LONELY
HEARTS
By RONNIE SCHEIB
Variety, 4/29/06
 The
lurid love story of infamous 1940s Lonely Hearts Killers Martha
Beck and Ray Fernandez previously spawned two fringe movie masterpieces:
Leonard Kastle's black-and-white cult fave "Honeymoon Killers"
and Arturo Ripstein's operatically Mexican "Dark Crimson."
The odds of a notable Hollywood remake, however--especially one
casting svelte Salma Hayek as the notoriously overweight Beck--would
seem unlikely; yet, in "Lonely Hearts," helmer/scribe
Todd Robinson constructs a riveting thriller that contrasts the
sleazy elegance of Hayek and Jared Leto's lethal duo with the lumbering,
beefy persistence of cops John Travolta and James Gandolfini. Accomplished
period piece could conceivably make a killing at the box office.
In their incarnations as Beck in the earlier films, both Shirley
Stoler and Regina Orozco used obesity (the real Beck was so fat
that her execution was delayed when she couldn't fit into the electric
chair) to add to the grotesquerie and pathos of the character's
obsessive romantic attachment to her slight, balding Romeo.
Hayek's gorgeous, shapely murderess is a very different proposition,
exuding such possessive malevolence and force of will that the viewer
can almost identify with Leto's lightweight lothario, helpless to
resist his lover's increasingly homicidal demands.
Director Robinson's new take on the oft-filmed saga not only slims
down the villainess but ushers in the hitherto undramatized role
of the New York policeman who collared the pair. This detective,
Elmer Robinson (Travolta), is the helmer's real-life paternal grandfather.
The unexplained suicide of the Travolta character's wife under the
opening credits provides the psychological link between the cops
and robbers as Robinson is called to investigate the suicide of
a victim of Beck and Fernandez.
With Gandolfini's fellow cop Charles Hildebrandt playing protective
Watson to Robinson's neurotic Holmes. Gandolfini's character, like
Leto's Fernandez, is swept up in a scenario he only half understands.
Pic's weird symmetry is such that the killers sink further and further
into their romantic dementia, while Robinson slowly recovers from
his morose guilt over his wife's death and begins a relationship
with squad room squeeze Rene (Laura Dern).
As in Kastle's breakthrough postmodern exercise, pic's deadpan,
matter-of-fact depiction of violence renders it as shocking as it
is unglamorous. In a startling scene, the killers' first victim
(a nervously enamored Alice Krige) is bludgeoned from behind as
she is riding fiance Fernandez; she falls out of the frame to be
replaced by Beck, the couple proceeding to make passionate love
while the bloody Krige convulses on the ground. This unblinking,
straight-ahead approach to violence climaxes in the back-to-back
scenes of the couple's state-mandated electrocutions, each shown
in excruciating detail.
In Kastle and Ripstein's films, Fernandez and Beck were seen as
almost tragic. Not so in Robinson's treatment, where they register
as outright sociopathic monsters. Indeed, in many ways, Robinson's
script reads as a nuanced endorsement of an eye-for-eye death penalty.
Performers are splendidly cast. Gandolfini, in classic character
actor mode, lends an effective 1940s presence to the film (as he
did to the Coen brothers' "The Man Who Wasn't There"),
and Travolta's weary corpulence speaks of countless years on a thankless
beat.
But it is Beck's evil that dominates the film: Like some beautiful
snake, Hayek embodies the ultimate femme fatale redeemed by no discernible
tragic flaw.
Totally organic, never seeming jerrybuilt or artificially decorated,
Jon Gary Steele's '40s-flavored production design comes alive as
cops shamble around their precinct, Peter Levy's camera stressing
the flatfoots' physicality in classic bygone cinema style. Rural
locations likewise achieve a convincingly old-timey quality, the
lines of laundry in the sun and the mold on disused bathtubs feeling
unquestionably authentic.
A Nu Image/Millennium Films presentation
of an Equity Pictures Medienfonds Gmbh production. Produced by Holly
Wiersma, Boaz Davidson. Executive producers, John Thompson, Avi
Lerner, Danny Dumbort, Trevor Short, Josef Lautenschlager, Andrews
Thiesmeyer, Manfred Heid, Gerd Koechlin, Randall Emmet, George Furla.
Co-producers, Kathryn Himoff, Sidney Sherman.
Directed, written by Todd Robinson.
Elmer C. Robinson - John Travolta
Charles Hildebrandt - James Gandolfini
Martha Beck - Salma Hayek
Raymond Fernandez - Jared Leto
Rene - Laura Dern
Detective Reilly - Scott Caan
Janet Long - Alice Krige |
