Hearts, a watchable enough time-waster that illustrates incontrovertibly that romantic comedies with non-straight characters can be every bit as muddled, formulaic, mediocre and forgettable as their rigidly heterosexual counterparts.
Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdaccordiontoal/the-joy-of-trash?ref=project_build
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here