A Love Song For Bobby Long Review

by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)
February 3rd, 2005
A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2005 David N. Butterworth

**1/2 (out of ****)

    As lazy as a summer day along a brackish Louisiana backwater, Shainee Gabel's "A Love Story for Bobby Long" is a slow moving (the diplomatic among us might say "deliberately paced") affair, a film with no explosions, no gunfire, no police sirens, just the soulful creaking of a rocking chair on a front stoop or the ticking of a grandfather clock or the comforting rasp of a paper wasp, awash with the smell of cheap tobacco and cheaper whisky as a former English professor and his teaching assistant hole up in an unpainted shanty on the edge of town, a place where people come and go but nobody stays. Until Purslane Hominy that is. She stays. Momma has died and Purslane has come for her share of the spoils, the bacon, the fight to call this place her own. Scarlett Johansson plays Pursy with grace, gusto, and levelheaded-ness. John Travolta is Bobby Long, white-haired and secretive, a drunken disaster--it's another character-defining turn from Travolta. His. And Gabriel Macht ("The Recruit") is the blocked writer Lawson Pines, a match for no man's man, a more than casual imbiber too by all accounts, in love with the local barkeep ("Thirteen"'s Deborah Kara Unger) yet unwilling to keep his options closed. This New Orleans tributary, written by the director based on Reginald Everett Capps's lazy, slow-moving novel, delights as often as it dulls the senses. That is to say it's phonetically and systematically sound, finely and engagingly acted by Travolta, Johansson, and Macht and nicely attuned by Philadelphia-born Ms. Gabel, yet it seems to be missing a soul, an inner sanctum, in short a very raison d???être.

--
David N. Butterworth
[email protected]

Got beef? Visit "La Movie Boeuf"
online at http://members.dca.net/dnb

More on 'A Love Song For Bobby Long'...

---

Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.