A Love Song For Bobby Long Review
by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)December 30th, 2004
A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A young woman whose mother has died shares
a home with two alcoholics who were friends of her
mother. Their love of literature and their passion
for life wears away at her suspicion and cynicism.
The film has thick New O'leans texture, but there is
never any question where the film is going. Rating:
+1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
A few years ago I was asked who my screen heroes were. I chose Thomas More from A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and Mr. Singer from THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. When I saw the tagline for Bobby Long was "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" I had hoped that this film would share the same style and values of that film. Sadly, it shares far to little. It has some of the tone and little else. It is thematically very different.
A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG starts out by showing us some people who you would cross the street to avoid and then tries to convince us to love these characters in spite of themselves. The action of this story begins with the death of a singer, Lorraine Will. The death brings together three people. They are two close friends of Lorraine and her estranged eighteen-year-old daughter. It takes a good long time before we realize that the title's Bobby Long (played by John Travolta) is into anything more than liquor (vodka and pickle juice???) and cigarettes and the occasional good book.
Scarlett Johansson plays Pursy Will who moves into her dead mother's New Orleans house and finds two alcoholics already living there. She resents their former relationship with her mother, their pointless existence (little worse than hers), and their vulgarity. She is determined to throw these two hangers-on from the home she thinks she has inherited.
Bobby Long it seems is an ex-professor of literature who retreated from the world into a self-destructive life style. Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht) is an aspiring novelist whose has worked for years on a novel that is still not good enough. In this tumbledown house full of books Persy comes to know and go from hostility to love for these two devotees of great books and petty vices. Beyond Lawson's minimal efforts on his novel the two men seem to have given themselves over to drinking, sitting around, and giving each other inebriated wisdom. Persy openly resents these two men, but everybody knows or at least suspects where this story is going. The film proceeds to that end with the mood and pace of a blues song.
Travolta, with white hair, is trying to look like a man of letters who is trying to be a bum. The man of letters part seems strained but with the bum he goes over overboard. He and a circle of friends sit on junkyard furniture and Bobby pontificates, quotes major authors, and picks at a guitar. Travolta the actor is having a great time. Scarlett Johansson seems better suited to the acidic Perslane than to some of her previous roles.
In the end the film works or fails to work on the premise that someone with a love of great literature has Soul or something like it. But the film simply misses making Bobby Long as impressive or as likeable as the script calls for him to be. I suppose I consider his field of literature a better choice than rock music or drugs. But if freshman director Shainee Gabel--adapting the novel OFF EAST MAGAZINE ST by R. E. Capps--wants to convince us that Bobby Long is in some way admirable or even is not wasting his life, she fails.
The game of "identify the quote" adds a little fun to the film but over all this seems a vanity piece for Travolta. He is unconvincing as a great lover of literature. His singing sounds better to him than to me. The film is a good try, but it does not do what it sets out to do. I rate A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected] Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
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